For Christiane, Theresa, Johanna,

Catharina and Julius

For Anela, Liam, Maria, Karen and Eckart—

and for all those who are committed to an

equitable and loving coexistence on this planet

About the Book

If one follows public pronouncements, the world is repeatedly afflicted with new terrible virus diseases. As the latest horror variant, the so-called coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 dominated the headlines. The population is also terrified by reports of measles, swine flu, SARS, BSE, AIDS or polio. However, this virus mayhem ignores very basic scientific facts: the existence, the pathogenicity and the deadly effects of these agents have never been proven. The medical establishment and its loyal media acolytes claim that this evidence has been produced. But these claims are highly suspect because modern medicine has pushed direct virus proof methods aside and uses dubious indirect tools to “prove” the existence of viruses such as antibody tests and the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

The authors of Virus Mania, journalist Torsten Engelbrecht and doctor of internal medicine Claus Köhnlein, MD, show that these alleged contagious viruses may be, in fact, also be seen as particles produced by the cells themselves as a consequence of certain stress factors such as drugs. These particles are then identified by antibody and PCR tests and interpreted as epidemic-causing viruses by doctors who have been inoculated for over 100 years by the theory that microbes are deadly and only modern medications and vaccines will protect us from virus pandemics.

The central aim of this book is to steer the discussion back to a real scientific debate and put medicine back on the path of an impartial analysis of the facts. It will put medical experiments, clinical trials, statistics and government policies under the microscope, revealing that the people charged with protecting our health and safety have deviated from this path. Along the way, Engelbrecht and Köhnlein will analyze all possible causes of illness such as pharmaceuticals, lifestyle drugs, pesticides, heavy metals, pollution, stress and processed (and sometimes genetically modified) foods. All of these can heavily damage the body of humans and animals and even kill them. And precisely these factors typically prevail where the victims of alleged viruses live and work. To substantiate these claims, the authors cite dozens of highly renowned scientists, among them the Nobel laureates Kary Mullis, Barbara McClintock, Walter Gilbert, Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet and microbiologist and Pulitzer Prize winner René Dubos. The book presents approximately 1,100 pertinent scientific references, the majority of which have been published recently.

The topic of this book is of pivotal significance. The pharmaceutical companies and top scientists rake in enormous sums of money by attacking germs and the media boosts its audience ratings and circulations with sensationalized reporting (the coverage of the New York Times and Der Spiegel are specifically analyzed). Individuals pay the highest price of all, without getting what they deserve and need most to maintain health: enlightenment about the real causes and true necessities for prevention and cure of their illnesses. “The first step is to give up the illusion that the primary purpose of modern medical research is to improve people’s health most effectively and efficiently,” advises John Abramson of Harvard Medical School. “The primary purpose of commercially-funded clinical research is to maximize financial return on investment, not health.”

Virus Mania will inform you on how such an environment took root—and how to empower yourself for a healthy life.

About the Authors

Torsten Engelbrecht works as a journalist in Hamburg. In 2009 he received the Alternative Media Award for his article “The Amalgam Controversy.” He was trained at the renowned magazine for professional journalists Message and was a permanent editor at the Financial Times Deutschland, among others. As a freelance journalist, he has written articles for publications such as Süddeutsche Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Frankfurter All-gemeine Sonntagszeitung, Rubikon, Freitag, Geo Saison, Greenpeace Magazin and The Ecologist. In 2010 his book “Die Zukunft der Krebsmedizin” (The Future of Cancer Medicine) has been published, with Claus Köhnlein, MD, and two other doctors as co-authors.

Further information at www.torstenengelbrecht.com.

Claus Köhnlein, MD, is a medical specialist of internal diseases. He completed his residency in the Oncology Department at the University of Kiel. Since 1993, he has worked in his own medical practice, treating also Hepatitis C and AIDS patients who are skeptical of antiviral medications.

Foreword I

by Etienne de Harven, MD

The Content of this Book Has To Be Read,
Quickly and Worldwide

The book Virus Mania by Torsten Engelbrecht and Claus Köhnlein presents a tragic message that will, hopefully, contribute to the re-insertion of ethical values in the conduct of virus research, public health policies, media communications, and activities of the pharmaceutical companies. Obviously, elementary ethical rules have been, to a very dangerous extent, neglected in many of these fields for an alarming number of years.

When American journalist Celia Farber courageously published, in Harper’s Magazine (March 2006) the article “Out of control—AIDS and the corruption of medical science,” some readers probably attempted to reassure themselves that this “corruption” was an isolated case. This is very far from the truth as documented so well in this book by Engelbrecht and Köhnlein. It is only the tip of the iceberg. Corruption of research is a widespread phenomenon currently found in many major, supposedly contagious health problems, ranging from AIDS to Hepatitis C, Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or “mad cow disease”), SARS, Avian flu and current vaccination practices (human papillomavirus or HPV vaccination).

In research on all of these six distinct public health concerns scientific research on viruses (or prions in the case of BSE) slipped onto the wrong track following basically the same systematic pathway. This pathway always includes several key steps: inventing the risk of a disastrous epidemic, incriminating an elusive pathogen, ignoring alternative toxic causes, manipulating epidemiology with non-verifiable numbers to maximize the false perception of an imminent catastrophe, and promising salvation with vaccines. This guarantees large financial returns. But how is it possible to achieve all of this? Simply by relying on the most powerful activator of human decision making process, i.e. FEAR!

We are not witnessing viral epidemics; we are witnessing epidemics of fear. And both the media and the pharmaceutical industry carry most of the responsibility for amplifying fears, fears that happen, incidentally, to always ignite fantastically profitable business. Research hypotheses covering these areas of virus research are practically never scientifically verified with appropriate controls. Instead, they are established by “consensus.” This is then rapidly reshaped into a dogma, efficiently perpetuated in a quasi-religious manner by the media, including ensuring that research funding is restricted to projects supporting the dogma, excluding research into alternative hypotheses. An important tool to keep dissenting voices out of the debate is censorship at various levels ranging from the popular media to scientific publications.

We haven’t learnt well from past experiences. There are still many unanswered questions on the causes of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, and on the role of viruses in post-WWII polio (DDT neurotoxicity?). These modern epidemics should have opened our minds to more critical analyses. Pasteur and Koch had solidly constructed an understanding of infection applicable to many bacterial, contagious diseases. But this was before the first viruses were actually discovered. Transposing the principles of bacterial infections to viruses was, of course, very tempting but should not have been done without giving parallel attention to the innumerable risk factors in our toxic environment; to the toxicity of many drugs, and to some nutritional deficiencies.

Cancer research had similar problems. The hypothesis that cancer might be caused by viruses was formulated in 1903, more than one century ago. Even today it has never been convincingly demonstrated. Most of the experimental laboratory studies by virus-hunters have been based on the use of inbred mice, inbred implying a totally unnatural genetic background. Were these mice appropriate models for the study of human cancer? (we are far from being inbred!) True, these mice made possible the isolation and purification of “RNA tumor viruses,” later renamed “retroviruses” and well characterized by electron microscopy. But are these viral particles simply associated with the murine tumors, or are they truly the culprit of malignant transformation? Are these particles real exogenous infective particles, or endogenous defective viruses hidden in our chromosomes? The question is still debatable. What is certain is that viral particles similar to those readily recognized in cancerous and leukemic mice have never been seen nor isolated in human cancers. Of mice and men…

However, by the time this became clear, in the late 1960s, viral oncology had achieved a dogmatic, quasi-religious status. If viral particles cannot be seen by electron microscopy in human cancers, the problem was with electron microscopy, not with the dogma of viral oncology! This was the time molecular biology was taking a totally dominant posture in viral research. “Molecular markers” for retroviruses were therefore invented (reverse transcriptase for example) and substituted most conveniently for the absent viral particles, hopefully salvaging the central dogma of viral oncology. This permitted the viral hypothesis to survive for another ten years, until the late 1970s, with the help of increasingly generous support from funding agencies and from pharmaceutical companies. However by 1980 the failure of this line of research was becoming embarrassingly evident, and the closing of some viral oncology laboratories would have been inevitable, except that…

Except what? Virus cancer research would have crashed to a halt except that, in 1981, five cases of severe immune deficiencies were described by a Los Angeles physician, all among homosexual men who were also all sniffing amyl nitrite, were all abusing other drugs, abusing antibiotics, and probably suffering from malnutrition and STDs (sexually transmitted diseases). It would have been logical to hypothesize that these severe cases of immune deficiency had multiple toxic origins. This would have amounted to incrimination of these patients’ life-style…

Unfortunately, such discrimination was, politically, totally unacceptable. Therefore, another hypothesis had to be found—these patients were suffering from a contagious disease caused by a new…retrovirus! Scientific data in support of this hypothesis was and, amazingly enough, still is totally missing. That did not matter, and instantaneous and passionate interest of cancer virus researchers and institutions erupted immediately. This was salvation for the viral laboratories where AIDS now became, almost overnight, the main focus of research. It generated huge financial support from Big Pharma, more budget for the CDC and NIH, and nobody had to worry about the life style of the patients who became at once the innocent victims of this horrible virus, soon labeled as HIV.

Twenty-five years later, the HIV/AIDS hypothesis has totally failed to achieve three major goals in spite of the huge research funding exclusively directed to projects based on it. No AIDS cure has ever been found; no verifiable epidemiological predictions have ever been made; and no HIV vaccine has ever been successfully prepared. Instead, highly toxic (but not curative) drugs have been most irresponsibly used, with frequent, lethal side effects. Yet not a single HIV particle has ever been observed by electron microscopy in the blood of patients supposedly having a high viral load! So what? All the most important newspapers and magazine have displayed attractive computerized, colorful images of HIV that all originate from laboratory cell cultures, but never from even a single AIDS patient. Despite this stunning omission the HIV/AIDS dogma is still solidly entrenched. Tens of thousands of researchers, and hundreds of major pharmaceutical companies continue to make huge profits based on the HIV hypothesis. And not one single AIDS patient has ever been cured…

Yes, HIV/AIDS is emblematic of the corruption of virus research that is remarkably and tragically documented in this book.

Research programs on Hepatitis C, BSE, SARS, Avian flu and current vaccination policies all developed along the same logic, that of maximizing financial profits. Whenever we try to understand how some highly questionable therapeutic policies have been recommended at the highest levels of public health authorities (WHO, CDC, RKI etc.), we frequently discover either embarrassing conflicts of interests, or the lack of essential control experiments, and always the strict rejection of any open debate with authoritative scientists presenting dissident views of the pathological processes. Manipulations of statistics, falsifications of clinical trials, dodging of drug toxicity tests have all been repeatedly documented. All have been swiftly covered up, and none have been able to, so far, disturb the cynical logic of today’s virus research business.

Virus mania is a social disease of our highly developed society. To cure it will require conquering fear, fear being the most deadly contagious virus, most efficiently transmitted by the media.

Errare humanum est sed diabolicum preservare… (to err is human, but to preserve an error is diabolic).

Etienne de Harven, MD (1928-2019)

Professor Emeritus of Pathology at the University of Toronto and Member of the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, New York (1956-1981)

Member of Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS Advisory Panel of South Africa President of Rethinking AIDS (www.rethinkaids.net)

Foreword II

by Joachim Mutter, MD

This Book Will Instigate an Upheaval of Dogmas

The book Virus Mania shows in a simple comprehensible way the diversity of scientific data that proves most of the epidemics presented in the media as horror stories (flu, avian flu, AIDS, BSE, Hepatitis C, etc.) do not actually exist or are harmless. In contrast: Through this scaremongering and through the toxic materials contained in vaccines a vast number of diseases can emerge; diseases that have recently been increasing on a massive scale: allergies, cancer, autism, attention deficit disorder (ADD), attention deficite hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autoimmune diseases and disorders of the nervous systeme. The authors, the journalist Torsten Engelbrecht and doctor of internal medicine Claus Köhnlein, succeed in tracking down the real culprits, including the profiteers in this game. They also identify solutions that everybody can easily implement in their daily lives. This work is one of the most important and enlightening books of our times which will instigate an upheaval of the dogmas and delusions that have held for more than 150 years.

Joachim Mutter, MD

Institute of Environmental Medicine

And Hospital Epidemiology

University Medical Center Freiburg

Germany

Freiburg, 19 December 2006

Introduction

Society under the Spell of a
One-Dimensional Microbe Theory

We had accepted some half-truths and had stopped searching for the whole truths. The principal half-truths were that medical research had stamped out the great killers of the past—tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, etc.—and that medical research and our superior system of medical care were major factors in extending life expectancy. The data on deaths from tuberculosis show that the mortality rate from this disease has been declining steadily since the middle of the 19th century and has continued to decline in almost linear fashion during the past 100 years [till 1970]. There were increases in rates of tuberculosis during wars and under specified adverse local conditions. The poor and the crowded always came off worst of all in war and in peace, but the overall decline in deaths from tuberculosis was not altered measurably by the discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus, the advent of the tuberculin test, the appearance of BCG vaccination, the widespread use of mass screening, the intensive anti-tuberculosis campaigns, or the discovery of streptomycin. It is important that this point be understood in its completeness. The point was made years ago by Wade Hamptom Frost, and more recently by René Dubos, and has been repeatedly stressed through the years by many observers of the public health. Similar trends in mortality have been reported with respect to diphtheria, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, pertussis, measles, and many others.“1 2

EDWARD H. KASS, HARVARD PHYSICIAN AND FOUNDING MEMBER AND FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE INFECTIOUS DISEASE SOCIETY OF AMERICA

The founding of The Royal Society in 1660 caused a tectonic shift in Western medicine. A group of British scientists decided that what counts is “the experimental proof” not speculative fantasy, superstition and blind faith.3 4 The Royal Society called this basic research principle “nullius in verba,”⁵ which essentially means “Don’t just trust what someone says.” In that era, it was still common to accuse women of witchcraft “in the name of God” and burn them at the stake, or to subjugate entire peoples such as the Aztecs or Mayans to Western ideologies. Setting a standard of scientific proof marked the end of the dark ages and had enormous long-term consequences.

Today, considering ourselves enlightened and in the safe hands of our high-tech scientific culture, we look back with misgivings and great discomfort at the abuses of power that occurred in such draconian times. Indeed, the dream that science promises with its principle of proof—namely to free people from ignorance, superstition, tyranny, and not least from physical and psychological suffering—has, in many cases, particularly in wealthy countries, become a reality.⁶ Airplanes, tractors, computers, bionic limbs—all these achievements are the product of scientific research. Like our modern legal system, bound by the principle of evidence, science recognizes only one guiding principle: provable fact.

Our enthusiasm for scientific achievements has risen immeasurably. We have granted a godlike status to researchers and doctors, who still had the status of slaves in ancient Rome and even until the early 20th century were mostly poor and powerless.⁷ Because of this status, we continue to perceive them as selfless truth-seekers.⁸ The English biologist Thomas Huxley, a powerful supporter of Charles Darwin and grandfather of the author Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932), described this phenomenon as early as the late 19th century, when he compared science’s growing authority to the Church’s position of power. For this, he coined the term “Church Scientific.”9 10

Today’s enlightened civilized individual believes so firmly in the omnipotence of scientists that they no longer question the evidence for certain hypotheses or even whether they make sense. Instead, citizens rely on the latest sensationalized media coverage churned out in daily newspapers and TV newscasts about world-threatening viral epidemics (Corona/ COVID-19, wine flu, avian flu, SARS, HIV/AIDS, etc.). For many decades, the media (and scientific reporters above all) have intently cultivated friendly relationships with researchers in the drive to scoop their competitors for provocative headlines. “We scientific reporters all too often serve as living applause for our subject,” New York Times reporter Natalie Angier says critically about her profession. “Sometimes we write manuscripts that sound like unedited press releases.”¹¹

Journalists usually assume that scientists engage in rigorous studies and disseminate only provable facts—and that rare instances of fraud will quickly be driven out of the hallowed halls of research. It’s an ideal picture, but one that has nothing to do with reality.12 13 14 15 16 17 Uncountable billions of dollars are transformed into “scientific” hypotheses, which are ultimately packaged and hawked by pharmaceutical companies, researchers, health advocates and journalists alike as the ultimate conclusions of truth. In actuality, these theories are often mere speculation, proven false and years later, finally discarded.

“The more willing the people are, the more promises must be made,” warned Erwin Chargaff as early as 1978. “A quick route to long life, freedom from all diseases, a cure for cancer—soon, perhaps the elimination of death—and what then?” asked the co-founder of biochemical research and gene-technology, and a repeatedly decorated professor at Columbia University’s Biochemical Institute in New York. “But no singer would ever have to promise to make me a better person if I would just listen to her trills.”¹⁸

Since the end of the 1970s, this situation has dramatically worsened.¹⁹ Just as in politics and economics, we in research are also “bombarded, saturated, harried by fraud,“ writes renowned science historian Horace Judson,²⁰ whose analyses are corroborated by a number of relevant studies.21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 “There is widespread and organized crime in the drug industry,” states Peter C. Gøtzsche, professor of medicine, longtime director of the world-renowned Nordic Cochrance Center and author of the book “Deadly Medicine and Organised Crime.³²

“From a global viewpoint, there is corruption at all levels of the public health service, from health ministries to patients—and there are almost no limits to criminal imagination,” maintains Transparency International, an institution for protection against corruption, in its annual “Global Corruption Report 2006” (focus on health services).³³

A close look at this data reveals that our scientific culture is ruled by secretiveness, privilege-granting, lack of accountability, and suffers from a blatant lack of monitoring, as well as from the prospects that these companies and researchers will make exorbitant profits. All of these questionable factors contribute to the potential for researcher bias and fraud, jeopardizing the scientific proof principle introduced in the 17th century.³⁴ “Judson paints a dark picture of [biomedical] science today, but we may see far darker days ahead as proof and profit become inextricably mixed,“ warns the medical publication Lancet.³⁵

Even when one theoretically assumes ideal researchers and ideal studies, it must be emphasized that medicine remains (is still) a “science of uncertainties,”³⁶ expressed William Osler (1849-1919), regarded as the father of modern medicine.³⁷ Nothing has changed. Donald Miller, Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington, warns that with today’s medical research, “scientific standards of proof are not uniform and well defined, in contrast to legal standards. Standards of measurement, ways of reporting and evaluating results, and particular types of experimental practices vary. Science prizes objective certainty. But science does not uniformly adhere to this standard. Subjective opinions and consensus among scientists often supersede the stricture of irrefutability.”³⁸

To effectively combat this systemic problem, much would be gained if it were compulsory to have certain studies replicated, thus reviewing them for their soundness.³⁹ But, according to Judson, “replication, once an important element in science, is no longer an effective deterrent to fraud because the modern biomedical research system is structured to prevent replication—not to ensure it.” Such verification is unattractive, because it doesn’t promise gigantic profits, but might only produce similar results to the original research, which is unlikely to be published by a medical journal.⁴⁰ From time to time, these reviews are carried out, with stunning results.

At the beginning of 2005, an investigation disclosed a severely flawed study leading to the approval of viramune, a globally-touted AIDS.⁴¹ The follow-up investigation found that records of severe side effects including deaths were simply swept under the carpet.

At the same time, chief investigator Jonathan Fishbein was greatly hindered, from the highest levels of the National Institutes of Health, in his bid for clarification. The medical system, according to Fishbein, is shaped more by politics of interest, partisanship and intrigue than by sound science. Fishbein called the government’s AIDS research agency “a troubled organization,” referring to an internal review that found its managers have engaged in unnecessary feuding, sexually explicit language and other inappropriate conduct.42 43

How far this can go becomes apparent when research produced by individual scientists is placed under the microscope. The South Korean veterinarian Hwang Woo Suk, for example, published a paper in Science in May 2005 in which he described how he had extracted human stem cells from cloned embryos for the first time. The work was celebrated as a “global sensation” and Hwang as a “cloning pioneer.” But at the end of 2005, it was discovered that Hwang had completely forged his experiments.44 45

The medical field is ultimately about illness, dying and death. Naturally, these experiences involve a complex and nuanced range of emotions for individuals, their loved ones and doctors. The process makes us extremely receptive to a belief in salvation through miracle treatments. In this, researchers and physicians take over the roles of priests; the white smock has merely replaced the black robes and black wigs physicians used to wear.⁴⁶ These white knights proclaim their healing messages, and of course require “victims” to carry out their research with billions of dollars of government and taxpayer funded dollars. “Indeed, so profound is our belief in the cures of science” that it has become “the new secular theology of the 20th century,”⁴⁷ according to American media scientist Michael Tracey. “This belief is so inherent within us that we construct any problem, grievance, pain, or fear in conceptual terms that not only allow us to seek the cure, but demand that we do so.”⁴⁸

At the heart of this web of feelings and wishes are the fantasies of almightiness that further prop up the medical-industrial complex, that ever more powerful part of the global economy consisting of pharmaceutical companies worth billions, their lobbyists and spin doctors, and an immense army of highly-paid researchers and doctors. In the process, we’ve turned our bodies into vehicles of consumerism, internalizing a highly-questionable promise inherent to this industry: Science can conquer terrible and puzzling diseases—just like we conquered the moon—if it is just given enough money.⁴⁹

To avoid any misunderstandings: medicine has made tremendous achievements. This applies first and foremost to reparative medicine such as accident surgery, organ transplants or laser eye surgery. But, the various perils of modern medicine are all-too evident in the ever-expanding field of so-called preventive and curative treatments, particularly the growing arsenal of pharmaceutical drugs—in other words, medicine that purports to be able to heal.⁵⁰

Take cancer, for example. In 1971, US President Richard Nixon at the behest of public health officials (and above all, virologists), declared a “War on Cancer.” The medical establishment vowed there would be a cure at hand by 1975.⁵¹ But we are still waiting. And there is “no evidence of the way cancer comes into being,” according to German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum).⁵² Mainstream cancer theories also show blatant contradictions.⁵³ Despite this, hundreds of billions of dollars have already flowed into a completely one-sided cancer research focused on wonder-drug production. Above all, this set-up grants pharmaceutical companies, researchers and doctors gigantic profits.

In contrast, even plausible alternative theories (which may be less profitable, because they focus on lifestyle and environmental factors and not only on fatefully appearing genes and viruses as causes) remain almost completely disregarded.54 55 For instance, although official cancer theories assume that a third of cancer cases could be prevented through a change of diet (above all more fruit and vegetables and less meat),⁵⁶ cancer expert Samuel Epstein points out that the American National Cancer Institute spent “just $1 million—that is 0.02 percent of its $4.7 billion budget in 2005—on education, press work and public relations to encourage eating fruit and vegetables to prevent cancer.”⁵⁷

At the same time, the number of people who die from “non-smoking” cancers has noticeably increased since Nixon’s call to battle (even, it is worth noting, when one takes into consideration that people on average have become older).⁵⁸ In Germany 220,000 people still die from this terrible disease annually; in the USA there are almost 600,000 cancer deaths each year.59 60

The situation doesn’t look any better for other widespread illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, or rheumatism. In spite of exorbitant research budgets, the development of a cure is unforeseeable. Cortisone, for instance, does help to alleviate acute rheumatic or allergic discomfort—but only during cortisone therapy. If treatment is discontinued, suffering returns. At the same time, cortisone, which also finds plenty of use in the treatment of viruses, is, like most reputed miracle cures (magic bullets), connected with severe side effects.⁶¹

Vera Sharav of the New York City-based Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), an organization that fights for independent and ethically responsible medical science, warns that “often enough, the medications are so toxic that they produce precisely the diseases against which, as the pharmaceutical manufacturers’ advertising messages aim to convince us, they are supposed to be so active. And then, new preparation after new preparation is given.”⁶²

As relevant studies reveal, drug toxicities are so severe that the American “health” industry’s pill craze is responsible for about 800,000 deaths each year, more than any illness (including cancer and heart attack). And in Germany, tens of thousands of people are estimated to die each year due to improper treatment and prescription of incorrect medications (there are no exact figures because certain interest groups have successfully resisted the collection of the relevant information).⁶³ And Peter C. Gøtzsche, professor of medicine, points out: “Our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in the United States and Europe.”⁶⁴ The fact that a society calling itself enlightened is nevertheless dominated by the belief that there is a healing pill for every little ache and pain or serious complaint is substantially due to the persuasive craftiness of Big Pharma. Pharmaceutical companies operating in the US spend approximately a third of their expenses on marketing, which means that $50 billion per year is merely invested in advertising their preparations as miracle cures to doctors, journalists, consumers and politicians.⁶⁵ With this, they have extended their sphere of influence in a most alarming way to include institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as well as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the independence and integrity of which is particularly important.66 67 68 69

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in April 2006, showed that “conflicts of interest at the FDA are widespread.” It was shown that in 73 percent of meetings, at least one member of the consulting team in question yielded conflicts of interest: being remunerated by Big Pharma, for instance, through consultation fees, research contracts or grants, or stock ownership or options. In nearly a quarter of contracts and grants, for example, sums of more than $100,000 changed hands. The study found that these conflicts of interest influenced voting behavior. When panel members with conflicts of interest were excluded from voting, the judgment of the product in question was much less favorable. And even though these conflicts of interest were so extensive, panel members with relevant conflicts of interest were disqualified in only 1 percent of cases.70 71

“Big Pharma money and advertising not only influence the perception of illness, the demand for drugs, and the practice of medicine, but government budgets, including health service and oversight agencies have become dependent on Big Pharma money,” says Vera Sharav of the AHRP. “An out of the box analysis opened our eyes to a fundamental conflict of interest that has never been discussed. Public health policies are not merely influenced by Big Pharma; they are formulated so as to increase industry’s profits because government budgets are tied to this industry’s profits.” In this context, a decisive event occurred in 1992 when the US Congress waved through the “Prescription Users Fees Act” (PDUFA), which established the “fast track drug approval service.” According to Sharav, “the FDA has received $825 million in industry ‘user fees’,” and “other government agencies have similarly become financially dependent on Big Pharma.”⁷²

The issue stirred up so much controversy that the British Parliament also opened an extensive investigation. Their conclusions: The pharmaceutical industry’s corrupt practices and its massive influence upon parliaments, authorities, universities, health professionals and the media were sharply criticized.⁷³

In fact, “if prescription medicines are so good, why do they need to be pushed so hard?“ asks Marcia Angell, former Editor in Chief of the well-known New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). “Good drugs don’t have to be promoted.”⁷⁴ Her opinions are as simple as they are revealing, but unfortunately they don’t register in the consciousness of the modern believer in science. Our society that considers itself particularly enlightened has become senselessly “overmedicated.”⁷⁵

This pill-mania exists because we have a distorted comprehension of what causes diseases—a comprehension that has been able to lodge itself firmly in our thought processes over a period of more than 100 years.⁷⁶ To understand this, one must look back to the middle of the 19th century, when a true paradigm shift in the way we see disease occurred. There was an about-turn, away from a complex, holistic view concerning how diseases originate, to a monocausal and “one-dimensional” mindset, to use a term from philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Through this, a false awareness arose “which is immune to its falseness” because the dimensions of self-criticism and the ability to look in various alternative directions is missing.⁷⁷

This paradigm shift is largely due to the fact that from approximately the 16th century, in the course of the Enlightenment, the natural sciences began to develop rapidly, and put the population under their spell with descriptions of very specific phenomena. One need only remember the tremendous achievements of the English physicist Isaac Newton, who described gravitation; or the invention of the steam locomotive or even the printing press. But in the euphoric exuberance of progress, particularly from the middle of the 19th century, this thought pattern of specificity—that very particular chemical or physical phenomena have very specific causes—was simply transferred to the medical sciences. Many researchers and interest groups didn’t even consider if this actually made sense.⁷⁸

The dogma of a single cause for diseases was decisively shaped by microbiology, which became predominant at the end of the 19th century, declaring specific microorganisms (viruses, bacteria, fungi) to be the causes of very definite diseases; including mass epidemics such as cholera and tuberculosis.⁷⁹ The founders of microbe theory, researchers Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, ascended in their lifetimes to the heights of medicine’s Mount Olympus.

And so with the microbe theory, the “cornerstone was laid for modern biomedicine’s basic formula with its monocausal-microbial starting-point and its search for magic bullets: one disease, one cause, one cure,“ writes American sociology professor, Steven Epstein.⁸⁰ From the end of the 19th century, the hunt for microbes increasingly provided the thrill, and the same admiration that physicists and chemists had earlier garnered (as in Paris in 1783, when the brothers Montgolfier performed the “miracle” of launching a hot air balloon into the sky).⁸¹

But as fascinating as this conception of a single cause is, it has very little to do with the complex workings of the human body. A significant majority of diseases have far more than just one cause, so the search for the single cause of disease, and by extension for the one miracle-pill, will remain for them a hopeless undertaking.⁸² This is particularly true in microbiology, a “scientific No Man’s Land,”⁸³ as the American magazine The New Yorker fittingly described it. The field is becoming ever more complex and incomprehensible, as further research penetrates the seemingly infinite microcosmic mini-worlds of cellular components, molecules and microbes.

Bacteria, fungi and viruses are omnipresent—in the air, in our food, in our mucous membranes—but we aren’t permanently sick.⁸⁴ When a disease generally held to be contagious “breaks out,” only some individuals become sick. This is clear evidence that microbes, whatever potential they may have to make you sick, cannot be the lone cause of disease.

Pasteur himself admitted on his deathbed: “The microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything.”⁸⁵ And indeed, even for mainstream medicine, it is becoming increasingly clear that the biological terrain of our intestines—the intestinal flora, teeming with bacteria—is accorded a decisive role, because it is by far the body’s biggest and most important immune system.⁸⁶ A whole range of factors (in particular nutrition, stress, lack of activity, drug use, etc.) influence intestinal flora, so it has a decisive influence on all sorts of severe or less serious illnesses.87 88 89 90

But it is not just this large oversimplification that calls for opposition to the microbe theory.⁹¹ Under closer examination, fundamental assumptions of microbe theory also emerge as pure myth. Edward Kass, professor of medicine at Harvard University, made this the subject of his opening address at a conference of the American Society for Infectious Diseases in 1970. US citizens were becoming increasingly critical of the Vietnam War and many people in the USA began to rebel against the establishment. Maybe this zeitgeist spurred Kass to address these issues openly, although they may have stood in glaring opposition to the views of most of his listeners.

Kass argued that medical scientists and microbe hunters were not the ones to be praised for stemming the flow of mass diseases like tuberculosis, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough or pulmonary infections. The data unquestionably shows that death rates for these so-called infectious diseases had noticeably decreased from the middle of the 19th century; long before microbe hunters and the medical establishment became active (see diagram 1). The monumental accomplishment of pushing back diseases and raising life expectancy is primarily due to an improvement in general standards of living (improved nutrition, construction of water purification plants, etc.), which gained momentum in industrialized countries precisely in the mid-19th century.⁹²

Diagram 1 Pertussis: Death Rates of Children Younger than 15 (England and Wales)

Source: McKeown, Thomas, Die Bedeutung der Medizin, Suhrkamp, 1979, p. 149

This also explains why deaths from so-called infectious diseases have become a rarity in affluent societies (in wealthy countries, they make up less than 1 percent of all mortalities).⁹³ Yet, in poor third-world regions like Africa, where every third person is malnourished,⁹⁴ these same diseases (tuberculosis, leprosy, etc.) that wealthy countries fought during times of recession run rampant.⁹⁵ The excessive panic-like fear, which so easily consumes members of affluent societies when the media stokes the flames of the viral-epidemic panic, can in this context, only be described as irrational.

And although the horror scenarios that were painted on the wall by the mainstream media “at the behest” of the virologists in connection with SARS (2002/2003), bird flu (2004/2005) or swine flu (2009/2010) have never become a reality, it nonetheless happened that in 2020 that total panic was spread again with Corona/COVID-19 and, in addition, totalitarian freedoms were massively restricted.These shocking media reports totally overlook the fact that the existence and pathogenic effects of all these allegedly contagious and even fatal viruses—avian flu, H5N1, HIV etc.)—have never been proven. A glaring paradox is that very few people actually die from these purported large new epidemics. Strictly speaking, these epidemics are not epidemics whatsoever.

No scientists have even seen the avian flu virus H5N1 in full (with its complete genetic material and virus shell); we don’t even know if it could be dangerous to humans, or if it could trigger the already widely reported global pandemic; something that mainstream researchers also admit.⁹⁶ And despite this lack of proof, Reinhard Kurth, director of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, which is responsible for microbe epidemics, does not shy from warning that H5N1 “potentially threatens all of humanity.”⁹⁷ There is also discrepancy between speculation and existing facts in the BSE “epidemic,” which has yet to present us in Germany with a single clinical case of the disease, only animals that have tested positive for the virus.⁹⁸

With regard to hepatitis C, we are still waiting for the predicted epidemic of liver cirrhosis (serious liver damage).⁹⁹ Since the 1980s, no more than a few hundred people die in Germany each year from so-called AIDS, according to official statistics. And what about the horrifying figures of x-million “infected with HIV” in Africa and other developing countries? This is primarily due to the redefinition of patients who suffer from conventional diseases like tuberculosis or leprosy as AIDS patients.¹⁰⁰ The threat of SARS is similarly over hyped: In the first nine months (November 2002-July 2003) after the alleged discovery of the SARS virus at the end of 2002, the World Health Organization found only 800 “probable SARS deaths.”¹⁰¹

“Years from now, people looking back at us will find our acceptance of the HIV theory of AIDS as silly as we find the leaders who excommunicated Galileo, just because he insisted that the earth was not the center of the universe,“ predicts Kary Mullis, one of the most significant Nobel laureates of the 20th century who died in 2019. “It has been disappointing that so many scientists have absolutely refused to examine the available evidence in a neutral, dispassionate way, regarding whether HIV causes AIDS.”¹⁰² This breaking of the fundamental principles in scientific research also applies to other new alleged epidemics like Corona/COVID-19, hepatitis C, SARS, swine flu, avian flu, cervical cancer, Ebola, or BSE.

Mullis’ words come from his article titled, “The Medical Establishment vs. the Truth.” In it, he discusses how the entire virus-busting industry plies its dogmas, declaring them to be eternal truths, without the support of factual evidence. Of course, this helps to secure the gigantic research budgets and profits of pharmaceutical groups and top scientists.

Between 1981 and 2006, US taxpayers alone shelled out $190 billion for AIDS research focused almost exclusively on the deadly virus hypothesis and the development of treatment drugs.¹⁰³ Yet the growing list of medications haven’t demonstrably extended the life of a single patient, and a “cure” is nowhere in sight.¹⁰⁴ The same strategy has been employed with Tamiflu flu medication, which has serious side effects, yet, thanks to skillful public relations work, support of the WHO and the media’s avian flu fear mongering, this drug mutated in a short time from shelf warmer to cash cow.¹⁰⁵

While pharmaceutical groups and top researchers cash in and the media drive their circulation ratings sky high with sensationalized headlines, citizens must foot a gigantic bill without getting what is necessary: enlightenment over the true causes and true solutions. “So what are dedicated clinicians to do?” asks John Abramson of Harvard Medical School. “The first step is to give up the illusion that the primary purpose of modern medical research is to improve Americans’ health most effectively and efficiently. In our opinion, the primary purpose of commercially-funded clinical research is to maximize financial return on investment, not health.”¹⁰⁶

This book’s central focus is to steer this discussion back to where, as a scientific debate, it belongs: on the path to prejudice-free analysis of facts. To clarify one more time, the point is not to show that diseases like cervical cancer, SARS, AIDS or hepatitis C do not exist. No serious critic of reigning virus theories has any doubt that people or animals (as with avian flu) are or could become sick (although many are not really sick at all, but are only defined as sick, and then are made sick or killed). Instead, the central question is: What really causes these diseases known as cervical cancer, avian flu, SARS, AIDS and hepatitis C? Is it a virus? Is it a virus in combination with other causes? Or is it not a virus at all, but rather something very different?

We will embark on a detailed examination of the hypotheses of science, politics and the media elite, looking at all of the available evidence. At the same time, alternative explanations or causes will be described: substances like drugs, medicines, pesticides, heavy metals or insufficient nutrition. All these factors can severely damage or even completely destroy the immune system—and their devastating effects can be encountered in the victims hastily branded with a diagnosis of COVID-19, cervical cancer, avian flu, SARS, AIDS or hepatitis C. Ultimately they are victims of complex, broad socio-economic and political forces and further marginalized and degraded by a profession that pledges to “do no harm.”

Chapter 1 explains what microbes (bacteria, fungi, viruses) actually are, and what role they play in the complete cycle of life and the ways in which the medical establishment and the media have turned these microbes into our worst enemies. In Chapter 2, we’ll travel from the middle of the 19th century until modern times, in order to separate myth from reality in microbe theory. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch rose to become medicine’s shining lights, but we cannot leave them out of this analysis since they were certainly not immune from lying and deception. Nor will we shy away from the question of whether polio is a viral disease or if poisons like pesticides have not made at least their contribution to the destruction of the spinal nerves that is so typical of this disease.

With this background knowledge, we dive into the time of modern virus research. Chapter 3 thus begins with the history of HIV/AIDS, which arrived in the early 1980s, triggering an almost unprecedented mass panic that continues to this day. And now the whole world also seems to accept that Hepatitis C, BSE, SARS, avian flu, cervical cancer or COVID-19 are also triggered by a causative agent (pathogen). In Chapters 4 through 12, we will see that these statements do not hold up and that other explanations make more sense.

Chapter 1

Medicine Presents a Distorted Picture of Microbes

“The gods are innocent of man’s suffering.

Our diseases and physical pains are the products of excess!”

PYTHAGORAS (570-510 B.C.)

“Béchamp was right, the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything!”¹⁰⁷

LOUIS PASTEUR (1822-1895)

“Where there is life, there are germs.”¹⁰⁸

ROBINSON VERNER

“Diet clearly has a major influence on many diseases and modulates the complex internal community of microorganisms.
These microorganisms, weighing up to 1 kg in a normal adult human, may total 100 trillion cells.”¹⁰⁹

JEREMY NICHOLSON PROFESSOR OF BIOCHEMISTRY

Microbes: Branded as Scapegoats

People are very susceptible to the idea that certain microbes act like predators, stalking our communities for victims and causing the most serious illnesses like COVID-19 (pulmonary infection) or hepatitis C (liver damage). Such an idea is thoroughly simple, perhaps too simple. As psychology and social science have discovered, humans have a propensity for simplistic solutions, particularly in a world that seems to be growing increasingly complicated.¹¹⁰ It also allows for a concept of the “enemy at the gates” allowing individuals to shift responsibility for their illnesses to a fungus, a bacteria or a virus. “Man prefers to perish rather than change his habits!” the author Leo Tolstoy once said.

But this scapegoat thinking has often led humanity astray, be it in personal life, in science or in politics. Fishermen and politicians both earnestly assert that seals and dolphins contribute to the depletion of ocean fish stocks. So, each year in Canada, one hundred thousand seals—often just a few days old—are battered to death,¹¹¹ while every autumn in Japan, thousands of dolphins are hacked apart while still alive.¹¹²

But in their blind hate for the animals, the slaughterers completely overlook the fact that it is their own species—Homo sapiens—is responsible for the state of our oceans and that through massive overexploitation and high-technology catch-methods, we have plundered the world’s fish stocks. A German-Canadian study that appeared in Nature in 2003, found that industrialized fishing has dramatically reduced the stocks of predators like tuna and swordfishes, marlins, cod, halibut, ray and flounder in the world’s oceans since the beginning of commercial fishing in the 1950s—by no less than 90 percent.¹¹³

Our modern concept of the lethal microbes similarly avoids the big picture issues. Some can be harmful; nevertheless, it is negligent to ignore the role individual behaviors (nutrition, drug consumption, etc.) play instead of simply pointing a finger at these microorganisms. “Whether the method of treatment affects the animal predators in the wilderness or the bacteria in the gut, it is always risky to tamper with the natural balance of forces in nature,” writes microbiologist and Pulitzer Prize winner René Dubos.¹¹⁴

Medical and biological realities, like social ones, are just not that simple. Renowned immunology and biology professor Edward Golub’s rule of thumb is that, “if you can fit the solution to a complex problem on a bumper sticker, it is wrong! I tried to condense my book The Limits of Medicine: How Science Shapes Our Hope for the Cure to fit onto a bumper sticker and couldn’t.”¹¹⁵

The complexities of the world—and above all, the living world—might seem too difficult for any one individual to grasp with even approximate comprehension. Informing ourselves on economics, culture, politics and medical science seems incredibly daunting. Man “is not an Aristotelian god that encompasses all existence; he is a creature with a development who can only comprehend a fraction of reality,” writes social psychologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann.¹¹⁶ Supposed experts are no exception. Most doctors themselves, for instance, have hardly more than a lay understanding of the concepts that loom on the horizons of molecular biology, including research into microbes and their role in the onset of diseases.

Correspondingly, if you asked most doctors to define the unmistakable characteristics of retroviruses (HIV, for example, is claimed to be one), they’d most likely shrug their shoulders or throw out a bewildering cryptic response. Another challenge for many doctors would be a description of how the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) functions, even though it developed into a key technology in molecular biology in the 1990s, and is brought up again and again in connection with the alleged discovery of the so-called avian flu virus H5N1 (on PCR, see chapter 3, about the “miracle weapons” of the epidemic inventors, as well as chapter 12 about corona/COVID-19).

Ignorance and the desire for oversimplification are root problems in medical science. As early as 1916, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked in his diary: “Humanity has always searched for a science in which simplex sigillum veri ist,“ essentially meaning, “simplicity is a mark of truth.”¹¹⁷ And microbe theory fits exactly into this scheme: one disease, one agent as cause—and ultimately, one miracle pill or vaccine as a solution.¹¹⁸

But this oversimplification belies the goings-on in the “invisible” micro-world of cells and molecules. The living world—on both a small and large scale—is just much more complicated than medical science and the media lets on. For this reason, as biochemist Erwin Chargaff points out, “The attempt to find symmetry and simplicity in the world’s living tissue has often led to false conclusions.”¹¹⁹ There are even a few people who believe that what is now called ‘molecular biology’ encompasses all life sciences. But that is not the case, except on a superficial level: everything we can see in our world is somehow made up of molecules. But is that all? Can we describe music by saying that all instruments are made of wood, brass, and so on, and that because of that they produce their sounds?”¹²⁰

Biology—the science of life—isn’t even capable of defining its own object of research: life. “We do not have a scientific definition of life,” as Erwin Chargaff states. And “indeed, the most precise tests are carried out on dead cells and tissues.”¹²¹ This phenomenon is particularly virulent in bacterial and viral research (and in the whole pharmaceutical development of medicines altogether) where laboratory experiments on tissue samples which are tormented with a variety of often highly reactive chemicals allow few conclusions about reality. And yet, conclusions are constantly drawn—and then passed straight on to the production of medications and vaccines.

Fungi: As in the Forest, So in the Human Body

It’s ultimately impossible to find out exactly everything that microbes get up to on a cellular and molecular level in living people or animals. To do this, you would have to chase every single microbe around with mini-cameras. And even if it were possible, you’d merely have little pieces of a puzzle, not an intricate blueprint of the body in its entirety. By focusing on microbes and accusing them of being the primary and lone triggers of disease, we overlook how various factors are linked together, causing illness, such as environmental toxins, the side effects of medications, psychological issues like depression and anxiety and poor nutrition.

If over a longer period of time, for instance, you eat far too little fresh fruits and vegetables, and instead consume far too much fast food, sweets, coffee, soft drinks, or alcohol (and along with them, all sorts of toxins such as pesticides or preservatives), and maybe smoke a lot or even take drugs like cocaine or heroin, your health will eventually be ruined. Drug-addicted and malnourished junkies aren’t the only members of society who make this point clear to us. It was also tangibly presented in the 2004 film Super Size Me, in which American Morgan Spurlock— the film’s director and guinea pig rolled into one—consumed only fast food from McDonald’s for 30 days. The result: Spurlock gained 12 kg, his liver fat values were equivalent to those of an alcoholic, his cholesterol increased, he became depressed, suffered from severe headaches and erectile dysfunction.

Despite its drastic effects, people still become addicted to this protein and fat-containing and simultaneously nutrient-deficient foodstuff. Certainly that has something to do with the fact that fast-food corporations with a billin-dollar annual advertising budget, purposefully and successfully target the smallest consumers (while the US government provides an advertising budget of merely $2 million for their campaign “Fruit and Vegetables—five times a day”).¹²² As laboratory studies on rats and mice show, the contents of hamburgers and French fries can cause reactions in the body that are similar to that of heroin addiction,¹²³ which has been proven to have a destructive effect upon the immune system.¹²⁴ Significant components in the onset of addiction, according to researchers, are processed ingredients. “A diet containing salt, sugar and fats caused the animals to become addicted to these foodstuffs,“ says Ann Kelley, a neurologist at the Wisconsin Medical School who observed alterations in brain chemistry in long-term test series that were similar to long-term use of morphine or heroin.

Sugar “is in a position to be a ‘gateway’ to other drugs, legal or illegal,” according to Thomas Kroiss, president of the Austrian Society for holistic medicine. Sugar robs vitamins from the body, which influences mood as well. Although it is popular in Western cultures it doesn’t exist at all in nature, and causes an imbalance when regularly consumed.¹²⁵

This prompted the journal New Scientist to write that fast foods, like cigarettes, should carry a health advisory warning.¹²⁶ But instead of providing more information and carrying out more research (not least into the influence of animal proteins on health not just those found in burgers)127 128 129 on the many dangers of fast foods, McDonald’s continues luring children with “Happy Meals” and even promotes the brand by sponsoring large sporting events.

One such event is the Football Champions League, which was supposed to be all about sport—and by extension health. To to push its image as a promoter of health, in 1987 the fast food giant has founded a children’s aid program, “McDonald’s Kinderhilfe”—for sick children who, according to the fast food giant, “need one thing above all: love and security.” Super-celebrities such as athletes Michael Ballack, Henry Maske, Jérôme Boateng and Katarina Witt, as well as supermodel Heidi Klum and the world-famous vocal trio Destiny’s Child functioned as brand-pushers.130 131

Corporate groups also receive political support. In late 2005, the EU commission announced that they wanted to loosen TV advertising regulations, making even more and more specifically targeted advertising possible, such as direct product placement during programs.¹³² If these measures had been carried out, European cultures would undoubtedly have found themselves closer to US standards—and the consumer would be even more heavily bombarded with advertising messages from the food, pharmaceutical and other multi-national industries. Such partisan politics certainly have nothing to do with targeted health precautions, although that kind of public service is so urgently needed.

Preventive health care is generally neglected by the very government-sponsored groups charged with protecting the health of citizens. A good and symbolically appropriate example of this is that these bloated bureaucracies pay little attention to intestinal function and health. Even organizations like the generally esteemed Stiftung Warentest, a German consumer protection organization still earnestly holds to the message that “poor nutrition or a lifestyle that leads to constipation generally has nothing to do with intestinal bacteria; candida fungi, for instance, can be found in every healthy intestine.” And in general, “shifts in the composition of the intestine’s microbes are merely symptoms [that is, consequences] of infections, inflammations or antibiotic treatments, but not their causes. Under normal patterns of life, the intestinal flora regulates itself on its own as soon as the cause of the disturbance has been eliminated,“ the researchers say.133 134

Stiftung Warentest cannot, however, furnish concrete studies that prove this. And there is also no reason to assume that their statements are well founded. Beyond the allegedly sole causes (infections, inflammations) of a shift in the intestinal flora, of course there are many factors to consider. A large proportion of the population suffers from intestinal problems like constipation or abnormally high candida fungus, so, it’s absurd to assume that toxins and antibiotics should pass by the intestinal flora’s composition without leaving a trace.

We don’t even know precisely what a “normal intestinal flora” is. We’ve yet to become acquainted with all the microbes in the intestinal ecosystem, and it has also been observed that different people have very different intestinal flora.¹³⁵ How, then, could we possibly know what “normal” intestinal flora looks like? Or how it constantly regulates itself toward a “normal” level? The individual microbe composition might be very stable, as studies suggest,¹³⁶ but “stable” but doesn’t automatically mean “normal” or even “healthy.”

It is certain that “artificial sugar, for example, constitutes a terrain for the wrong fungi and bacteria,“ says physician Thomas Kroiss.¹³⁷ Additionally, studies document that a diet with little to no fresh (raw) food is unsuitable for maintaining a properly functioning intestinal flora.¹³⁸ Individual behavior (nutrition, activity, stress, etc.) also influences intestinal flora, and can also make candida fungi grow.

In this context, it would also be interesting to discover what kind of effect an overly acidic diet has on the intestinal flora and on the health of an individual. After all, studies on animals in factory farms show that the acids ingested with food, which are said to speed up growth in pigs or poultry, affect intestinal flora negatively.¹³⁹ But, how does it affect the human body?

The human body is like a forest with a buffer system of lungs, kidneys and sweat glands, by way of which superfluous acids can be released. The German Nutrition Society (DGE, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ernährung) claims that an “excessively basic diet brings no provable advantages to your health. Too much acid in the body is nothing to fear in a healthy individual, since buffer systems keep the acid-base level in blood and tissue constant.”¹⁴⁰ Still, the DGE cannot deliver any evidence for its claim, and it is difficult to imagine that a “normal” diet, that only consists of acid-generating foods like meat, fish, eggs, cheese, bread, butter, refined sugar and pills and few to no base-producing foods like fruit and vegetables can leave no trace in the body.

Even if the buffer systems in a so-called healthy person (whatever that means!) keeps the acid-base level in the blood constant, it cannot be ruled out that tissue may be stressed or even damaged. Many experts, such as the American nutritionist Gary Tunsky are of the opinion that “the fight for health is decided by the pH values.”¹⁴¹ It is worth noting that cancer tissue, for instance, is extremely acidic,¹⁴² and it would be easy to investigate how various basic or acidic diets affect the course of the cancer—but unfortunately this doesn’t happen.¹⁴³ The influence that nutrition has on the skeletal system, on the other hand, has been well investigated;144 145 even osteoporosis tablet manufacturers expressly indicate that one should try to avoid “phosphate and foods containing oxalic acids, in other words [calcium robbers like] meat, sausages, soft drinks, cocoa or chocolate.”¹⁴⁶

“The intestinal flora is among the numerous factors that could take part in the onset and triggering of an illness,” states Wolfgang Kruis, intestinal expert and professor of medicine in Cologne.¹⁴⁷ And his colleague, researcher Francisco Guarner, adds that “the intestinal flora is very significant to an individual’s health, something that has been well documented.”¹⁴⁸ Among other things, it is essential in providing nutrients for the development of epithelial cells.¹⁴⁹ And if the intestine is disturbed, this can affect the absorption and processing of important nutrients and vital substances, which in turn can trigger a chain reaction of problems, such as the contamination of body tissue, which then helps certain fungi and bacteria to move in. More and more studies prove this.¹⁵⁰

An article in the German Ärzte Zeitung (Doctor’s Newspaper) described how a healthy intestinal flora improves overall health by reporting “four out of five patients had normal and pain free bowel movements again.” According to the article, this resounding success could be traced back to a preparation containing Escherichia coli or E. coli bacteria. In contrast to classic laxatives, bothersome flatulence and intestinal rumbling, abdominal cramps and nausea seldom appeared after the 8-week-long bacterial cure.¹⁵¹ After all, there are evermore studies to indicate that probiotics (tablets containing live bacterial cultures) and prebiotics (nutrients which are supposed to stimulate certain “good” bacteria already found in the intestines) are of some use to health.¹⁵²

The primary objective should be to study exactly how certain foodstuffs, specific diets, drug consumption, toxins (pesticides, automobile exhaust, etc.), and stress effect the composition of the intestinal flora—and how this in turn influences human health (researchers are practically unanimous in that the intestinal flora influences health, but they continue to puzzle over how this happens).¹⁵³ But, evidently, this research work is neglected. Neither the EU¹⁵⁴ (which financially facilitates studies of intestinal flora),¹⁵⁵ nor the German Institute of Human Nutrition¹⁵⁶ (Institut für Ernährungsforschung) in Potsdam were willing to indicate to what extent they are active in this area. Instead the impression is given that here as well, the development of marketable products like “functional food ingredients,“ “specifically designed bacterial strains,” or “probiotics and prebiotics” are the primary research targets.¹⁵⁷

This shows, once again, that the medical industry has little interest in real preventive research.¹⁵⁸ The sale and application of antifungal preparations (just like antibiotics, antiviral medicines, vaccines, probiotics, etc.) makes a lot of money; the advice to eliminate, avoid, or reducerefined sugar or lifestyle drugs, on the other hand, does not make any at all.¹⁵⁹ And who really wants (or is able) to give up beloved habits? Many people would rather hope for a magic potion that makes all the aches and pains go away fast. Regretfully, this has led to the formation of a medical structure which ultimately only supports concepts that pass through the market’s needle eye, and lets company profits and experts’ salaries swell.¹⁶⁰ The various hazards of this paradigm are shut out of the public conversation, and, so, we drift further and further from the possibilities of truly effective preventive health.

We must not ignore the fact that people are experiencing higher rates of fungal infections. It’s certainly not because fungi have become more aggressive, since they have hardly changed in the past millions of years. But what has changed is our behavior and with it our physical environment as well. We only have to glance at other areas of nature, where fungi can’t tell the difference between a human body and, for example, a forest. Everywhere, balance is at play: Excess substances are continuously generated, and must somehow be diminished again. If this were not the case, the earth would suffocate in the chaos of these excessively produced substances.¹⁶¹ This is where over 100,000 species of fungi come in and form their own kingdom next to animals and plants,¹⁶² acting like garbage collectors, eating up leaves, dead twigs, branches, tree stumps or pinecones in the forest, and bringing the nutrients back into the life cycle of the plants as re-utilizable humus.

Everything in nature—cells, our bodies, the land—occurs in a balance,¹⁶³ which is why “fungal illnesses in compact, healthy plants do not have a chance,” as stated in a botany textbook. Yet if “a plant is infested by a fungus, then something must be wrong with the plant’s living conditions.”¹⁶⁴ This would be the case, for instance, if the plant’s soil were overly acidic, something which causes fungi to thrive.

Bacteria: At the Beginning of All Life

For billions of years, nature has functioned as a whole with unsurpassed precision. Microbes, just like humans, are a part of this cosmological and ecological system. If humanity wants to live in harmony with technology and nature, we are bound to understand the supporting evolutionary principles ever better and to apply them properly to our own lives. Whenever we don’t do this, we create many ostensibly insolvable environmental and health problems of our time. These are thoughts which Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), a well-known doctor from Berlin, had when he required in 1875 that “the doctor should never forget to interpret the patient as a whole being.”¹⁶⁵ The doctor will hardly understand the patient, then, if he or she does not see that person in the context of a larger environment.

Without the appearance of bacteria, human life would be inconceivable, as bacteria were right at the beginning of the development towards human life:¹⁶⁶

Progenotes (precursors to bacteria; ca. 3.5 billion years ago) →

Prokaryotes →

Anaerobic bacteria (anaerobe) →

Anaerobic photosynthetic bacteria →

Photosynthetic cyano-bacteria →

Oxygen-rich atmosphere →

Aerobic breathing →

Aerobic prokaryotes →

Eukaryotes (1.6–2.1 billion years ago) →

Many-celled plants and animals →

Mammals →

Humans

With the term progenotes, bacteriologists denote a “pre-preliminary stage,“ a life form from which prokaryotes (cells without nuclei) arise. Bacteria are known not to have cell nuclei, but they do have deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA), the carriers of genetic material. Anaerobic bacteria, as the word “anaerobic” indicates, can get by without oxygen. Only after the earth was supplied with oxygen could aerobic bacteria live; bacteria that formed the foundation for the lives of plants, animals, and humans.¹⁶⁷

Through this it becomes obvious that bacteria could very well exist without humans; humans, however, could not live without bacteria! It also becomes unimaginable that these mini-creatures, whose life-purpose and task for almost infinite time has been to build up life, are supposed to be the great primary or singular causes of disease and death. Yet, the prevailing allopathic medical philosophy has convinced us of this since the late 19th century, when Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch became heroes. Just a few hours after birth, all of a newborn baby’s mucous membrane has already been colonized by bacteria, which perform important protective functions.¹⁶⁸ Without these colonies of billions of germs, the infant, just like the adult, could not survive. And, only a small part of our bacteria have even been discovered.¹⁶⁹

“The majority of cells in the human body are anything but human: foreign bacteria have long had the upper hand,“ reported a research team from Imperial College in London under the leadership of Jeremy Nicholson in the journal Nature Biotechnology in 2004. In the human digestive tract alone, researchers came upon around 100 trillion microorganisms, which together have a weight of up to one kilogram. “This means that the 1,000-plus known species of symbionts probably contain more than 100 times as many genes as exist in the host,” as Nicholson states. It makes you wonder how much of the human body is “human” and how much is “foreign”?

Nicholson calls us “human super-organisms”—as our own ecosystems are reigned by microorganisms. “It is widely accepted,“ writes the Professor of Biochemistry, “that most major disease classes have significant environmental and genetic components and that the incidence of disease in a population or individual is a complex product of the conditional probabilities of certain gene components interacting with a diverse range of environmental triggers.” Above all, nutrition has a significant influence on many diseases, in that it modulates complex communication between the 100 trillion microorganisms in the intestines!¹⁷⁰ “The microbes are part of our extended symbiotic genome and as such are in many ways just as important as our genes,” says Nicholson.¹⁷¹

How easily this bacterial balance can be decisively influenced can be seen with babies: if they are nursed with mother’s milk, their intestinal flora almost exclusively contains a certain bacterium (Lactobacillus bifidus), which is very different from the bacterium most prevalent when they are fed a diet including cow’s milk. “The bacterium lactobacillus bifidus lends the breast-fed child a much stronger resistance to intestinal infections, for instance,” writes microbiologist Dubos.¹⁷²

This is just one of countless examples of the positive interaction between bacteria and humans. “But unfortunately, the knowledge that microorganisms can also do a lot of good for humans never enjoyed much popularity,“ Dubos points out. “Humanity has made it a rule to take better care of the dangers that threaten life than to take interest in the biological powers upon which human existence is so decisively dependent. The history of war has always fascinated people more than descriptions of peaceful coexistence. And so it comes that no one has ever created a successful story out of the useful role that bacteria play in stomach and intestines. Alone the production of a large part of the food that lands on our plates is dependent on bacterial activity.”¹⁷³

However, haven’t antibiotics helped or even saved the lives of many people? Without a doubt. But, we must note that as recently as 12 February 1941, the first patient was treated with an antibiotic, specifically penicillin. So, antibiotics have nothing to do with the increase in life expectancy, which really took hold in the middle of the 19th century (in industrialized countries), almost a century before the development of antibiotics.¹⁷⁴ And, plenty of substances, including innumerable bacteria essential to life are destroyed through the administration of antibiotics, which directly translated from the Greek, means, “against life.”¹⁷⁵ In the USA alone, millions of antibiotics are now unnecessarily administered, as American talk radio host Gary Null outlined in his article “Death by Medicine” (his book later appeared under the same title).176 177 178 This has profound consequences, as antibiotics are held responsible for nearly a fifth of the more than 100,000 annual deaths that are traced back to side effects of medicines in the United States alone.179 180

The over-use of antibiotics is also causing more bacteria to become resistant. Today, 70 percent of microbes held responsible for lung illnesses no longer respond to medications.¹⁸¹ The increase in resistance prompts the pharmaceutical sector to conduct more intensive research for new antibiotics. But the discovery of such molecules is a long, difficult and costly process (about $600 million per molecule).¹⁸² For many years, no important new antibiotic has come onto the market. At the same time, increasingly stronger preparations are being introduced, which only leads to the bacteria becoming even more resistant and excreting even more toxins.

A key question, such as the causes of pulmonary or middle-ear infection, cannot be answered by simply branding the microbes as lethal enemies and wiping them out. And yet people stick to vilifying the microbes because they are caught in their concept of the enemy and their tunnel vision is directed only at germs.

This is a perception that actually began with Louis Pasteur, who as an acclaimed researcher spread the opinion that bacteria lingered everywhere in the air. And so the idea was born that bacteria (like fungi and viruses) would fatefully descend upon human and animal like swarms of locusts. For about ten years, doctors have speculated that even heart attacks are an infectious disease, triggered by the Chlamydia pneumoniae bacterium. Because of this some patients were treated with antibiotics—but a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine stated quite plainly that there is no benefit from this.¹⁸³

Another issue when considering reports that E. coli bacteria have been detected in drinking water, is the false notion that somehow on their forays these germs discovered a stream and then contaminated it. In fact, E. coli gets into drinking water through human or animal excrement, which serves as food for the bacteria.

Bacteria do not live isolated in an open atmosphere. Rather, they always exist together with cells and tissue parts.¹⁸⁴ Just like a fungal culture, a bacterial culture does not simply consist of bacteria or fungi; rather, a terrain always exists as well. And depending on the (toxicity of a) terrain, there are different (toxic) germs. Let’s recall a well-known phrase from Claude Bernard (1813-1878), one of the best-known representatives of a holistic approach to health: “The microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything.”

If we ask bacteriologists which comes first: the terrain or the bacteria, the answer is always that it is the environment (the terrain) that allows the microbes to thrive. The germs, then, do not directly produce the disease. So, it is evident that the crisis produced by the body causes the bacteria to multiply by creating the proper conditions for actually harmless bacteria to mutate into poisonous pus-producing microorganisms.

“Under close observation of disease progression, particularly in infective processes, damage to the organism occurs at the beginning of the disease—and only afterwards the bacterial activity begins,” says general practitioner Johann Loibner. “Everyone can observe this in himself. If we put dirt into a fresh wound, other bacteria appear as well. After the penetration of a foreign body, very specific germs appear which, after removal or release, go away on their own and do not continue to populate us. If we damage our respiratory mucous membrane through hypothermia, then those bacteria accordingly appear which, depending on the hypothermia’s acuteness and length, and the affected individual’s condition, can break down the affected cells and lead to expulsion, catarrh.”

This would also explain what the dominant medical thought pattern can’t comprehend: why so many different microorganisms are in our bodies (among them such “highly dangerous” ones as the tuberculosis bacillus, the Streptococcus or the Staphylococcus bacterium) without bringing about any recognizable damage.¹⁸⁵ They only become harmful when they have enough of the right kind of food. Depending on the type of bacterium this food could be toxins, metabolic end products, improperly digested food and much more.

Even surgery makes use of this principle, using little sacks of maggots to clean wounds that are particularly difficult to sanitize. The maggots eat only the dead or “broken” material. They do not touch healthy, living flesh. No surgeon in the world can cleanse such a wound so precisely and safely as these maggots. And when everything is clean, the feast is over; the maggots don’t eat you up, because then they wouldn’t have anything more to eat.¹⁸⁶

Pasteur finally became aware of all of this, quoting Bernard’s dictum—“the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything”—on his deathbed.¹⁸⁷ But Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915), known as the father of chemotherapy, adhered to the interpretation that Robert Koch (just like Pasteur in his “best days“) preached: that microbes were the actual causes of disease. For this reason, Ehrlich, whom his competitors called “Dr. Fantasy,“¹⁸⁸ dreamed of “chemically aiming” at bacteria, and decisively contributed to helping the “magic bullets” doctrine become accepted, by treating very specific illnesses successfully with very specific chemical-pharmaceutical preparations.¹⁸⁹ This doctrine was a gold rush for the rising pharmaceutical industry with their wonder-pill production.¹⁹⁰ “But the promise of the magic bullet has never been fulfilled,“ writes Allan Brandt, a medical historian at Harvard Medical School.¹⁹¹

Viruses: Lethal Mini-Monsters?

This distorted understanding of bacteria and fungi and their functions in abnormal processes shaped attitudes toward viruses. At the end of the 19th century, as microbe theory rose to become the definitive medical teaching, no one could actually detect viruses. Viruses measure only 20-450 nanometers (billionths of a meter) across and are thus very much smaller than bacteria or fungi—so tiny, that one can only see them under an electron microscope. And the first electron microscope was not built until 1931. Bacteria and fungi, in contrast, can be observed through a simple light microscope. The first of these was constructed as early as the 17th century by Dutch researcher Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723).

The photo on the right shows the first commercial electron microscope (the EMB) from Radio Corporation of America (RCA), in 1940, operated by James Hillier with Alexander Zworykin, RCA’s research chief and instigator of the EM project, looking on. This was followed in 1943 by the RCA “universal” EM, the EMU (right), which was capable of both imaging and diffraction. The electron microscope (EM), invented in 1931, first made it theoretically possible to see viruses, which are not recognizable with a normal light microscope, as the EM uses fast electrons, which have a much smaller wavelength than visible light, to depict a sample’s surface. And since a microscope’s resolution is limited by the wavelength, a much higher resolution can be achieved with an EM (currently approximately 0.1 Nanometer = billionth of a meter) than with a light microscope (approximately 0.2 micrometers = millionth of a meter). Source: James Hillier 1915-2006: Contributions to Electron Microscopy, www.microscopy.org

“Pasteurians” were already using the expression “virus” in the 19th century, but this is ascribed to the Latin term “virus” (which just means poison) to describe organic structures that could not be classified as bacteria.¹⁹² It was a perfect fit with the concept of the enemy: if no bacteria can be found, then some other single cause must is responsible for the disease. In this case, a quote by Goethe’s Mephistopheles comes to mind: “For just where no ideas are, the proper word is never far.”¹⁹³

The number of inconsistencies that arise from the theory of death-bringing viruses is illustrated by the smallpox epidemic, which even today people like to draw upon to stir up epidemic panic.¹⁹⁴ But was smallpox really a viral epidemic that was successfully overpowered by vaccines? “Medical historians doubt this,“ writes journalist Neil Miller in his book Vaccines: Are They Really Safe & Effective? “Not only were there no vaccines for scarlet fever or the Black Plague, and these diseases disappeared all the same.”¹⁹⁵

For example, in England, prior to the introduction of mandatory vaccinations in 1953, there were two smallpox deaths per 10,000 inhabitants per year. But at the beginning of the 1870s, nearly 20 years after the introduction of mandatory vaccinations, which had led to a 98 percent vaccination rate,¹⁹⁶ England suffered 10 smallpox deaths per 10,000 inhabitants annually; five times as many as before. “The smallpox epidemic reached its peak after vaccinations had been introduced,“ summarizes William Farr, who was responsible for compiling statistics in London.¹⁹⁷

From an orthodox view, the picture on the Philippines was no less contradictory: the islands experienced their worst smallpox epidemic at the beginning of the 20th century, even though the vaccination rate was at almost 100 percent.¹⁹⁸ And in 1928, a paper was finally published in the British Medical Journal that disclosed that the risk of dying from smallpox was five times higher for those who had been vaccinated than for those who had not.¹⁹⁹

In Germany statistics of smallpox mortalities have been collected since 1816. There were around 6,000 smallpox deaths per year until the end of the 1860s. In the years 1870-1871, the number of victims suddenly jumped 14-fold to nearly 85,000 deaths. What had happened? The Franco-Prussian War was raging, and French prisoners of war were held in German camp under the most miserable conditions with extremely bad nutrition. As a result, the number of smallpox cases in the camps increased exponentially, even though all French and German soldiers had been vaccinated against smallpox. Germans (themselves suffering from the war) were likewise affected by the smallpox, although some of them had also been vaccinated.

When the camps were dissolved directly after the war, the number of smallpox deaths also markedly declined. Three years later, in 1874, there were only 3,345 smallpox deaths in Germany per year. Prevailing medicine says that this reduction was due to the Reichsimpfgesetz, a law that among other things stipulated that a child had to be vaccinated “before the end of the calendar year following his year of birth.” But in fact, this law first came into effect in 1875, when the smallpox scare was long past. ”Improvements in hygiene, technology, and civilization much had occurred at that time, which led to the reduction in illnesses and deaths,” says physician Gerhard Buchwald.²⁰⁰

Irrespective of this, mainstream viral research and medicine exclusively assumes that viruses are “infectious” pathogenic germs, which actively spread out in the cells in a parasitic way (with the assistance of enzymes and other cellular components) and multiply—ultimately attacking and sometimes killing cells. Or as a well-known German daily newspaper puts it, in the typical sensationalized manner: “Viruses are the earth’s wiliest infectious agents: they attack animals and humans to enslave their cells.”²⁰¹

As thrilling as this may sound, no scientific backing is provided for this statement. To accept this, the existence of these so-called “killer viruses” must first be proven. And this is where the trouble begins. Consequential, scientifically-sound evidence has never been provided, even though it’s as easy as taking a sample of patient blood and isolating one of these viruses, in a purified form with its complete genetic material (genome) and virus shell, directly from it, and then imaging it with an electron microscope. But these critical initial steps have never been done with H5N1 (avian flu),²⁰² the so-called hepatitis C virus,²⁰³ HIV,204 205 and numerous other particles that are officially called viruses and depicted as attack-crazy beasts.

At this point, we encourage our readers to verify dominant virus theories independently—as many people have done, among them Nobel laureates, top microbiologists and researchers from other fields, serious journalists and lay people alike. We’ve asked for evidence from important institutions like World Health Organization (WHO), the American Centers for Disease Control (CDC), or its German counterpart, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Berlin. In the summer of 2005, for example, we contacted the RKI and requested the following information:²⁰⁶

Please name the studies that indisputably show that the SARS, hepatitis C, Ebola, smallpox and polio viruses and the BSE causative agent have been proven to exist (complete purification, isolation and definition of biochemical properties plus electron micrographs).

Please name studies that indisputably show that the viruses named above cause disease (and also that other factors like malnutrition, toxins, etc. do not at least co-determine the course of disease).

Please name at least two studies that indisputably show that vaccinations are effective and active.

Unfortunately, to date we have not (despite repeated questioning) yet had a single study named to us.

Readers may wonder how it can be continually claimed that this or that virus exists and has potential to trigger diseases through contagion. An important aspect in this context is that some time ago, mainstream virus-science left the road of direct observation of nature, and decided instead to go with so-called indirect “proof” with procedures such as antibody and PCR tests.

In this book, we will often stray from the well-traveled road, but at this point we must point out that these methods lead to results which have little to no meaning. Antibody tests just prove the existence of antibodies—and not the virus or particle itself to which the antibody tests react. That means: as long as the virus or cell particle (antigen) has not been precisely defined, no one can say what these antibody tests are reacting to; they are thus “unspecific” in medical lingo.²⁰⁷

It is no different with PCR (polymerase chain reaction), which is used to track down genetic sequences, little genetic snippets, and then replicate them a million-fold. As with antibody tests, PCR probably has significance because it displays a sort of immune reaction (as it is called in technical terms) in the body; or, to put it more neutrally, some sort of disturbance or activity on a cellular level. But a virus with indeterminate characteristics cannot be proven by PCR any more than it can be determined by a little antibody test.²⁰⁸ Again, this is because the exact virus determination has not been carried out. Even Robert Gallo conceded this in court in 2007.²⁰⁹

In terms of genetics, these short DNA or RNA pieces that are found using the PCR do not even satisfy the definition of a gene (of which humans are said to have 20,000 to 25,000).²¹⁰ But even if scientists assume that the genetic sequences discovered in the laboratory belong to the viruses mentioned, this is a long way from proving that the viruses are the causes of the diseases in question, particularly when the patients or animals who have been tested are not even sick, which, often enough is the case.

Another important question must be raised: even when a supposed virus does kill cells in the test-tube (in vitro), or lets embryos in a chicken egg culture die, can we safely conclude that these findings can be carried over to a living organism (in vivo)? Many issues contradict this theory, such as that the particles termed viruses stem from cell cultures (in vitro) whose particles could be genetically degenerate because they have been bombarded with chemical additives like growth factors or strongly oxidizing substances.²¹¹ A 2017 study shows this using antibiotics.²¹²

In 1995, the German news magazine Der Spiegel delved into this problem (something that is worth noting, when one considers that this news magazine usually runs only orthodox virus coverage), quoting researcher Martin Markowitz from the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York: “The scientist [Markovitz] mauls his virus-infected cell cultures with these poisons in all conceivable combinations to test which of them kill the virus off most effectively. ‘Of course, we don’t know how far these cross-checks in a test-tube will bring us,’ says Markowitz. ‘What ultimately counts is the patient.’ His clinical experience has taught him the difference between test-tube and sick bed. He is more aware than most AIDS researchers of how little the behavior of cultured virus stems in incubator cells has to do with those that grow naturally in a network of hormones, antibodies, scavenger and T cells of the immune system of a living person.”²¹³

The chemist Andreas Meyerhans, when he was still working at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, uses the phrase: “To culture is to disturb,” which basically means that the results obtained in vitro only confuse.214 215

“Unfortunately, the decade is characterized by climbing death rates, caused by lung cancer, heart disease, traffic accidents and the indirect consequences of alcoholism and drug addiction,“ wrote Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, in his 1971 book Genes Dreams, and Realities: “The real challenge of the present day is to find remedies for these diseases of civilization. But nothing that comes out of the labs seems to be significant in this context; laboratory research’s contribution has practically come to an end. For someone who is well on the way to a career as a lab researcher in infectious disease and immunology, these are not comforting words.”

To biomedical scientists and the readers of their papers, Burnet continued, it may be exciting to hold forth on “the detail of a chemical structure from a phage’s [viruses from simple organisms; see below] RNA, or the production of antibody tests, which are typical of today’s biological research. But modern fundamental research in medicine hardly has a direct significance to the prevention of disease or the improvement of medical precautions.”²¹⁶

Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1960; the photograph shows him in his laboratory in the microbiology department of the University of Melbourne (1965). © Burnet, F.M. Collection, University of Melbourne Archives 89/34

But mainstream medicine avoids this theory like the devil does holy water. Instead, one tries to demonstrate the pathogenicity (ability to cause disease) of these particles through experiments that could hardly be more arcane. For instance, test substrates were injected directly into the brains of lab animals. This was the procedure with BSE and polio, for example; and even the famous Louis Pasteur had applied this method in his rabies experiments, in which he injected diseased brain tissue into the heads of dogs (Pasteur became famous through these experiments, and only years after his death were these studies found to be pure put-on).217 218 The industry now says that “direct injections into the brain” are unrealistic, and thus ultimately provide no evidence of pathogenic effects.²¹⁹

Why not suppose that a virus, or what we term a virus, is a symptom—i.e. a result—of a disease? Medical teaching is entrenched in Pasteur and Koch’s picture of the enemy, and has neglected to pursue the thought that the body’s cells could produce a virus on its own accord, for instance as a reaction to stress factors. The experts discovered this a long time ago, and speak of “endogenous viruses”—particles that form inside the body by the cells themselves.

In this context, the research work of geneticist Barbara McClintock is a milestone. In her Nobel Prize paper from 1983, she reports that the genetic material of living beings can constantly alter, by being hit by “shocks.” These shocks can be toxins, but also other materials that produced stress in the test-tube.²²⁰ This in turn can lead to the formation of new genetic sequences, which were unverifiable (in vivo and in vitro) before.

Long ago, scientists observed that toxins in the body could produce physiological reactions, yet current medicine sees this only from the perspective of exogenous viruses. In 1954, the scientist Ralph Scobey reported in the journal Archives of Pediatrics, that herpes simplex had developed after the injection of vaccines, the drinking of milk or the ingestion of certain foodstuffs; while herpes zoster (shingles) arose after ingestion or injection of heavy metals like arsenic and bismuth or alcohol.²²¹

It is also conceivable that toxic drugs like poppers, recreational drugs commonly used by homosexuals, or immunosuppressive medications like antibiotics and antivirals could trigger what is called oxidative stress. This means that the blood’s ability to transport oxygen, so important for the life and survival of cells, is compromised. Simultaneously, nitric oxides are produced, which can severely damage cells. As a result, antibody production is “stirred up,” which in turn causes the antibody tests to come out positive. Also, new genetic sequences are generated through this, which are then picked up by the PCR tests222 223—all this, mind you, without a pathogenic virus that attacks from outside.

But prevailing medicine condemns such thoughts as heresy. Just as the orthodoxy fought against McClintock’s concept of “jumping genes” for decades, because they did not want to let go of their own model of a completely stable genetic framework. Here, they had not merely ignored McClintock, but even became downright “hostile,“ according to McClintock.²²⁴ “Looking back, it is painful to see how extremely fixated many scientists are on the dominant assumptions, on which they have tacitly agreed,” McClintock wrote in 1973, shortly after the medical establishment admitted, finally, that she had been right. “One simply has to wait for the right time for a change in conception.”²²⁵ However, McClintock had no time to brace herself against the prevailing HIV = AIDS dogma. She did voice criticism that it has never been proven AIDS is triggered by a contagious virus.²²⁶ But the Nobel Prize winner died in 1992, shortly after increased numbers of critics of the HIV = AIDS dogma had come into the game.

Whether Nobel laureate or layperson, ask yourself this simple question: how is it actually imaginable that killer viruses stalk the world bumping off one human cell after another? Viruses—as opposed to bacteria and fungi—do not even have their own metabolisms. By definition, viruses have completely given their metabolisms to the cells. They are composed of only one nucleic acid strand (DNA or RNA genes) and one protein capsule, so are missing the decisive attributes of living beings. Strictly speaking, they do not count among “microbes,” which comes from the Greek: “micro” = small, “bios”=life. How can viruses, like bacteria, be in a position to become active and aggressive of their own accord? Remember, it is said that viruses may have existed for three billion years.²²⁷ And exactly like bacteria and fungi, viruses are also said to be ubiquitous from the deep sea to the polar ice caps. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences²²⁸ found that there are more than 20,000 species of bacteria in a liter of seawater—the researchers had expected to find only 1,000 to 3,000 species.

“Just as scientists have discovered through ever more powerful telescopes that stars number in the billions, we are learning that the number of marine organisms invisible to the eye exceeds all expectations and their diversity is much greater than we could have imagined,” says lead author Mitchell Sogin, director of the Massachusetts-based Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) Center for Comparative and Molecular Biology and Evolution. “This study shows we have barely scratched the surface. The number of different kinds of bacteria in the oceans could eclipse five to 10 million.”²²⁹ Furthermore, one liter of sea water is said to contain no less than 10 billion viruses of very simple organisms, like single-celled algae, called (bacterio)phages;²³⁰ umpteen times as many viruses (phages) as bacteria. Both of these discoveries—the long development time and their universal existence—argue clearly that nature, which constantly strives for balance, lives in symbiosis with these viruses.

Luckily, the phages’ omnipresence has flown below the radar of prevailing medical viral research—otherwise there would probably be regulations against bathing in the sea without full-body condoms or epidemic-protection suits, and only under the condition that we first take prophylactic antiviral medications. Or, why not try to disinfect large surfaces of seawater. We are already well on the way to this kind of thinking, since phages are already being presented as super villains that “work using wily tricks.”²³¹ But there is no real proof here either.

We’d be wise to remember times in which the ruling dogma of viral killers was (freely and openly) sharply attacked and dismissed as pure “belief.”²³² Indeed, there were many prominent microbiologists who insisted that bacteriophages just aren’t viruses, but rather products “endogenously” produced, i.e. by bacteria.²³³ Robert Doerr, editor of the Handbook of Virology, published by Springer in 1938, even held the idea that not only phages, but also other “viruses” were the product of cells.²³⁴

Let’s look at one of their arguments: bacteriophages cannot be living entities that become active independently, since phages themselves cannot be destroyed by temperatures as high as 120 degrees.²³⁵ “And it would probably be of use to recall the history of this decade-long dispute,“ says Dutch microbiologist Ton van Helvoort, “for controversies and finding consensus are at the heart of scientific research.”²³⁶

Chapter 2

The Microbe Hunters Seize Power

“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.”²³⁷

THOMAS EDISON (1847-1931) ONE OF THE GREATEST INVENTORS OF HISTORY

“The conclusion is unavoidable:

Pasteur deliberately deceived the public, including especially those scientists most familiar with his published work.”²³⁸

GERALD GEISON

MEDICAL HISTORIAN

“[Modern virus detection methods like PCR] tell little or nothing about how a virus multiplies, which animals carry it, [or] how it makes people sick. [It is] like trying to say whether somebody has bad breath by looking at his fingerprint.”²³⁹

AN APPEAL FROM 14 TOP VIROLOGISTS OF THE “OLD GUARD”

TO THE NEW BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH GENERATION SCIENCE, 6 JULY 2001

Pasteur and Koch: Two of Many Scientific Cheats

The elevated status Louis Pasteur enjoyed during his lifetime is made clear by a quotation from physician Auguste Lutaud in 1887 (eight years before Pasteur’s death): “In France, one can be an anarchist, a communist or a nihilist, but not an anti-Pasteurian.”²⁴⁰ In truth, however, Pasteur was no paragon with a divinely pure clean slate, but rather a researcher addicted to fame acting on false assumptions and “he misled the world and his fellow scientists about the research behind two of his most famous experiments,“ as the journal The Lancet stated in 2004.²⁴¹

In his downright fanatical hate of microbes, Pasteur actually came from the ludicrous equation that healthy (tissue) equals a sterile (germ-free) environment.²⁴² He believed in all earnestness that bacteria could not be found in a healthy body,²⁴³ and that microbes flying through the air on dust particles were responsible for all possible diseases.²⁴⁴ At 45 years of age, he “was basking in his fame,” as bacteriologist Paul de Kruif writes in his book Microbe Hunters, “and trumpeted his hopes out into the world: ‘it must lie within human power to eliminate all diseases caused by parasites [microbes] from the face of the earth.’”²⁴⁵

Flaws in Pasteur’s theories were shown long ago by experiments in which animals were kept completely germ-free. Their birth even took place by Cesarean section; after that, they were locked in microbe-free cages and given sterile food—after a few days, all the animals were dead.²⁴⁶ In rats reared germ-free, the appendix was abnormally enlarged, filled with mucus, which would normally have been broken down by microbes.²⁴⁷

Flaws in Pasteur’s theories were shown long ago in the first half of the 20th century by experiments in which animals were kept completely germ-free. Their birth even took place by Cesarean section; after that, they were locked in microbe-free cages and given sterile food and water—after a few days, all the animals were dead. This made it apparent that “contamination” by exogenous bacteria is abolutely essential to their lives.²⁴⁸

In the early 1960s, scientists succeeded for the first time in keeping germ-free mice alive for more than a fews days, namely for several weeks. Seminal research on these germ-free rodents was performed by Morris Pollard in Notre-Dame, Indiana.

However, this does not undermine the fact that germs are essential for life. Not only do mice under natural conditions have a life span of three years, which is much longer than the average life span of these germ-free lab animals.²⁴⁹ The ability to keep germ-free animals such as mice or rats alive for a longer time requires highly artifical lab conditions in which the animals are synthetically fed with vitamin supplements and extra calories, conditions that have nothing to do with nature. These specially designed liquid diets are needed because under normal rearing conditions, animals harbor populations of microorganisms in the digestive tract. ²⁵⁰

These microorganisms generate various organic constituents as products or by-products of metabolism, including various water-soluble vitamins and amino acids. In the rat and mouse, most of the microbial activity is in the colon, and many of the microbially produced nutrients are not available in germ-free animals. This alters microbial nutrient synthesis and, thereby, influence dietary requirements. Adjustments in nutrient concentrations, the kinds of ingredients, and methods of preparation must be considered when formulating diets for laboratory animals reared in germ-free environments or environments free of specific microbes.251 252

One important target by administering these artificial diets is to avoid the accumulation of metabolic pruducts in the large intestine. However, it has been observed that already after a short time the appendix or cecum of these germ-free reared rodents increased in weight and eventually became abnormally enlarged, filled with mucus which would normally have been broken down by microbes.²⁵³ Furthermore, in germ-free conditions rodents typically die of kidney failure²⁵⁴—a sign that the kidneys are overworked in their function as an excretion organ if the large intestine has been artificially crippled. In any case, it shows that germ-free mice would not be able to survive and reproduce while staying healthy in realistic conditions, which can never be duplicated by researchers, not even approximately.

Apart from this, it is not clear that these germ-free animals have been truly 100 percent germ-free. Obviously not all tissues and certainly not every single cell could have been checked for germs. Nobody can know that these animals are absolutely germ-free, especially if one keeps in mind that germs such as the Chlamydia trachomatis may “hide” so deeply in the cells that they persist there even after treatment with penicillin.²⁵⁵ Furthermore, even if the specimens of so-called germ-free animals are maintained under optimum conditions—assumed to be perfectly sterile—their tissues do, nevertheless, decay after a time, forming “spontaneous” bacteria. But how do we explain these “spontaneous” bacteria? They cannot come from nothing, so logic allows only one conclusion: the bacteria must have already been present in the so-called “germ-free” mice.

If nature wanted us bacteria-free, nature would have created us bacteria-free. Germ-free animals, which apparently aren’t really germ-free, can only exist under artificial lab conditions, not in nature. The ecosystems of animals living under natural conditions—be it rodents or be it human beings—depend heavily upon the activities of bacteria, and this arrangement must have a purpose.

But back to “Tricky Louis”²⁵⁶ who deliberately lied, even in his vaccination experiments, which provided him a seat on the Mount Olympus of research gods. In 1881, Pasteur asserted that he had successfully vaccinated sheep against anthrax. But not only does nobody know how Pasteur’s open land tests outside the Paris gates really proceeded, but the national hero of la grande Nation, as he would later be called, had in fact clandestinely lifted the vaccine mixture from fellow researcher Jean-Joseph Toussaint,²⁵⁷ whose career he had earlier ruined through public verbal attacks.²⁵⁸ And what about Pasteur’s purportedly highly successful experiments with a rabies vaccine in 1885? Only much later did the research community learn that they did not satisfy scientific standards at all, and were thus unfit to back up the chorus of praise for his vaccine-mixture. Pasteur’s super-vaccine “might have caused rather than prevented rabies,” writes scientific historian Horace Judson.²⁵⁹

These experiments weren’t debated for decades largely due to the fastidious secretiveness of the famous Frenchman. During his lifetime, Pasteur permitted absolutely no one—not even his closest co-workers—to inspect his notes. And “Tricky Louis” arranged with his family that the books should also remain closed to all even after his death.²⁶⁰ In the late 20th century, Gerald Geison, medical historian at Princeton University, was first given the opportunity to go through Pasteur’s records meticulously, and he made the fraud public in 1995.²⁶¹ That it became so controversial shouldn’t be particularly surprising, for sound science thrives in a transparent environment so that other researchers can verify the conclusions made.²⁶²

Secretiveness has an oppositional goal: shutting out independent monitoring and verification. When external inspection and verification by independent experts are shut out of the process, the floodgates are open to fraud.²⁶³ Of course, we observe this lack of transparency everywhere, be it in politics, in organizations like the international Football association FIFA, and also in “scientific communities [that] believe that public funding is their right, but so is freedom from public control,” according to Judson.²⁶⁴ With this, mainstream research has actually managed to seal off their scientific buildings from public scrutiny.

This set-up lacks critical checks and balances, so no one is ultimately in the position to scrutinize the work of researchers and make sure research is conducted in an honest way. We are left to simply trust that they go about it truthfully.²⁶⁵ But, a survey taken by scientists and published in a 2005 issue of Nature showed that a third of researchers admitted they would not avoid deceptive activities, and would simply brush to the side, any data that did not suit their purposes.²⁶⁶ A crucial aspect of science has been lost; few researchers now trouble themselves to verify data and conclusions presented by fellow researchers.

Such quality checkups are equated with a waste of time and money and for that reason are also not financed. Instead medical researchers are completely occupied obsessed with chasing after the next big high-profit discovery. And many of today’s experiments are constructed in such a complicated manner that they cannot be reconstructed and precisely verified at all.²⁶⁷ This makes it very easy for researchers to ask themselves, without having to fear any consequences: why shouldn’t I cheat?

One would hope that the so-called peer review system largely eliminates fraud. It is still commonly considered a holy pillar of the temple of science, promising adherence to quality standards.²⁶⁸ But the decades-long practice of peer review is rotten to the core.269 270 It functions like this: experts (“peers”) who remain anonymous examine (review) research proposals and journal articles submitted by their scientific competitors. These so-called experts then decide if the proposals should be approved or the articles printed in scientific publications. There are said to be around 50,000 such peer reviewed publications,²⁷¹ and all the best known journals such as Nature, Science, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal and The Lancet, are peer reviewed.

There is, however, a fundamental problem: peer reviewing, in its current form, is dangerously flawed. If researchers in other fields conducted studies and published results using this process, what would happen? If their current methods were common in the car industry, for example, BMW’s competitors could decide, through an anonymous process, whether or not BMW would be permitted to develop a new car model and bring it to the market. Clearly this would stifle innovation and invite conflicts of interest and fraud.

“Peer review is slow, expensive, a profligate of academic time, highly selective, prone to bias, easily abused, poor at detecting gross defects, and almost useless for detecting fraud,” says Richard Smith, former Editor in Chief of the British Medical Journal.²⁷² No wonder, then, that all the cases of fraud which scientific historian Judson outlines in his 2004 book The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science were not uncovered by the peer review system, but rather by pure coincidence.²⁷³ And next to Pasteur in the pantheon of scientific fraudsters appear such illustrious names as Sigmund Freud and David Baltimore, one of the best-known recipients of the Nobel Prize for medicine²⁷⁴ (we’ll discuss Baltimore in more detail later in this chapter).

The other shining light of modern medicine, German doctor Robert Koch (1843-1910) was also an enterprising swindler. At the “10th International Medical Congress” in Berlin in 1890, the microbe hunter “with the over-sized ego”²⁷⁵ pronounced that he had developed a miracle substance against tuberculosis.²⁷⁶ And in the German Weekly Medical Journal (Deutsche Medizinische Wochenzeitschrift), Koch even claimed his tests on guinea pigs had proved that it was possible “to bring the disease completely to a halt without damaging the body in other ways.”²⁷⁷

The reaction of the world-at-large to this alleged miracle drug “Tuberkulin” was at first so overwhelming that in Berlin, Koch’s domain, sanatoria shot out of the ground like mushrooms.²⁷⁸ Sick people from all over the world turned the German capital into a sort of pilgrimage site.²⁷⁹ But soon enough, Tuberkulin was found to be a catastrophic failure. Long-term cures did not emerge, and instead one hearse after another drove up to the sanatoria. And newspapers such as the New Year’s edition of the satirical Der wahre Jakob (The Real McCoy) jeered: “Herr Professor Koch! Would you like to reveal a remedy for dizziness bacteria!”²⁸⁰

In the style of Pasteur, Koch had also kept the contents of his alleged miracle substance strictly confidential at first. But as death rates soared, a closer inspection of the drug’s properties revealed that Tuberkulin was nothing more than a bacillus culture killed off by heat; even with the best of intentions, no one could have assumed that it would have helped tuberculosis patients suffering from severe illness. On the contrary, all individuals—be it the test patients or the ones who were given it later as an alleged cure—experienced dramatic adverse reactions: chills, high fever, or death.²⁸¹

Finally, Koch’s critics, including another medical authority of that time, Rudolf Virchow, succeeded in proving that Tuberkulin could not stop tuberculosis. Rather, it was feared, according to the later scathing criticisms, that it made the disease’s progress even worse. Authorities demanded that Koch brings forth evidence for his famous guinea pig tests—but he could not.²⁸²

Experts such as historian Christoph Gradmann of Heidelberg say that Koch “cleverly staged” Tuberkulin’s launch. Everything seemed to have been planned well in advance. In late October 1890, during the first wave of Tuberkulin euphoria, Koch had taken leave of his hygiene professorship. In confidential letters, he requested his own institute—modeled on the Institut Pasteur in Paris—from the Prussian state in order to be able to research his Tuberkulin extensively.

Professor Koch calculated the expected profit on the basis of a “daily production of 500 portions of Tuberkulin at 4.5 million marks annually.” On the reliability of his prognosis, he dryly observed: “Out of a million people, one can reckon, on average, with 6,000 to 8,000 who suffer from pulmonary tuberculosis. In a country with a population of 30 million, then, there are at least 180,000 phthisics (tubercular people).” Koch’s announcement in the German Weekly Medical Journal (Deutsche Medizinische Wochenzeitschrift) appeared simultaneously with excessively positive field reports by his confidantes, according to Gradmann, served “for the verification of Tuberkulin just as much as for its propaganda.”²⁸³

Scurvy, Beriberi and Pellagra:
The Microbe Hunters’ Many Defeats

At the end of the 19th century, when Pasteur and Koch became celebrities despite their scams, the general public had hardly a chance to brace itself against microbe propaganda. Medical authorities, who adhered to the microbes = lethal enemies theory, and the rising pharmaceutical industry already had the reins of power and public opinion firmly in their hands. With this, the course was set for the establishment of clinical studies using laboratory animals, with the goal of developing (alleged) miracle pills against very specific diseases.

The scheme was so effective that even a substance like Tuberkulin, which caused such a fatal disaster, was highly profitable. Koch never even admitted that his Tuberkulin had been a failure. And Hoechst, a dye factory looking for a cheap entry into pharmaceutical research, got into Tuberkulin manufacturing. Koch’s student Arnold Libbertz was to supervise production, with close cooperation from Koch’s institute, and the rising pharmaceutical industry were decisively spurred on.²⁸⁴

From this point on, scientists tried to squeeze virtually everything into the model “one disease—one cause (pathogen)—one miracle cure,” something that prompted one failure after another. For example, for a long time, the prevailing medicine spiritedly asserted that diseases like scurvy (seamen’s disease), pellagra (rough skin), or beriberi (miners’ and prisoners’ disease) were caused by germs. Until the orthodoxy ultimately, with gritted teeth, admitted that vitamin deficiency is the true cause.

With beriberi, for instance, it was decades before the dispute over what caused the degenerative neural disease took its decisive turn when vitamin B1 (thiamine) was isolated in 1911—a vitamin that was absent in refined foods like white rice. Robert R. Williams, one of the discoverers of thiamine, noted that, through the work of Koch and Pasteur, “all young physicians were so imbued with the idea of infection as the cause of disease that it presently came to be accepted as almost axiomatic that disease could have no other cause [than microbes]. The preoccupation of physicians with infection as a cause of disease was doubtless responsible for many digressions from attention to food as the causal factor of beriberi.”²⁸⁵

Hippocrates, von Pettenkofer, Bircher-Benner:
The Wisdom of the Body

The idea that certain microbes—above all fungi, bacteria and viruses— are our great opponents in battle, causing certain diseases that must be fought with special chemical bombs, has buried itself deep into the collective conscience. But a dig through history reveals that the Western world has only been dominated by the medical dogma of “one disease, one cause, one miracle pill” since the end of the 19th century, with the emergence of the pharmaceutical industry. Prior to that, we had a very different mindset, and even today, there are still traces everywhere of this different consciousness.²⁸⁶

“Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people did not ‘catch’ a disease, they slipped into it. To catch something meant that there was something to catch, and until the germ theory of disease became accepted, there was nothing to catch,” writes previously mentioned biology professor Edward Golub in his work, The Limits of Medicine: How Science Shapes Our Hope for the Cure.²⁸⁷ Hippocrates, who is said to have lived around 400 B.C., and Galen (one of the most significant physicians of his day; born in 130 A.D.), represented the view that an individual was, for the most part, in the driver’s seat in terms of maintaining health with appropriate behavior and lifestyle choices.

“Most disease [according to ancient philosophy] was due to deviation from a good life,“ says Golub. “[And when diseases occur] they could most often be set aright by changes in diet—[which] shows dramatically how 1,500 years after Hippocrates and 950 years after Galen, the concepts of health and disease, and the medicines of Europe, had not changed” far into the 19th century.²⁸⁸

Even into the 1850s, the idea that diseases are contagious found hardly any support in medical and scientific circles. One of the most significant medical authorities of the time was the German Max von Pettenkofer (1818-1901), who tried to comprehend things as wholes, and so incorporated various factors into his considerations about the onset of diseases, including individual behavior and social conditions. To von Pettenkofer, the microbe-theoreticians’ oversimplified, monocausal hypothesis seemed naive, something that turned him into a proper “anticontagionist.”²⁸⁹ In view of the then-emerging division of medicine into many separate specialized disciplines, the scientist, later appointed rector of the University of Munich, jeered: “Bacteriologists are people who don’t look further than their steam boilers, incubators and microscopes.”²⁹⁰

And so it was also von Pettenkofer who at this time directed the discussion on the treatment of cholera, a disease so typical to rising industrial nations in the 19th century. He held the same position that the famous doctor François Magendie (1783-1855) had adopted back in 1831, when he reported to the French Academy of Sciences that cholera was not imported, nor contagious, but rather it was caused by excessive dirt as a result of catastrophic living conditions.²⁹¹ Correspondingly, the poorest quarters in centers like London were, as a rule, also the ones most afflicted by cholera.²⁹²

Von Pettenkofer identified drinking water as the main cause. There were no treatment plants in those days, so water was often so visibly and severely contaminated with industrial chemicals and human excrement that people regularly complained about its stink and discoloration. Studies also showed that households with access to clean water had few to no cholera cases at all.²⁹³ Although von Pettenkofer certainly didn’t deny the presence of microbes in this cesspool, he argued that these organisms could contribute to the disease’s course, but only when the biological terrain was primed so they could thrive.²⁹⁴

Unfortunately, von Pettenkofer’s authority ultimately could not prevent adherents of the microbe theory from taking the matter into their own hands at the end of the 19th century, and they squeezed cholera into their narrow explanatory concept as well. So a microbe (in this case the bacterium Vibrio cholerae or its excretions) was branded as the sole culprit—and Pasteurian microbe theory was falsely decorated for having repelled cholera. Golub was left shouting into the void: “Why does Pasteur get the credit for that which the sanitation movement and public health were primarily responsible?”²⁹⁵

The 1500-year history of a holistic view of health and disease was much too connected with life and its monstrous complexities to disappear altogether at the spur of the moment. Yet, it virtually disappeared from the collective conscience.

Geneticist Barbara McClintock was of the opinion that the concepts that have since posed as sound science cannot sufficiently describe the enormous multi-layered complexities of all forms of natural life, and with that, their secrets. Organisms, according to the Nobel Prize winner for medicine, lead their own lives and comply with an order that can only be partially fathomed by science. No model that we conceive of can even rudimentarily do justice to these organisms’ incredible capability to find ways and means of securing their own survival.²⁹⁶

By the beginning of the 1970s, Nobel laureate for medicine, Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet had also become very skeptical about “the ‘usefulness’ of molecular biology, [especially because of] the impossible complexity of living structure and particularly of the informational machinery of the cell. [Certainly, molecular biologists are] rightly proud of their achievements and equally rightly feel that they have won the right to go on with their research. But their money comes from politicians, bankers, foundations, who are not capable of recognizing the nature of a scientist’s attitude to science and who still feel, as I felt myself 30 years ago, that medical research is concerned only in preventing or curing human disease. So our scientists say what is expected of them, their grants are renewed and both sides are uneasily aware that it has all been a dishonest piece of play-acting—but then most public functions are.”²⁹⁷

Certainly not all doctors have clamored for roles on the medical industrial stage and some were key players in keeping the holistic health viewpoint alive. Swiss doctor Maximilian Bircher-Benner (1867-1939) directed his attention to the advantages of nutrition after treating his own jaundice with a raw foods diet, as well as a patient suffering from severe gastric problems. In 1891, long before the significance of vitamins and dietary fiber to the human body had been recognized, Bircher-Benner took over a small city practice in Zürich, where he developed his nutritional therapy based on a raw foods diet.

By 1897, only a few years later, the practice had grown into a small private clinic, where he also treated in patients. There was strong interest in his vegetarian raw food diet from all over the world, so, Bircher-Benner erected a four-story private sanatorium in 1904 called “Lebendige Kraft” (living force). And so besides a raw foods diet, Bircher-Benner (whose name has been immortalized in Bircher-Muesli) promoted natural healing factors like sun-baths, pure water, exercise and psychological health.²⁹⁸ With this, he supported treatments that had become increasingly neglected with the appearance of machines and, particularly, pharmaceuticals: attention to the natural healing powers of the body and the body’s cells, which possess their own sort of sensitivity and intelligence.²⁹⁹

Walter Cannon, professor of physiology at Harvard, also made holistic health his central theme, in his 1932 work The Wisdom of the Body. Here, he describes the concept of homeostasis, and underlines that occurrences in the body are connected with each other and self-regulating in an extremely complex way.³⁰⁰ “’Wisdom of the Body’ is an attribute of living organisms,” wrote Israeli medical researcher Gershom Zajicek in a 1999 issue of the journal Medical Hypotheses. “It directs growing plants toward sunshine, guides amoebas away from noxious agents, and determines the behavior of higher animals. The main task of the wisdom of the body is to maintain health, and improve its quality. The wisdom of the body has its own language and should be considered when examining patients.”³⁰¹

The words of biologist Gregory Bateson from 1970 are certainly still valid today: “[Walter] Cannon wrote a book on the Wisdom of the Body; but nobody has written a book on the wisdom of medical science, because that is precisely the thing it lacks.”³⁰²

Clustering: How to Make an Epidemic
Out of One Infected Patient

After World War II, diseases such as tuberculosis, measles, diphtheria or pneumonia no longer triggered mass fatalities in industrialized nations such as affluent America. This became a huge problem for institutions like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the American epidemic authorities, as redundancy threatened.³⁰³ In 1949, a majority voted to eliminate the CDC completely.³⁰⁴ Instead of bowing out of a potentially very lucrative industry, the CDC went on an arduous search for viruses.³⁰⁵ But, how to find an epidemic where there isn’t any? You do “clustering.”

This involves a quick scan of your environment—hospitals, daycares, local bars, etc. —to locate one, two, or a few individuals with the same or similar symptoms. This is apparently completely sufficient for virus hunters to declare an impending epidemic. It doesn’t matter if these individuals have never had contact with each other, or even that they’ve been ill at intervals of weeks or even months. So, clusters can deliver no key clues or provide actual proof of an existing or imminent microbial epidemic.

Even the fact that a few individuals present the same clinical picture does not necessarily mean that a virus is at work. It can mean all sorts of things including that afflicted individuals had the same unhealthy diet or that they had to fight against the same unhealthy environmental conditions (chemical toxins etc.). Even an assumption that an infectious germ is at work could indicate that certain groups of people are susceptible to a certain ailment, while many other people who are likewise exposed to the microbe remain healthy.³⁰⁶

For this reason, epidemics rarely occur in affluent societies, because these societies offer conditions (sufficient nutrition, clean drinking water, etc.) which allow many people to keep their immune systems so fit that microbes simply do not have a chance to multiply abnormally (although antibiotics are also massively deployed against bacteria; and people who overuse antibiotics and other drugs that affect the immune system are even at greater risk).

Just how ineffective clustering is in finding epidemics becomes evident, moreover, if we look more closely at cases where clustering has been used as a tool to sniff out (allegedly impending) epidemics. This happened with the search for the causes of scurvy, beriberi and pellagra at the beginning of the 20th century. But, as illustrated, it proved groundless to assume that these are infectious diseases with epidemic potential.

The most important example in recent times is the HIV=AIDS dogma because it laid the foundation for making even the corona/COVID-19 insanity a reality. At the beginning of the 1980s, a few doctors tried to construct a purely viral epidemic out of a few patients who had cultivated a drug-taking lifestyle that destroyed the immune system. We’ll discuss how virus authorities manufactured this epidemic in chapter 3. For now, we’ll quote CDC officer Bruce Evatt, who admitted that, the CDC went to the public with statements for which there was “almost no evidence. We did not have proof it was a contagious agent.”³⁰⁷

Unfortunately, the world ignores all kinds of statements like this. So talk of the “AIDS virus” has since kept the world in epidemic fear and virus hunters are now the masters of the medical arena. Every cold, every seasonal influenza, every hepatitis disease, or whatever other syndrome has become an inexhaustible source for epidemic hunters armed with their clustering methods to declare ever new epidemics that pose threats to the world.

In 1995, allegedly, “the microbe from hell came to England,“ according to media scientist Michael Tracey, who was then active in Great Britain and collected media headlines like, “Killer Bug Ate My Face,” “Flesh Bug Ate My Brother in 18 Hours,” and “Flesh Eating Bug Killed My Mother in 20 Minutes.” Tracey writes, ”The Star was particularly subtle in its subsidiary headline, ‘it starts with a sore throat but you can die within 24 hours.’” Yet the bacterium, known to the medical world as Streptococcus A, was anything but new. “Usually only a few people die from it each year,“ says Tracey. “In that year in England and Wales just 11 people. The chances of getting infected were infinitesimally small but that didn’t bother the media at all. A classic example of bad journalism triggering a panic.”³⁰⁸

In the same year, the US CDC sounded the alarm, warning insistently of an imminent Ebola virus pandemic. With the assistance of cluster methods, several fever cases in Kikwit, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, were separated out and declared as an outbreak of the Ebola epidemic. In their addiction to sensation the media reported worldwide that a deadly killer virus was about to leave its jungle lair and descend on Europe and the USA.³⁰⁹

Time magazine showed spectacular pictures of CDC “detectives” in spacesuits impermeable to germs and colorful photographs in which the dangerous pathogen could ostensibly be seen.³¹⁰ The director of the UN AIDS program made the horror tangible by imagining: “It is theoretically possible that an infected person from Kikwit makes it to the capital, Kinshasa, climbs into a plane to New York, gets sick and then poses a risk to the USA.” Within a month, however, Ebola was no longer a problem in Africa, and not one single case was ever reported in Europe or North America.³¹¹ And a publication in which the ebola virus is characterized (with its genetic material and virus shell) and shown in an electron micrograph is still nowhere to be found.

Polio: Pesticides Such as DDT
and Heavy Metals under Suspicion

Practically all of the infectious illnesses that infected people in industrialized countries in the decades before World War II (tuberculosis etc.) ceased to cause problems after 1945. For a few years, the major exception was polio (infantile paralysis), which continues to be called an infectious disease. In the 1950s, the number of polio cases in developed countries fell drastically—and epidemic authorities attributed this success to their vaccination campaigns. But a look at the statistics reveals that the number of polio victims had already fallen drastically when vaccination activities started (see diagram 2).

Many pieces of evidence justify the suspicion that the cause of infantile paralysis (polio) is not a virus. Many experts, like American physician Benjamin Sandler, believe a decisive factor is a high consumption of refined foods such as granulated sugar.³¹² Others cite mass vaccinations. Indeed, since the beginning of the 20th century, it has been known that the paralysis so typical of polio have often appeared at the site where an injection has been given.³¹³ Additionally, the number of polio cases increased drastically after mass vaccinations against diphtheria and whooping cough in the 1940s, as documented in the Lancet and other publications.314 315 316

Diagram 2 Polio death rates began to decline long before major inoculation campaigns were started

From 1923 to 1953, long before large-scale polio vaccinations began to be carried out in the mid-1950s, mortalities attributed to polio had already decreased substantially: in the USA by 47 percent; in Great Britain by 55 percent; in other European countries, the statistics are comparable. This diagram was reproduced with permission from the following book: Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective? © by Neil Z. Miller, all rights reserved.

Polio, like most diseases, may be conditional on various factors. It makes particular sense, however, to take poisoning by industrial and agricultural pollution into consideration, to explain why this nervous disease first appeared in the 19th century, in the course of industrialization. It spread like wildfire in the industrialized West in the first half of the 20th century, while in developing countries, in contrast, there was no outbreak.

In the 19th century, the disease was named poliomyelitis, referring to degeneration of spinal column nerves (myelitis is a disease of the spinal cord) typical of polio.³¹⁷ Orthodox medical literature can offer no evidence that the poliovirus was anything other than benign until the first polio epidemic, which occurred in Sweden in 1887. This was 13 years after the invention of DDT in Germany (in 1874) and 14 years after the invention of the first mechanical crop sprayer, which was used to spray formulations of water, kerosene, soap and arsenic.

“The epidemic also occurred immediately following an unprecedented flurry of pesticide innovations,” says Jim West of New York, who has extensively investigated the subject of polio and pesticides. “This is not to say that DDT was the actual cause of the first polio epidemic, as arsenic was then in widespread use and DDT is said to have been merely an academic exercise. However, DDT or any of several neurotoxic organochlorines already discovered could have caused the first polio epidemic if they had been used experimentally as a pesticide. DDT’s absence from early literature is little assurance that it was not used.”³¹⁸

Nearly ten years before, in 1878, Alfred Vulpian, a neurologist, had provided experimental evidence for the poisoning thesis when he discovered that dogs poisoned by lead suffered from the same symptoms as human polio victims. In 1883, the Russian Miezeyeski Popow showed that the same paralysis could be produced with arsenic. These studies should have aroused the scientific community, considering that the arsenic-based pesticide Paris green had been widely used in agriculture to fight “pests” like caterpillars since 1870.³¹⁹

“But instead of prohibiting the insecticide Paris green, it was replaced by the even more toxic pesticide: lead arsenate, which likewise contained heavy metals, in the state of Massachusetts in 1892,“ according to a 2004 article in the British magazine The Ecologist.³²⁰ Indeed, a polio epidemic broke out in Massachusetts two years later. Dr. Charles Caverly, who was responsible for the tests, maintained that a toxin was more likely the culprit than a virus, stating emphatically that, “we are very certainly not dealing with a contagious disease.”

Within a short time, however, lead arsenate became the most important pesticide in the industrialized world’s fruit cultivation. It was not the only toxic substance used in agricultural industries.³²¹ In 1907, for example, calcium arsenate was introduced in Massachusetts³²² and was used in cotton fields and factories. Months later, 69 children who lived downstream from three cotton factories suddenly became sick and suffered from paralysis. Meanwhile, lead arsenate was also being sprayed on the fruit trees in their gardens.³²³ But microbe hunters ignored these legitimate “cluster” factors, and instead continued searching for a “responsible” virus.³²⁴

A cornerstone for the polio-as-virus theory was laid down in 1908 by scientists Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper, both working in Austria.325 326 The World Health Organization calls their experiments one of the “milestones in the obliteration of polio.”³²⁷ That year, another polio epidemic occurred and once again there was clear evidence that toxic pesticides were at play. But, astoundingly, instead of following up this evidence, medical authorities viewed the pesticides as weapons in the battle against the arch enemy microbes. They even neglected to give the children suffering from lameness treatments to alleviate the pesticide poisoning and, thus establish whether their health could be improved this way.³²⁸ (In 1951, Irwin Eskwith did exactly that and succeeded in curing a child suffering cranial nerve damage—bulbar paralysis, a particularly severe form of polio³²⁹—with dimercaprol, a detoxification substance that binds heavy metals like arsenic and lead).330 331 332

Landsteiner and Popper instead chose to take a diseased piece of spinal marrow from a lame nine-year-old boy, chopped it up, dissolved it in water and injected one or two whole cups of it intraperitoneally (into the abdominal cavities) of two test monkeys: one died and the other became permanently paralyzed.333 334 Their studies were plagued by a mind-boggling range of basic problems. First, the “glop” they poured into the animals was not even infectious, since the paralysis didn’t appear in the monkeys and guinea pigs given the alleged “virus soup” to drink, or in those that had it injected into their extremities.³³⁵ Shortly after, researchers Simon Flexner and Paul Lewis experimented with a comparable mixture, injecting this into monkeys’ brains.³³⁶ Next, they brewed a new soup from the brains of these monkeys and put the mix into another monkey’s head. This monkey did indeed become ill. In 1911, Flexner even boasted in a press release, that they had already found out how polio could be prevented, adding, of course, that they were close to developing a cure.³³⁷

But this experiment shows no proof of a viral infection. The glop used cannot be termed an isolated virus, even with all the will in the world. Nobody could have seen any virus, as the electron microscope wasn’t invented until 1931. Also, Flexner and Lewis did not disclose the ingredients of their “injection soup.” By 1948, it was still unknown “how the polio virus invades humans,” as expert John Paul of Yale University stated at an international poliomyelitis congress in New York City.³³⁸

Apart from that, it is very probable that the injection of foreign tissues in the monkeys’ craniums triggered their polio-like symptoms (see Chapter 5: BSE). And when one considers the amount of injected material, it can hardly be surprising that the animals became ill. Controlled trials weren’t even carried out—that is, they neglected to inject a control group of monkeys with healthy spinal cord tissue. Neither were the effects of chemical toxins like heavy metals injected directly into the brain.339 340 All of these factors make the experiments virtually worthless.

Although many scientific factors spoke against the possibility that polio was an infectious viral disease,³⁴¹ these studies would become the starting point of a decade-long fight, which concentrated exclusively on an imaginary polio virus.³⁴² Anything and everything, like brain parts, feces, and even flies were chased into the monkeys’ brains in an attempt to establish a viral connection. Later these monkeys were even captured en masse in the Indian wilderness and transported overseas to the experimental laboratories—with the single aim of producing paralysis. And where virus hunters were working, vaccine manufacturers were not far away.

By the end of the 1930s, vaccine researchers had allegedly discovered a whole range of virus isolates. But these could not have been real isolates. The same holds for the photograph from 1953 that was said to be the first electron microscopic depiction of a polio virus. But the photograph shows nothing but white dots. In order to call these dots polio viruses with any certainty, the particles would have had to be purified, isolated, imaged with an electron microscope and precisely biochemically characterized. But no scientist has ever undertaken this, not even the so-called pioneers of polio research at the beginning of the 20th century, such as Karl Landsteiner, Erwin Popper, Simon Flexner and Paul Lewis; nor, decades later, Renato Dulbecco, Gilbert Dalldorf and Grace Sickles; nor Nobel laureates John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins.

The researchers did spiritedly claim that they had “isolated” a virus; but in truth, they had done nothing more than take a sample of spinal tissue or even feces from a person or animal affected by polio, and inject this mix (which could have been laced with all sorts of things) into the brains of test animals. If the animals ultimately became ill, the researchers just assumed that a virus was responsible. But whatever ultimately made the animals ill; there was no proof that it was due to a virus, because the basic requirement of virus isolation (as described above) simply has not been fulfilled.³⁴³

And another problem cropped up along the way: the monkeys didn’t get sick when they were orally administered the “glop.” These researchers could only produce paralysis by injecting into the brain large amounts of substrates of unknown contents.³⁴⁴ In 1941, the polio virus hunters had to accept a bitter setback, when experts reported in the scientific journal Archives of Pediatrics that, “Human poliomyelitis has not been shown conclusively to be a contagious disease.” Neither has the experimental animal disease, produced by the so-called poliomyelitis virus, been shown to be communicable. In 1921, Rosenau stated that “monkeys have so far never been known to contract the disease ‘spontaneously’ even though they are kept in intimate association with infected monkeys.”³⁴⁵ This means that if this was not an infectious disease, no virus could be responsible for it, so the search for a vaccine was a redundant venture.

But virus hunters didn’t even consider factors that lay outside of their virus obsession. So it happened that, in the middle of the 20th century, researcher Jonas Salk believed he had conclusively found the polio virus.³⁴⁶ Even though he could not prove that what he called the polio virus actually triggered polio in humans, he still somehow believed he could produce a vaccine from it.³⁴⁷

Salk alone is said to have sacrificed 17,000 test monkeys (termed “the heroes” by one of Salk’s co-workers) on the altar of vaccine research during the most heated phase of his research;³⁴⁸ in total, the number of slaughtered monkeys reached into the hundreds-of-thousands.³⁴⁹ But critics objected that what Salk termed the polio virus was simply an “artificial product of the laboratory.”³⁵⁰ Consequently, to this day, it is a huge challenge to find what is termed the polio virus where the patient’s nerve cells are damaged, that is to say, in spinal cord tissue.³⁵¹

In 1954, Bernice Eddy, who was then responsible from the US government’s vaccine safety tests, also reported that the Salk vaccine had caused severe paralysis in test monkeys. Eddy was not sure what had triggered the paralysis symptoms: a virus, some other cellular debris, a chemical toxin? But it contained something that could kill. She photographed the monkeys and submitted them to her boss—but he turned her down and criticized her for creating panic. Instead, of course, he should have taken her misgivings into account and started extensive inquiries. But Eddy was stopped by the microbe establishment and even had to give up her polio research shortly before her warnings had proven themselves justified.³⁵²

On 12 April 1955, Salk’s vaccine was celebrated nationwide as a substance that completely protected against polio outbreaks. US President Dwight Eisenhower awarded Salk a Congressional Gold Medal. American and Canadian television joined in the celebration. And on 16 April, the Manchester Guardian joined the party, stating that “nothing short of the overthrow of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union could bring such rejoicing to the hearths and homes in America as the historic announcement last Tuesday that the 166-year war against paralytic poliomyelitis is almost certainly at an end.”³⁵³

But the triumph was short-lived. Medical historian Beddow Bayly wrote that “Only thirteen days after the vaccine had been acclaimed by the whole of the American Press and Radio as one of the greatest medical discoveries of the century, and two days after the English Minister of Health had announced he would go right ahead with the manufacture of the vaccine, came the first news of disaster. Children inoculated with one brand of vaccine had developed poliomyelitis. In the following days more and more cases were reported, some of them after inoculation with other brands of the vaccine.” According to Bayly, “Then came another, and wholly unlooked-for complication. The Denver Medical Officer, Dr. Florio announced the development of what he called ‘satellite’ polio, that is, cases of the disease in the parents or other close contacts of children who had been inoculated and after a few days illness in hospital, had returned home [and] communicated the disease to others, although not suffering from it themselves.”³⁵⁴

Within only two weeks, the number of polio cases among vaccinated children had climbed to nearly 200.³⁵⁵ On 6 May 1955, the News Chronicle quoted the US government’s highest authority on viruses, Carl Eklund, who said that in the country, only vaccinated children had been afflicted by polio. And only, in fact, in areas where no polio cases had been reported for a good three-quarters of a year. At the same time, in nine out of ten cases, the paralysis appeared in the injected arm.³⁵⁶

This triggered panic in the White House. On 8 May, the American government completely halted production of the vaccine.³⁵⁷ A short time later, a further 2,000 polio cases were reported in Boston, where thousands had been vaccinated. In “inoculated” New York, the number of cases doubled, in Rhode Island and Wisconsin, they jumped by 500 percent. And here as well, the lameness appeared in the inoculated arm in many children.³⁵⁸

Apart from that, an objective look at statistics would have shown that there was no reason to celebrate Salk’s vaccine as the great conqueror of an alleged polio virus. “According to international mortality statistics, from 1923 to 1953, before the Salk killed-virus vaccine was introduced, the polio death rate in the United States and England had already declined on its own by 47 percent and 55 percent respectively,” writes scientific journalist Neil Miller (see diagram 2).³⁵⁹

In the Philippines, only a few years before the US catastrophe, the first polio epidemic in the tropics occurred spontaneously, in fact, with the introduction of the insecticide DDT there.³⁶⁰ Around the end of World War II, US troops in the Philippines had sprayed masses of DDT daily to wipe out flies. Just two years later, the well-known Journal of the American Medical Association reported that lameness among soldiers stationed in the Philippines could not be differentiated from polio, and it had advanced to become the second most common cause of death. Only combat exercises were said to have claimed more victims. Meantime, populations in neighboring areas, where the poison had not been sprayed, experienced no problems with paralysis.361 362 This is further evidence that DDT poisoning can cause the same clinical symptoms as polio (which is claimed to be conditional upon a virus).

Young people in industrialized countries are hardly acquainted with DDT anymore. It stands for dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, and is a highly toxic substance first synthesized at the end of the 19th century, in 1874, by Austrian chemist Othmar Zeidler. Paul Hermann Müller of Switzerland discovered its insect killing property in 1939, for which he received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1948.³⁶³ This resulted in its widespread for pest control, even though there was already strong evidence that it was a severe neurotoxin, dangerous for all forms of life and associated with the development of herpes zoster (shingles), produces paralysis, has carcinogenic potential and can be fatal.364 365 366

DDT is also problematic because it biodegrades very slowly in nature with a half-life of 10-20 years. Additionally, through the food chain, it can become concentrated in the fatty tissue of humans and animals. But this toxic substance wasn’t outlawed until 1972 in the USA and even later in most other countries in the prosperous northern hemisphere. Today, its use is prohibited in a large part of the world and it one of the “dirty dozen” organic toxins banned worldwide at the Stockholm Convention on 22 May 2001.³⁶⁷

Industrial production of DDT started at the beginning of the 1940s. It was first used to fight malaria, and later became a sort of “all-purpose remedy” against all sorts of insects.³⁶⁸ There was also military use of DDT. US army recruits were powdered with it to protect them from lice, and they additionally received DDT-sprayed shirts.³⁶⁹ When the Second World War was over, DDT was sold on stock markets round the globe, even though strong warnings about its toxicity had been issued. “In the mid-40s, for example, the National Institutes of Health demonstrated that DDT evidently damaged the same part of the spinal cord as polio,” writes research scientist Jim West of New York.370 371 372

The classic Harrison’s Principle of Internal Medicine states, “Lameness resulting from heavy metal poisoning is clinically sometimes difficult to differentiate from polio.”³⁷³ Endocrinologist Morton Biskind came to the same conclusion in his research papers describing the physiological evidence of DDT poisoning that resembles polio physiology: “Particularly relevant to recent aspects of this problem are neglected studies by Lillie and his collaborators of the National Institutes of Health, published in 1944 and 1947 respectively, which showed that DDT may produce degeneration of the anterior horn cells of the spinal cord in animals. These changes do not occur regularly in exposed animals any more than they do in human beings, but they do appear often enough to be significant.”³⁷⁴

Biskind concludes: “When in 1945 DDT was released for use by the general public in the United States and other countries, an impressive background of toxicological investigations had already shown beyond doubt that this compound was dangerous for all animal life from insects to mammals. It was even known by 1945 that DDT is stored in the body fat of mammals and appears in the milk. With this foreknowledge the series of catastrophic events that followed the most intensive campaign of mass poisoning in human history, should not have surprised the experts.”³⁷⁵

Despite the fact that DDT is highly toxic for all types of animals, the myth has spread that it is harmless, even in very high doses. It was used in many households with a carefree lack of restraint, contaminating peoples’ skin, their beds, kitchens and gardens.³⁷⁶ In Biskind’s opinion, the spread of polio after the Second World War was caused “by the most intensive campaign of mass poisoning in known human history.”³⁷⁷

Along with DDT, the much more poisonous DDE was also used in the USA. Both toxins are known to break through the hematoencephalic barrier, which protects the brain from poisons or harmful substances. Nonetheless, housewives were urged to spray both DDT and DDE to prevent the appearance of polio. Even the wallpaper in children’s rooms was soaked in DDT before it was glued on the wall.³⁷⁸

What from today’s perspective seems like total blindness was at that time an everyday practice, not only in the United States. After 1945, DDT powder was used in Germany to fight a type of louse said to carry typhus.³⁷⁹ And in agriculture, including fruit and vegetable cultivation, DDT was likewise lavishly dispersed for so-called plant protection. Through this, DDT gradually replaced its predecessor, lead arsenate, a pesticide containing heavy metals.³⁸⁰

A look at statistics shows that the polio epidemic in the USA reached its peak in 1952, and from then on rapidly declined. We have seen that this cannot be explained by the Salk-inoculation, since this was first introduced in 1955. There is a most striking parallel between polio development and the utilization of the severe neurotoxin DDT and other highly toxic pesticides like BHC (lindane), which was also hard to degrade and actually much more poisonous than DDT. While use of DDT was eventually drastically reduced because of its extreme harmfulness, the use of BHC was curbed because it produced a bad taste in foods³⁸¹ (see diagrams 3 and 4).

“It is worth noting that DDT production rose dramatically in the United States after 1954,” Jim West remarks, “which is primarily connected to the fact that DDT was increasingly exported to the Third World, to be used primarily in programs to fight malaria or in agriculture.” As West points out, the following factors contributed to its changed use patterns in the US:

An altered legislation led to the use of warning labels, which in turn raised public awareness of DDT’s poisonous nature.

Eventually, the use of DDT on dairy farms was prohibited. Earlier, Oswald Zimmerman and his fellow research scientists had even advised the daily spraying of a 5 percent DDT solution directly on cattle and pigs, their feed, drinking water, and resting places.³⁸² In 1950, it was officially recommended to US farmers that they no longer wash cattle with DDT, but at first this advice was largely ignored. In the same year, cows’ milk contained up to twice as much DDT as is necessary to trigger serious illnesses (diseases) in humans.³⁸³

In advertisements and press releases, DDT was no longer celebrated as being “good for you,” “harmless,” and a “miracle substance.”³⁸⁴

From 1954, concentrated DDT was only used on crops that did not serve food production (for example, cotton).

DDT was used with more caution, something that caused decreased human intake of the poison through foodstuffs.

The use of DDT was extended to nationally sponsored forestry programs, so, for instance, entire forests were sprayed with it by airplane.

DDT was gradually replaced by allegedly “safe” pesticides in the form of organophosphates like malathion, but their uncertain toxicological effects and the new pesticide laws merely changed the type of neurological damage from acute paralysis to less-paralytic forms, such as chronic, slow-developing diseases which were difficult to define. This made it particularly difficult to prove in legal disputes or studies, that these pesticides contributed to or directly caused the illnesses in question (see also Chapter 5, section: “BSE as an Effect of Chemical Poisoning” for more on the organophosphate phosmet).

Finally in 1962, US biologist Rachel Carson published her book, Silent Spring, in which she gives a vivid account of the fatal repercussions of extensive spraying of plant toxins on insects and particularly on birds, and predicts the consequence of a “silent spring” (without any songbirds). Through this, the public was made aware of the dangers of DDT. But public reaction was slow, because 800 chemical companies reacted hysterically to Carson’s book, prophesizing hunger and destruction if farmers were no longer permitted to use any pesticides. “The goal was very obviously to create panic and drive farmers into the arms of the chemical industry,” as Pete Daniel, expert on the history of pesticides, writes in his 2005 book, Toxic Drift.³⁸⁵

On 15 February 2009, the American non-profit online magazine Grist published the article “Even 40 years after exposure, DDT linked to breast cancer.” The article is opened with a photo on which a pick-up truck can be seen, from which a beach with children playing is sprayed with DDT. The sign on the pick-up truck reads: “DDT—Powerful Insecticide, Harmless to Humans.” The article states: “DDT was so widely used in the United States between the 1940s to 1970s that pretty much everyone at the time was exposed to some degree. The health risks associated with it were so poorly understood (and some say, overlooked) that it was sprayed directly on playing children. Author and scientist Rachel Carson called attention to growing concerns over the chemical with her seminal book, Silent Spring, published in 1962. But it would take another 10 years before DDT was banned in the U.S… According to a new study published this week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, women exposed to the pesticide DDT are still at risk for developing breast cancer four decades later. The findings are based on a 50-year longitudinal cohort of over 15,000 pregnant women, many of whom had been exposed to the pesticide before it was banned in the 1970s.” Source: grist.org

In 1964, a North Carolina turkey breeder named Kenneth Lynch wrote to the Ministry of Health, stating that, since 1957, his home town of Summerville had been enveloped in a mist of DDT or malathion (an insecticide which can have wide-ranging neurotoxic and fatal effects)³⁸⁶ every summer, in order to kill mosquitoes. And over the past years, his turkeys had “more or less abruptly developed advanced paralyses and, even though they had originally been in good health, died within two or three days.”

At the same time, the fertility of the eggs had declined from 75 percent to 10 percent. “The evidence clearly indicated that the fog of insecticide is to blame,” writes Lynch. With the help of a chemistry professor, he turned to the Public Health Service (PHS) and suggested carrying out corresponding studies. The national authorities, however, showed no interest whatsoever. “It seems to me [that the ministry’s behavior] can hardly be interpreted as anything other than a case of bureaucracy being blinded by its own past mistakes,” opined Clarence Cottam, a biologist honored by the National Wildlife Federation as a protector of nature.387 388

In their refusal, political decision-makers and the chemical industry’s lobbyists³⁸⁹ referred primarily to the “prisoner studies” of PHS scientist Wayland Hayes.³⁹⁰ In these experiments on prisoners, Hayes had aimed to show that it was completely harmless to ingest 35 milligrams of DDT per day.³⁹¹ But critics like Cottam objected that every test subject could release him/herself from the experiments at any time. And indeed, “there were a fair number who withdrew when they became a bit ill.”

Diagram 3 Polio cases and DDT production in the USA, 1940-1970

Diagram 4 Polio cases and pesticide production in the USA, 1940-1970

A look at statistics shows that the polio epidemic in the USA reached its peak in 1952, and from then on rapidly declined. We have seen that this cannot be explained by the Salk-inoculation, since this was first introduced in 1955. There is a most striking parallel between polio development and the utilization of the severe neurotoxin DDT and other highly toxic pesticides like BHC (lindane), which was also hard to degrade and actually much more poisonous than DDT.

Sources: West, Jim, Pesticides and Polio, Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, June 2000, p. 68-75; West, Jim, Images of Poliomyelitis; Handbook of Pesticide Toxicology, Eds.: Hayes, Wayland; Laws, Edward, Academic Press Inc., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, San Diego, 1991, p. 769; Historical Statistics of the US (1975), US Government Printing Office; Scobey, Ralph, Is Human Poliomyelitis Caused By An Exogenous Virus?, Archives of Pediatrics, 1954. © Jim West, http://harvoa.org/polio/overview.htm

Since a number of prisoner test patients dropped out of the study, data on adverse effects were largely eliminated, so the study’s results were worthless. Cottam points out that Hayes had most likely engaged in researcher bias to substantiate his initial views on pesticides: “Perhaps he is like many human beings who when subjected to criticism become more and more dogmatic in maintaining their initial stand.” Pesticide historian Pete Daniel goes a step further in saying that “[the officials in charge] knew better, but the bureaucratic imperative to protect pesticides led the division into territory alien to honesty.”³⁹²

It would be years before the US government held a hearing on DDT and even longer until they finally prohibited it in 1972. Unfortunately, the government discussions were not widely reported, so the general public remained unaware of the connection between polio (in humans!) and pesticides, or other non-viral factors. To achieve this, in the beginning of the 1950’s, ten years before Carson’s Silent Spring, someone would have had to have written a bestseller which described the repercussions of DDT (and other toxins) in humans. Unfortunately, this was not the case; and even later on such a book has not appeared.

On 19 August 2017, thebetterindia.com dedicated an article to “Silent Spring”, one of Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking books that marked a new public awareness about the use of chemical pesticides, especially DDT, being published in 1962. In the article it says: “Carson was mocked and humiliated. A propaganda campaign was designed to discredit her findings, her publisher was bullied, some went as far as disregarding her qualification, only because she was a woman… It was only in 1963, that Silent Spring gained President JF Kennedy’s attention who called for a hearing to investigate and regulate the use of pesticides. An unwell Rachel prepared a 55 paged note with a list of eminent scientists who read and approved her manuscript. Her justifications and evidence, were strongly supported as right by President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee. Silent Spring marked the beginning of an environmental movement, and DDT’s agricultural use in the United States was banned in 1972. But unfortunately Rachel did not survive to see the day. She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.” Source: thebetterindia.com

“Carson’s book was good, but it was restricted to the damage to animals, whereas one looks in vain for descriptions of statistical trends or analyses in the work,“ says Jim West. “Even the research scientists Biskind and Scobey, who had clearly described the damage that DDT causes in humans in his 1952 study “The Poison Cause of Poliomyelitis And Obstructions To Its Investigation,”³⁹³ were practically unmentioned by Carson. Now who knows what kind of editorial censoring process her book had to go through before its publication.”

Bracero workers being fumigated with DDT in 1956 as part of the entry process into the US. © Smithsonian Institution/Leonard Nadel

DDT dust “ for vegetables, fruit, flowers, and household.” © From the collection of the Wisconsin Historical Museum, catalogue #1999.143.20

“Blitz Fog” pesticide package (one percent DDT, plus the suspected carcinogens chlordane and lindane) from Northern Industries, Wisconsin, USA; Milwaukee, in gardens, the insecticide was dispersed with an atomizer (“Blitz Fog” thermalized insecticide dispenser) fastened to a motor-operated lawnmower’s exhaust opening; in the early 1950s, the American chemical industry produced around 100 million pounds of DDT a year. © From the collection of the Wisconsin Historical Museum, catalogue #1999.143.22

This photograph was taken on 13 April 1955 and is featuring a beaming nurse showing a newspaper headline to a polio patient hooked up to a respirator. The caption reads: “Vaccine ‘Triumph’ Ends Polio Threat.” In her gleefulness, the nurse entirely overlooks the psychological effect that the headline must have upon the seriously ill patient laying before her. It was too late for him to take this (purported) medical triumph, so he would have had to continue eking out his life as a paraplegic. Of course, there was, as shown, no vaccine triumph whatsoever, for the polio fuss had largely passed before mass inoculations were finally carried out. © March of Dimes Canada

In 1956, megastar Elvis was roped in for pushing the polio vaccine. The Observer reported about it in 2016: “It was one of Elvis Presley’s more unusual ventures. The king of rock’n’roll had just been enjoying his first taste of success with singles such as Heartbreak Hotel, and was about to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, when he was given an unexpected medical challenge. Would he agree to be vaccinated against polio in front of the press before the show? He did. The resulting photographs were published in newspapers across the US. The publicity was part of a bid” to get more teenagers vaccinated against polio. Unfortunately, The Observer not only kept silent about that the polio vaccine had nothing to do with the drop of polio cases, but also that test monkeys and children inoculated with the vaccine had developed the disease itself: poliomyelitis. Source: screenshot of theguardian.com

West points out that this type of censorship became the norm in future virus research: “One needs only consider that her work had been financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. This makes one sit up and take notice, for the Rockefeller Foundation has supported the significant orthodox epidemic programs, including the HIV = AIDS research and numerous vaccination programs. And William A. Rockefeller Sen. (18101906) had made his money by selling snake venom and pure mineral oil as anti-cancer drug. Carson’s book prompted public outcry, which contributed to DDT’s ultimate prohibition. But this was a deceptive victory, which only helped to secure the public belief that democratic regulative mechanisms still functioned effectively. In actual fact, the chemical industry—because the public thought the poisonous demon had then been defeated—was able to establish its likewise highly toxic organophosphate on the market without a problem. And, fatally, nobody discussed its important central topic: that poisons like DDT could cause severe damage like polio.”

Gajdusek’s “Slow Virus”:
Infinite Leeway for Explanations

The virus hunters still had many weapons to pull from their box of tricks. Such as the concept of the “slow virus”: a virus capable of “sleeping” in a cell for years before striking with its pathogenic or fatal effects. The claim that a disease takes a very long time (decades) to “break out” gained popularity in the 1960s, when virus hunters convinced the medical establishment that the virus concept could even be imposed on cancer394 395—that is, a disease that generally appears after years or decades.³⁹⁶

But despite a most arduous search, researchers were simply unable to find any active viruses in tumors. The disappointment and frustration was correspondingly great.³⁹⁷ But a new theory was soon developed: that a virus could provoke an infection, then lie dormant in a cell for as long as it wanted—and finally, at some point, even trigger cancer, and even when the virus is no longer present. Just as with polio earlier, the nucleic acids of a so-called slow virus have never been isolated and the particles have never been imaged with an electron microscope,³⁹⁸ but the virus hunters embraced this suspect theory and adapted it to a number of modern ailments.³⁹⁹

Scientist Carleton Gajdusek prodded the slow virus concept along to serve not only an explanatory model for HIV/AIDS.⁴⁰⁰ In the 1970s in Papua New Guinea, Gajdusek researched a sponge-like alteration in brain tissue associated with dementia, which was predominantly spread among the female population there.⁴⁰¹ The disease, called kuru, was only observed in two clans; they often intermarried, and, according to Gajdusek, maintained a cult of the dead ritual that involved eating the brains of their deceased (something which was later revealed as a myth).

These transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (softening of the brain), as they are called, appear sporadically and end, mostly fatally, within five years. They are generally extremely rare (approximately one case per million people), but are represented within some families with a frequency of 1 in 50, which could point to a genetic disposition.⁴⁰² Despite this Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize in 1976 for his slow virus concept. With this endorsement his idea that this spongelike alteration in brain tissue was produced and transmitted by a pathogen achieved widespread acceptance as fact.

A close look at Gajdusek’s trials on apes, with which he aimed to show transmissibility, should have shocked the scientific community into disbelief. But instead, they recognized these papers as proof of transmissibility and ignored the fact that neither feeding the apes brain mush, nor injecting them with it had any affect on the chimpanzees. So, Gajdusek conducted a bizarre experiment, in order to finally induce neural symptoms in the test animals.

He ground up the brain of a kuru patient into a mush full of proteins, along with a number of other substances, and poured this into the living apes by drilling holes into their skulls. This so-called disease’s alleged transmissibility was founded only upon these experiments!⁴⁰³ How could it possibly derive proof of Gajdusek’s cannibalistic hypothesis? Particularly since the hypothesis indicates that the disease could appear in humans through ingestion of infected brains, and not through direct surgical insertion into the brain.

To compound matters, Gajdusek was the only living witness of cannibalism on Papua New Guinea . He reported on these cannibalistic rites in his 1976 Nobel Prize-winning lecture, even documenting them with photographs. But in the mid-1980s, it was discovered that Gajdusek’s photos, with which he aimed to document the cannibalism, actually showed pig flesh, not human flesh. An anthropological team looked into this claim and they did find stories of cannibalism, but no authentic cases.⁴⁰⁴

Gajdusek later had to admit that neither he himself, nor others he met had seen the cannibalistic rites.⁴⁰⁵ Roland Scholz, professor of biochemistry and cellular biology (who died in 2011), responded to this revelation by saying that, “the scientific world seems to have been taken in by a myth.”⁴⁰⁶

After World War II: Visible Proof of Viruses?
We Don’t Need That!

Modern viral research is like Bigfoot hunting. Trackers of this legendary ape-like beast (also called Sasquatch and the Abominable Snowman) trot out the occasional questionable blurry photograph and footprint marks to claim proof of Bigfoot’s existence. Based on this suspect data, they say the beast is up to ten feet tall and 440 pounds with 17-inch footprints that have even been made into plaster casts to prove its existence.⁴⁰⁷ Virus hunters also collect dubious data, claiming to have images of the virus, even though electron micrographs of viruses accompanied by an analysis of their complete genetic material and virus shell are the only method of proving a virus’s existence.

Bigfoot hunt, like viruses, are splendid moneymakers. Along a strip of California’s Highway 101, numerous shops hawk Bigfoot-souvenirs⁴⁰⁸ and they are popular with tourists even though it is generally accepted that Bigfoot is an invention.⁴⁰⁹ Of course, Bigfoot is nowhere near as lucrative as the international virus industry’s multi-billion dollar business.

We must stress here that electron microscopy is fundamental to virus identification. For a long time, establishing unequivocal proof of a virus meant seeing is believing, as is the case with bacteria and fungi. The one difference is that bacteria and fungi can be seen with a light microscope, whereas viruses are so tiny that only an electron microscope (first patented in 1931) enables detailed imaging to make them visible.

But, first you have to identify exactly what you’re looking at, so these particles (possible viruses) must exist in a pure or purified form, in order to be able to differentiate virus particles from virus-like ones. At the beginning of the 1950s, virologists agreed that this was necessary, since, under certain conditions, even healthy cells produce a whole range of particles that could look like so-called tumor viruses (oncoviruses).410 411

The importance of this process was confirmed at an international meeting of the Pasteur Institute in 1972,412 413 and “endured in the early 1980s,“ according to Val Turner, a physician and member of the Perth Group, an Australian research team.⁴¹⁴ “Viruses are not naked bits of RNA (or DNA). They are particles with particular sizes and shapes and other identifying features, which are obliged to replicate at the behest of living cells. They won’t multiply in dead meat like bacteria. So there you have it. This predicates experiments to prove particles are a virus and that hasn’t changed in a thousand years and certainly not since the 90s.”

Turner uses easy-to-grasp language to describe the science: “Think of it like a paternity suit in which DNA evidence will be used and the accused is HIV and the child is a human. The crux of the case is proof that the DNA you found in the human is the same DNA you found in the accused. For the latter, you have to have rock solid proof the DNA came from the accused. Given that in cell cultures all sorts of particles appear, only some of which are viruses, you have to prove that (a) a particular particle is a virus; and (b) your DNA comes from that particle. How can you prove (a) without using electron microscopy (for many reasons) and without purification? You tell me.

“Frankly we from the Perth Group do not understand this obsession with ‘old data’ or ‘science moves on.’ Has Archimedes’ principle ‘moved on’ that says that a body immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid—the principle applies to both floating and submerged bodies and to all fluids, i.e., liquids and gases? Do solid objects no longer displace their own volume of liquids? If everything has to be ‘up to date’ then in ten years nothing that is up to date now will be up to date then. Which means as long as time keeps going nothing will be right.”⁴¹⁵ This goes for orthodox theories as well!

By soundly characterizing virus structure (virus purification), it is theoretically possible to irrefutably differentiate viruses themselves from virus-like particles. If this has taken place, the next step would be to get an electron micrograph of the purified virus (of course, proof that a virus exists does not automatically mean that this virus is also infectious, as had already been established in 1960, at a conference sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences).⁴¹⁶ But this procedure is rarely carried out in modern viral research. Viruses that purportedly threaten to wipe out humanity (H5N1, SARS virus, etc.) have evidently never been seen by anyone.⁴¹⁷

“Around 1960, before contemporary molecular biology arose, electron microscopy was held to be the best way of identifying viruses in cell cultures,” writes pathology professor Etienne de Harven, a pioneer in electron microscopy and virology. De Harven’s research career includes 25 years at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York, a private cancer research center founded in 1945, which quickly advanced to become the largest of its kind in the United States of America.⁴¹⁸ “For this reason, laboratories all over the world directed their efforts at this time towards observing particles in cancer cells with ever-improved methods of electron microscopy.”

In 1962, the central role of electron microscopy was also recognized at the well-known Cold Spring Harbor Conference. André Lwoff, who would receive the Nobel Prize for medicine three years later, was among those who designated electron microscopy as likely the most efficient method of proving viruses’ existence; he suggested investigating viruses with this procedure and dividing them into classes.⁴¹⁹

A focus of medical science then (as now) was cancer. And because cancer researchers had the fixed idea that viruses were definitely cancer triggers,⁴²⁰ they spent a lot of time proving the presence of viruses in human cancer cells, with the help of electron microscopy. But, these efforts were unsuccessful. “One only found virus-like particles from time to time—while viruses of a certain types could never convincingly be seen,” reports de Harven.⁴²¹

Virus hunters were, once again, crushed by this scientific news. But the scientific world tends not to publicize negative results whenever possible—in scientific language, this is called, “publication bias.”⁴²² Yet, whether the research claims promoted as evidence involve new patented drugs said to be superior to existing (cheaper) ones, or genetic markers of disease (interpreted as “risk” factors), or statistical relationships, discerning whether the claims are spurious or confirmed by clinical trials can only be ascertained by making the full body of controlled studies publicly available.

In medicine, failure to do so casts doubt on the safety and efficacy of treatments as well as undermining the integrity of the scientific literature. Scientific journals are supposed to protect the integrity of science—but they don’t. As is the case with most deficient practices in medical research and practice, there is an unacknowledged financial motive. And why are scientists coy about publishing negative data? “In some cases,” says Scott Kern of Johns Hopkins University and editor of the recently founded online Journal of Negative Observations in Genetic Oncology, “withholding them keeps rivals doing studies that rest on an erroneous premise, thus clearing the field for the team that knows that, say, gene A doesn’t really cause disease B. Which goes to show that in scientific journals, no less than in supermarket tabloids, you can’t believe everything you read—or shouldn’t.”423 424

As long ago as the 1960s the established science community was coy about publishing negative data, but the cancer virus hunters’ failures were so universal that it was simply inevitable that one article or another should leak out into medical publications. In 1959, the researcher Hagenaus reported in the journal Etude du Cancer about the difficulties identifying any typical virus particles in a wide range of breast cancer samples.⁴²⁵ And in 1964, the scientists Bernhard and Leplus were unsuccessful, even with electron microscopy’s assistance, in finding virus particles presumed to play a role in the development of Hodgkin’s lymphoma (lymphatic cancer), lymphoid leukemia or metastases (tumors in various parts of the body).⁴²⁶

But these scientific studies didn’t stop the virus hunters for a second. Instead of disengaging themselves from their virus tunnel vision, they grumbled about the methodology of virus determination: for example, over what are known as thin slices or thin-sections (tissue samples which are extremely precisely dissected and trimmed to size so they can be observed under the electron microscope). Thin-sections had proved effective countless times, and had also worked perfectly with mice.⁴²⁷ But, the virus hunters needed a scapegoat and, instead of questioning the cancer-producing virus model, they started griping about the thin-sections. The production of the thin-sections was also thought to be too laborious and time-consuming. And who had the time for that once pharmaceutical companies began offering fast cash for quick fixes?

So, scientists turned to the much simpler and faster dye method, in which certain particles of the sample (for instance, DNA and RNA) were marked in color and then electron micrographed. But from a purely scientific perspective, the results of dye method are a disaster. Through the air-drying process that was necessary for the staining, the particles became totally deformed, so that they appeared as particles with long tails. They were full-blown artificial products of the laboratory, and they still looked exactly like so many other non-viral cellular components. This, logically, made it impossible to determine if a virus or a non-viral particle had been found.428 429

A few scientists did in fact acknowledge that the dye method was dubious. But, instead of admitting defeat and returning to the thin-sections method, they began bashing electron microscopy technology! Other researchers were in turn so anxiously preoccupied with finally finding cancer viruses that they casually overlooked the worthlessness of dye method results, and theorized that the “tailed” particles were a certain type of virus. As absurd as this may sound to logical thinkers, virus hunters were even remunerated with plenty of research money for this action.

As a result, even cow’s milk and mother’s milk were tested for the presence of “tailed” particles in the mad rush to prove that viruses could produce cancer.⁴³⁰ One well-known molecular biologist Sol Spiegelman even warned against breastfeeding in October 1971, and his message made for numerous lurid media headlines.⁴³¹ These so-called scientists brushed aside the fact that, to date, not a single retrovirus has been able to be isolated from breast cancer tissue (and probably not from human tumor tissue or blood plasma in general).⁴³² Shortly thereafter, Spiegelman was quoted in Science saying, “one can’t kick off fear mongering on this scale if one doesn’t exactly know if a virus particle is the cause.”⁴³³

But mainstream viral research drifted purposefully further away from the well-established viral proof model. They latched on to Howard Temin’s⁴³⁴ and David Baltimore’s⁴³⁵ description of activity of the enzyme reverse transcriptase in connection with cancer viruses in 1970. Their research seemed so significant to the medical establishment that the two were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1975.⁴³⁶

What was so significant about this enzyme, a substance that, as a sort of catalyst, makes it possible for biochemical reactions to occur? To understand this, we must remember that, in the 1960s, scientists thought they had established that a few viruses did not possess any DNA (complete genetic information), but rather only RNA genes. This baffled the researchers since they believed viruses without any DNA (only with RNA) were not able to multiply. Until Temin and Baltimore delivered an explanation with the enzyme called reverse transcriptase. It, they said, can transform the RNA in RNA viruses (later called retroviruses because of this) into DNA, by which viruses are then able to multiply (if RNA exists alone, the conditions for replication are not met).⁴³⁷

But there was so much enthusiasm about the discovery of reverse transcriptase that virus hunters rashly assumed that reverse transcriptase was something very typical of retroviruses. They proclaimed something like this: if we observe reverse transcriptase activities in our test tubes (in vitro), then we can be sure that a retrovirus is present as well (even if the virus’ existence has never been proven or reverse transcriptase’s role hasn’t been established, for instance, in the context of HIV).⁴³⁸ Yet, it was presumed that the (indirectly detected) presence of reverse transcriptase was sufficient enough to prove the existence of a retrovirus, and even a viral infection of the tested cells in vitro.

This dogma would now become fixed in the minds of mainstream researchers and it opened the floodgates to allow indirect virus detection methods (known as surrogate markers) to take the place of direct detection procedures (virus purification and characterization as well as electron micrograph).⁴³⁹

So, in 1983, in a paper printed in Science, researcher Luc Montagnier of the Institute Pasteur in Paris, later celebrated as the discoverer of HIV, asserted that his research team had found a new retrovirus (which would later be named HIV).⁴⁴⁰ This was claimed only after reverse transcriptase activity had been observed in the cell culture. But, once again, there was no scientific proof for this conclusion.

Eleven years before, in 1972, Temin and Baltimore had stated, “reverse transcriptase is a property that is innate to all cells and is not restricted to retroviruses.”⁴⁴¹ And even Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean Claude Chermann, the most important co-authors of Montagnier’s 1983 Science paper, concluded in 1973 that reverse transcriptase is not specific to retroviruses, but rather exists in all cells.⁴⁴² In other words, if the enzyme (the surrogate marker) reverse transcriptase is found in the laboratory cultures, one cannot conclude, as Luc Montagnier did, that a retroviruses, let alone a particular retrovirus has been found.

Reverse transcriptase is no longer the most significant surrogate marker, by a long shot. Now the virus hunters are fixated on antibody tests, PCR viral load tests, and helper cell counts. But these tests raise new questions, given their striking weaknesses (see chapter 3, “HIV Antibody Tests, PCR Viral Load Tests, CD4 Counts: As Informative as a Toss of a Coin”). This prompted 14 renowned virologists of the “old guard” to direct an appeal to the young high-technology-focused generation of researchers, which was published in Science in 2001:

“Modern methods like PCR, with which small genetic sequences are multiplied and detected, are marvelous [but they] tell little or nothing about how a virus multiplies, which animals carry it, how it makes people sick. It is like trying to say whether somebody has bad breath by looking at his fingerprint.”⁴⁴³

No less remarkable, in this context, is an early 2006 article in the German Medical Journal (Deutsches Ärzteblatt) about a study by researchers who thought that, with the assistance of PCR, they had discovered new “exotic“ bacteria. The article points out that, “only genetic traces of the pathogen are detected [with the PCR]. From this, it cannot automatically be concluded that complete bacteria exist as well.”444 445

The Virus Disaster of the 1970s— and HIV As Salvation in the 1980s

Among the overall virus mania, such critical thoughts founder quickly. In the 70s, elite researchers were simply too busy channeling generous government aid into researching the possible connection between viruses and cancer. On 23 December 1971, US President Richard Nixon declared the “War on Cancer” at the behest of the medical establishment, and, with this metaphor, carried the militant tradition of the monocausal medical doctrine to the extreme, attached to the conception of viruses as the enemy. We had now become accustomed to talking about the “weapons,“ the “strategies,” and the “arsenals” of cell-killing preparations—and weren’t even taken aback when powerful people like Nixon called the new cancer war “a Christmas present for the people.”⁴⁴⁶

To date, many hundred millions of dollars of research funds have been poured into this war (a good part of it paid by taxes)—and the results are staggering.⁴⁴⁷ Back in 1971, a cure for cancer and a preventive vaccine were promised by 1976—but both of these are still nowhere in sight.⁴⁴⁸ Incidentally, in the tradition of celebratory medicine, along with a trust that the public conscience and the media have short-term memory, the medical establishment rarely feels a need to keep its promises. “I am convinced that in the next decade or maybe later, we will have a medication that is just as effective against cancer … as penicillin against bacterial infections,” boasted Cornelius “Dusty” Rhoads as early as 1953. He had been leader of the US Army’s Department for Chemical Warfare (medical division of the US Chemical Warfare branch) during the Second World War, and was director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, founded in 1945.⁴⁴⁹

Death rates have meantime increased exponentially alongside skyrocketing research expenditures.⁴⁵⁰ Today in Germany, 220,000 people die annually from cancer; in the USA, it is around 600,000. Even taking the aging of these populations into consideration, these numbers are staggering. For this reason, experts like George Miklos, one of the most renowned geneticists worldwide, criticized mainstream cancer research in Nature Biotechnology as “fundamentally flawed” and equated it with “voodoo science.”⁴⁵¹

By the late 1970s, medical experts lobbed damning critiques against mainstream cancer research. Medical scientists “had credited the retroviruses with every nasty thing—above all the triggering of cancer—and have to accept constant mockery and countless defeats,“ Der Spiegel pointed out in 1986.⁴⁵²

And the concept that viruses are the great trigger factors failed with other diseases, besides cancer. One notorious example is the swine flu disaster of 1976. During a march, David Lewis, a young American recruit, collapsed. Epidemic experts swooped in with their “magic wand” of clustering in their hands and claimed that they had isolated a swine flu virus from his lung. At the behest of the medical establishment, and particularly the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), US President Gerald Ford appeared on TV and urged all Americans to get vaccinated against an imminent deadly swine flu epidemic.⁴⁵³ Just like the Corona/COVID-19, the SARS or the avian flu fear mongers, Ford used the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 to scare the public into action.

Approximately 50 million US citizens rushed to local health centers for injections of a substance hastily thrown on the market. It produced strong side effects in 20 percent to 40 percent of recipients, including paralysis and even death. Consequent damage claims climbed to $2.7 billion. In the end, CDC director David Spencer, who had even set up a swine flu “war room” to bolster public and media support, lost his job. The ultimate bitter irony was that there were no, or only very isolated reports of swine flu.⁴⁵⁴

Consequently, at the end of the 1970s the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) came into unsettled political waters—just like the CDC, which was extensively restructured at the beginning of the 1980s. As a result, at the CDC and NIH, the most powerful organizations related to health politics and biomedical science, the great contemplation began. To redeem themselves, a new “war” would, of course, be the best thing.

Despite perpetual setbacks, an “infectious disease” remained the most effective way to catch public attention and open government pockets. In fact, Red Cross officer Paul Cumming told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1994 that “the CDC increasingly needed a major epidemic” at the beginning of the 80s “to justify its existence.”⁴⁵⁵ And the HIV/AIDS theory was a salvation for American epidemic authorities.

“All the old virus hunters from the National Cancer Institute put new signs on their doors and became AIDS researchers. [US President Ronald] Reagan sent up about a billion dollars just for starters,” according to Kary Mullis, Nobel laureate for Chemistry. “And suddenly everybody who could claim to be any kind of medical scientist and who hadn’t had anything much to do lately was fully employed. They still are.”⁴⁵⁶

Among those who jumped over from cancer research to AIDS research, the best known is Robert Gallo. Along with Montagnier, Gallo who was also considered for a long time to be the discoverer of the “AIDS virus,” enjoys worldwide fame, and has become a millionaire. In his previous life as a cancer researcher, on the other hand, he had almost lost his reputation, after his viral hypotheses on diseases like leukemia imploded.⁴⁵⁷ “HIV didn’t suddenly pop out of the rain forest or Haiti,” writes Mullis. “It just popped into Bob Gallo’s hands at a time when he needed a new career.”⁴⁵⁸

Chapter 3

AIDS: From Spare Tire to Multibillion-Dollar Business

“If there is proof that HIV is the cause of AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There is no such document.”⁴⁵⁹

KARY MULLIS NOBEL PRIZE FOR CHEMISTRY, 1993

“Even with the greats of the AIDS establishment, Gallo does not hold back on psychiatric diagnoses. [According to Gallo,] one is a ‘control freak’, the next is ‘uncreative’ and has a ‘complex’ because of it, a third is—‘can I be honest?’—just plain ‘crazy.’ [Gallo’s] impetuous anger is real when he speaks of the fight for power in the AIDS business, the fight for the money pot, the spiteful jealousy of prestige. With AIDS a lot of money is at stake—and above all fame.”⁴⁶⁰

DER SPIEGEL, 29/1995

“[Freedom fighter John] Milton and Galileo would back the British Medical Journal on free speech [on HIV/AIDS]. We should never forget Galileo being put before the inquisition. It would be even worse if we allowed scientific orthodoxy to become the inquisition.”⁴⁶¹

RICHARD SMITH, EDITOR IN CHIEF OF THE BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL FROM 1991-2004, IN A PUBLISHED LETTER TO NATURE

Whoever experienced the 1980’s will still clearly remember: The AIDS panic picked up so quickly that there was no time for a survey of the facts. The media-stimulated fear of viruses had left behind such “traces in society,“ as the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit wrote in 1990, that “social psychologists even trace the imminent comeback of men’s white underwear [as a symbol of HIV—and with that sterility right into the most intimate zones] back to the AIDS effect.”⁴⁶²

In 1984, Der Spiegel⁴⁶³ announced that, by the middle of the 1990s, the last German would become ill from AIDS, dying from it two years later (in other words: by the mid-1990s, AIDS would wipe out the entire German population). The magazine Bild der Wissenschaft⁴⁶⁴ made the same deadly predictions the following year (1985). In comparison, a 1986 forecast in US magazine Newsweek sounded moderate: by 1991, five to 10 million Americans would be infected by HIV.⁴⁶⁵

In reality, yearly, no more than a few hundred Germans die from AIDS.⁴⁶⁶ Moreover, these people actually die from traditional diseases (like lymphatic cancer or tuberculosis), which are then redefined as AIDS (see below: “What is AIDS?”). And as for Newsweek’s visions of horror: its prognosis was around ten times the 750,000 HIV cases identified by US authorities.⁴⁶⁷

750,000 is actually a cumulative number, since AIDS cases aren’t tracked yearly, meaning that number represents the total numbers since official AIDS records were started in the early 1980s. Obviously, with such a method of measurement, the figures appear many times scarier than they actually are. Additionally, logic dictates that such numbers can only increase, even if the number of new cases had gone down in a given year. Incidentally, only AIDS cases are counted cumulatively. Have you ever heard the evening news give the number of traffic accident deaths since the beginning of statistical records (and not ‘just’ the deaths for a given year)? Certainly not.

Strangely, the Robert Koch Institute even admits that they proceeded this way: “To catch the public’s attention and encourage a political readiness to act, large numbers were naturally more suitable. A trick in the presentation of AIDS cases, applied internationally at the time, served to do this: in the first years, in contrast to other diseases where the number of new cases each year is given (incidence), AIDS cases were accumulated from year to year (cumulative incidence).”⁴⁶⁸

Anyone who impartially dives into the topic of HIV/AIDS, perpetually trips over such oddities, inconsistencies and contradictions—and searches in vain for scientific proof of the theory’s basic hypotheses: that a virus called HIV, causes AIDS. At the same time, we are dealing with a very complex topic, so to make the controversies around the study of the cause of AIDS understandable, we will begin with a section which compactly explains why doubts that HIV exists and causes AIDS are justified—and why it makes sense to name factors like drug consumption or malnutrition as causes of AIDS, or better: of the many diseases grouped together under the term AIDS.

AIDS: What Exactly Is It?

Even the definition of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is anything but coherent. In contrast to other diseases, there is no universal definition of AIDS that could be used as a basis for sound statistics.⁴⁶⁹ For developing nations, for instance, the World Health Organization (WHO) introduced the “Bangui Definition” in 1986, with which many patients have been diagnosed with AIDS. According to this definition, anyone suffering from a few common and non-specific symptoms, like weight loss plus diarrhea and itching, is declared an AIDS patient (without blood tests, and thereby without HIV antibody tests).470 471 In poor countries like in Africa, where today a third of the population is undernourished, these symptoms are a well known mass phenomena.

In comparison, in wealthy countries like the USA and Germany, people are declared to be AIDS patients if they have tested positive in an antibody test, and simultaneously suffer from at least one of 26—likewise well known—diseases, including the vascular tumor called Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), Hodgkin’s disease, herpes zoster (shingles) or tuberculosis. If a patient has a negative antibody test and KS, they have KS. If, on the other hand, a patient tests positive and has KS, they are an AIDS patient. But this type of definition is misleading—it is circular, since it is based on dubious, doubtful, unproven assumptions that HIV exists; that HIV can cause AIDS (or a disease like KS or herpes zoster); that a positive antibody test proves the existence of HIV, and so on.⁴⁷²

Where Is the Proof of HIV?

This HIV is said to belong to a certain class of viruses called retroviruses. In order to prove, then, that HIV is a specific retrovirus, it would first be necessary to have HIV as a pure virus available, so that it can be imaged in a purified form with an electron microscope.⁴⁷³ But all electron micrographs of so-called HIV taken from the mid-80s on, come, not from a patient’s blood, but from “souped-up” cell cultures. In some cases the cells have been cooked up for a week in a lab Petri dish. So-called AIDS experts didn’t even try to make scientific sense of their co-culturing techniques until 1997, when Hans Gelderblom, of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, took a stab at it.

But Gelderblom’s article, published in the magazine Virology, leaves out the purification and characterization of a virus (merely the protein p24 was found), which does not prove that the particles are HIV. The second image of patient’s blood came from the American National Cancer Institute. But the particles made visible (proteins, RNA particles) did not have morphology typical of retroviruses (let alone of a specific retrovirus). Additionally, proteins like p24 and p18, which, according to the opinions of mainstream AIDS researchers, are supposed to be specific to HIV, and are also used as HIV markers (surrogate markers), were found in a number of so-called “uninfected” human tissue samples.⁴⁷⁴

Even Luc Montagnier, called the discoverer of HIV, admitted in an interview with the journal Continuum in 1997 that even after “Roman effort,” with electron micrographs of the cell culture, with which HIV was said to have been detected, no particles were visible with “morphology typical of retroviruses.”⁴⁷⁵

If even retrovirus-like particles cannot be recognized in these electron micrographs (let alone particles that match a retrovirus or a very particular retrovirus), this must logically mean that HIV—allegedly, a very specific retrovirus—cannot be detected. “Indeed, HIV has never been detected in a purified form,” according to many renowned experts, including Etienne de Harven, the previously mentioned pioneer in electron microscopy and virology,⁴⁷⁶ and the biologist Eleni Papadopulos and the physician Val Turner of the Australian Perth Group.⁴⁷⁷

Nonetheless, in 2006, it was proudly reported once again that “the structure of the world’s most deadly virus had been decoded”⁴⁷⁸ and that HIV had been photographed in a “3-D quality never achieved before.”⁴⁷⁹ But a close inspection of the British-German research team’s paper (published in the journal Structure),⁴⁸⁰ shows that it doesn’t live up to its promises:

Firstly, it must be noted that the study was supported by the Wellcome Trust,⁴⁸¹ and that the lead author, as well as one additional author, work for the Wellcome Trust,⁴⁸² a pharmaceutical giant that makes multibillion dollar revenues from AIDS medications like Combivir, Trizivir and Retrovir (AZT, Azidothymidine).⁴⁸³ These researchers—involved in conflicts of interest—will hardly be able to say that HIV has not been proven to exist.⁴⁸⁴

Of 75 particles, the paper said that five had no well-defined core, 63 had a single core, three had a complete core plus part of a further core, while four particles had two cores; the particles with two cores were larger than those with only one.⁴⁸⁵ “For one thing, one notices that no double-cores can be seen in the printed pictures,“ writes Canadian biologist and AIDS expert David Crowe, “and for another, the question arises: how can a virus have two cores at all? That would be something absolutely new!”

In the majority of “single-cored” particles, the core was cone-shaped (morphology); in the remaining 23 particles, on the other hand, the cores were “tube-shaped” (cylindrical), triangular or simply shapeless.⁴⁸⁶ Here as well, it is difficult to comprehend that all these particles with such different appearances could all belong to a very particular type of retrovirus (for that is what HIV is supposed to be).

Particles were of a great variety of sizes: the diameters measured by Briggs et al. ranged from 106-183 nanometer (one billionth of a meter). Is it advisable to classify all the particles as being one and the same particular type? People, for example, vary in size. Let’s say we were comparing men and assumed that the average man is 1.78 meters or 5.84 feet tall. If the margin measured by Briggs et al (106-183 nanometers) were carried over, we would get heights ranging between 1.30 and 2.25 meters (4.27 and 7.38 feet). This would hardly permit us to believe that we were dealing exclusively with full-grown males. It also speaks against the assumption that the particles of such various sizes, which originate from one cell culture, are all of the same virus type.

AIDS researcher Val Turner of the Australian Perth Group re-measured the diameters of the particles that were visible in diagram 1A of Briggs et al’s paper.⁴⁸⁷ This revealed that two of the particles (also called virions, which gives the impression that they belong to a virus that had invaded from outside) had diameters of even less than 100 nanometers.⁴⁸⁸

The Structure article’s authors themselves conceded that both printed images (which originated from one image) are “not representative” of the entire sample,⁴⁸⁹ but that begs the question: what shapes and sizes are the particles in the pictures that were not shown? This information was not provided even when requested.

In this context, according to relevant sources, the diameter of retrovirus particles (HIV is supposed to be a retrovirus, after all) are quoted as 100-120 nanometers,490 491 492 something that clearly deviates from the 106-183 nanometers measured by Briggs et al.

“It would have cleared up a lot in this context if scientists had undertaken a complete purification and characterization of the particles,“ as David Crowe remarks, “but this apparently did not happen.” The researchers themselves say that only particles with “minimal contamination” were available.

Not once is a virus purification method described in the Structure paper; in this regard, let’s refer to an article by Welker et al, published in the Journal of Virology in 2000.⁴⁹³⁴⁹⁴ They first say, remarkably, that, “it is important to have pure HIV particles” available, which confirms how important virus purification is for virus detection. However, they did not demonstrate that pure HIV had been extracted; it was also said “the electron microscopic analysis showed that the core preparations were not completely pure.”

And even if the particles were pure, the problem still arises that even after the purification process, cell components (known as microvesicles, microbubbles, and material of cellular origin) could be present, which even from an orthodox perspective are non-viral, although they may have the same size and density as so-called HIV. Thus we read in a paper published in the journal Virology: “Identification and quantization of cellular proteins associated with HIV-1 particles are complicated by the presence of nonvirion-associated cellular proteins that co-purify with virions.”495 496

HIV = AIDS?

Is HIV the cause of AIDS? Let’s allow the medical establishment speak for itself. Reinhard Kurth, former director of the Robert Koch Institute (one of the pillars of mainstream AIDS research), conceded in Der Spiegel (9 September, 2004): “We don’t exactly know how HIV causes disease.”⁴⁹⁷ In the 1996 documentary AIDS—The Doubt, by French journalist Djamel Tahi (broadcasted on German Arte Television), Montagnier admitted to the same, saying, “there is no scientific proof that HIV causes AIDS.”⁴⁹⁸ And 12 years before, in 1984, Montagnier emphasized that, “The only way to prove that HIV causes AIDS is to show this on an animal model.” But there is still no such model.499 500

The California Monthly, the UC Berkeley alumni magazine, confronted Nobel laureate Kary Mullis in an interview using a statement from another Nobelist, David Baltimore. “[Dear Mr. Mullis,] you mentioned Baltimore a moment ago. In a recent issue of Nature,⁵⁰¹ he said: ‘There is no question at all that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Anyone who gets up publicly and says the opposite is encouraging people to risk their lives.’”

Whereupon Mullis replied: “I’m not a lifeguard, I’m a scientist. And I get up and say exactly what I think. I’m not going to change the facts around because I believe in something and feel like manipulating somebody’s behavior by stretching what I really know. I think it’s always the right thing and the safe thing for a scientist to speak one’s mind from the facts. If you can’t figure out why you believe something, then you’d better make it clear that you’re speaking as a religious person.

“People keep asking me, ‘You mean you don’t believe that HIV causes AIDS?’ And I say, ‘Whether I believe it or not is irrelevant! I have no scientific evidence for it!’ I might believe in God, and He could have told me in a dream that HIV causes AIDS. But I wouldn’t stand up in front of scientists and say, ‘I believe HIV causes AIDS because God told me.’ I’d say, ‘I have papers here in hand and experiments that have been done that can be demonstrated to others.’ It’s not what somebody believes, it’s experimental proof that counts. And those guys [from AIDS orthodoxy] don’t have that.”⁵⁰²

HIV Antibody Tests, PCR Viral Load Tests, CD4 Counts:
As Uninformative as a Toss of a Coin

The most significant diagnostic tools of viral and AIDS medicine are:

Antibody tests (HIV tests)

PCR viral load tests

Helper cell counts (T-cells, or rather the T-cell subgroup CD4)

These are what is known as surrogate markers: alternative methods which doctors determine, on the basis of laboratory data, if someone is infected with HIV or not, and whether they have AIDS. Instead of using traditional methods for investigating whether real disease symptoms (so-called clinical endpoints) have occurred, AIDS doctors look at whether the number of CD4 cells has decreased within a certain time period; if so, the risk of contracting AIDS is said to be low. But as previously mentioned (see Chapter 2), the results given by these methods are highly dubious ways to detect viruses like HIV, the SARS coronavirus, or the avian flu virus H5N1 and their pathogenic effects. Often enough, surrogate markers have led to misdiagnosis.⁵⁰³

Let’s look first at the HIV antibody tests. They’re based on an antigen-antibody theory, which assumes the immune system fights against these antigens (proteins from HIV), as they are called, which are seen by the body as foreign. Their detection triggers an immune reaction, or response, which in turn induces the formation of specifically targeted antibodies.

Now, since these so-called HIV antibody tests only prove the existence of antibodies (and not, it is worth noting, the antigen directly, which in this case would be parts of HIV), we have to assume that HIV must have been detected during the validation of the tests. Only then could one use the antigen to calibrate the antibody tests for this particular (HIV) antigen. That is, only in this way can one test whether HIV antibodies are present or not, and, if HIV has not been proven to exist, the tests cannot possibly be known definitively to react to it.

When you know this information, the antibody test manufacturer’s insert isn’t quite so surprising. It clearly states “there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence or absence of antibodies to HIV-1 and HIV-2 in human blood.”⁵⁰⁴ Reacting to this interesting fact, and in reference to a paper by the Australian Perth Group (published in the scientific journal Nature Biotechnology)⁵⁰⁵ the German weekly newspaper Die Woche ran a headline calling it, “The AIDS Test Lottery.” The article went on to say that “the antibody tests do not measure what they should: HIV infection. They also react to people who have overcome a tuberculosis infection. [Yet] the world’s leading AIDS researchers at the Institute Pasteur in Paris reviewed the study before publication.”⁵⁰⁶

But what do the tests react to, then, if not to HIV? As we’ve already noted with AIDS, a circular definition has also been used with the antibody tests: in the mid-1980s, the proteins which caused the tests to react most strongly were selected from blood samples from seriously ill AIDS patients, and used to calibrate the tests.

That these proteins have something to do with HIV, or at least are similar to a retrovirus of whatever type, has, however, never been proven.⁵⁰⁷ And, in fact, antibody tests were not actually designed specially to detect HIV at all, as Thomas Zuck, of the American drug approval authority FDA, warned in 1986. Rather, blood tests should be screened for their resistance to false-positive reactions due to other germs or contaminants (something which also fits with what Die Woche wrote: that HIV tests “also reacted in people who had survived tuberculosis”;⁵⁰⁸ and also dozens of other symptoms, including pregnancy or simple flu, could cause a positive reaction).509 510 But to stop using these HIV tests was “simply not practical,” as Zuck admitted at a World Health Organization meeting. Now that the medical community had identified HIV as an infectious sexually transmitted virus, public pressure for an HIV test was just too strong.⁵¹¹

With HIV antibody tests, orthodox AIDS research turned traditional immunology upside-down, by informing people who had positive antibody tests that they were suffering from a deadly disease. Normally, a high antibody level indicates that a person had already successfully battled against an infectious agent and is now protected from this disease. And since no HIV can be found in AIDS patients, the hunt for a vaccine is also an irrational undertaking.⁵¹² Even Reinhard Kurth, former director of the Robert Koch Institute made a sobering comment in the Spiegel in 2004: “To tell the truth, we really don’t know exactly what has to happen in a vaccine so that it protects from AIDS.”⁵¹³

Viral load measurements with the help of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) are just as dubious and ultimately meaningless. As long as HIV has not been proven to exist, these tests cannot be calibrated for HIV—and they cannot be used to measure “HIV viral load.” With the PCR method, mind you not a complete virus, but only very fine traces of genes (DNA, RNA) may be detected, but whether they come from a (certain) virus, or from some other contamination, remains unclear.⁵¹⁴

Heinz Ludwig Sänger, professor of molecular biology and 1978 winner of the renowned Robert Koch Prize stated that “HIV has never been isolated, for which reason its nucleic acids cannot be used in PCR virus load tests as the standard for giving evidence of HIV.” Not coincidentally, relevant studies also confirm that PCR tests are worthless in AIDS diagnosis: for example, “Misdiagnosis of HIV infections by HIV-1 viral load testing: a case series,“ a 1994 paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.⁵¹⁵

In 2006, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) shook again the foundation of the past decade of AIDS science right to the core, inciting skepticism and anger among many HIV = AIDS advocates. A US nationwide team of orthodox AIDS researchers led by doctors Benigno Rodriguez and Michael Lederman of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland disputed the value of viral load tests—the standard used since 1996 to assess the patient’s health, predict progression to disease, and grant approval to new AIDS drugs—after their study of 2,800 positively tested people concluded viral load measures failed, in more than 90 percent of cases, to predict or explain immune status.

While orthodox AIDS scientists and others protest or downplay the significance of the JAMA article, Rodriguez’s group stands by its conclusion that viral load is only able to predict progression to disease in 4 percent to 6 percent of (so-called) HIV positives studied, challenging much of the basis for current AIDS science and treatment policy.⁵¹⁶

The same controversy plagues tests that count CD4 helper cells. Not a single study confirms the most important principle of the HIV = AIDS theory: that HIV destroys CD4 cells by means of an infection.517 518 Furthermore, even the most significant of all AIDS studies, the 1994 Concorde study, questions using helper cell counts as a diagnostic method for AIDS⁵¹⁹—and many studies corroborate this. One of these is the 1996 paper “Surrogate Endpoints in Clinical Studies: Are We Being Misled?“ Printed in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the paper casually concludes that CD4 count in the HIV setting is as uninformative as “a toss of a coin”—in other words, not at all.⁵²⁰

Following the news that viral load is not an accurate method of assessing or predicting immune status comes word from the Journal of Infectious Diseases that helper cell counts may be “less reliable” measures of immune competence than the AIDS orthodoxy previously believed. The study conducted in Africa by the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that so-called HIV negative populations can have T-cell counts below 350, a number that would, according to WHO guidelines, qualify for an AIDS diagnosis in HIV positive populations. Another “surprising” conclusion (from the point of view of the HIV = AIDS believers) from the same WHO study: HIV positives that started AIDS drug treatment with low helper cell counts had the same survival outcomes as HIV positives that began treatment with high T-cell counts!⁵²¹

“One of the most spiteful and most unhealing properties of scientific models is their capability to strike down truth and take its place,“ warns Erwin Chargaff, long-time professor at Columbia University’s Biochemical Institute in New York. “And often, these models serve as blinkers, by limiting attention to an excessively narrow area. The exaggerated trust in models has contributed much to the affected and ingenuine character of large parts of current natural research.”⁵²²

The biotechnology company Serono illustrates the ways in which such surrogate marker tests can be misused. The Swiss firm was suffering revenue losses with their preparation Serostim, which is supposed to counteract the weight-loss so typical of AIDS patients. So, at the end of the 1990s, Serono redefined this “AIDS wasting” and developed a computerized medical test, which would professedly determine “body cell mass.” These tests were actually adopted by doctors.

And so it came about that doctors ordered Serostim when the tests showed patients had lost body cell mass, a treatment that could easily cost more than $20,000. The strange thing was that patients who, with the help of the tests, had been diagnosed with a reduced body cell mass, had in reality not lost any weight at all. On the contrary, some had even gained weight. The Serostim scheme was finally busted and, as a legal investigation showed, more than 80 percent of Serostim prescriptions had been unnecessarily ordered through the test’s application. Michael Sullivan, the attorney in charge of the investigation, termed the tests “voodoo” magic, and they ultimately cost Serono more than $700 million in criminal fines. At that point, this was the third highest sum ever to be paid in such a judicial process.⁵²³

Illicit Drugs, Medicines and Malnutrition Lead to AIDS

There is much evidence that AIDS—that conglomerate of dozens of well known diseases—can substantially be explained by the intake of poisonous drugs and medications (antivirals, antibiotics, etc.) and by malnutrition.⁵²⁴ Around 80 percent of all children declared to be AIDS patients are born to mothers who have taken intravenous drugs that destroy the immune system.⁵²⁵ And the first people to be diagnosed as AIDS patients in the USA were all consumers of drugs like poppers, cocaine, LSD, heroin, ecstasy, or amphetamines, all of which have devastating effects on the immune system.526 527 528 529 530 The American National Institute on Drug Abuse was not alone in confirming the extreme toxicity and immunosuppressive effects of substances like heroin or poppers (nitrite inhalants) used among gay men.⁵³¹

With poppers, the following chemical event takes place: poppers are nitrites, and when inhaled are immediately converted into nitric oxide. Through this, the blood’s capability to transport oxygen is compromised; it oxidizes. The first areas to sustain damages through this oxygen deficiency are the linings of the smallest vessels (epithelia). When this damage develops malignantly it is called Kaposi’s sarcoma—a vascular tumor that is diagnosed in many AIDS patients. And, as a matter of fact, tumor tissue is oxidized.⁵³²

This self-destructive process is particularly noticeable in the lungs, since poppers are inhaled and dead organic material is produced, which cannot be completely disposed of by the cells’ weakened detoxification systems. At this point, fungi enter the game. Nature intended precisely this role for them because they eat away all kinds of “waste.” This explains why so many patients, termed AIDS cases, suffer from pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP, also called pneumocystis jirovecii), a lung disease typically associated with strong fungal infestation (decay).

These patients’ immune systems are weakened, which “is the common denominator for the development of PCP,” according to Tinstey Harrison’s textbook for internal medicine. And the “disease [the immune deficiency upon which PCP develops] can be produced in laboratory rats by starvation or by treatment with either corticosteroids [cortisone] or cyclophosphamides.”⁵³³ In other words, with cell-inhibiting substances that are destructive to the immune system, just like AIDS therapeutics. This makes it obvious that there is no need for HIV to explain AIDS (which is nothing but a synonym for well-known diseases like Kaposi’s sarcoma or PCP).

Correspondingly, the typical sufferer who is tagged as an “AIDS patient” suffers from malnutrition; particularly those affected in poor countries, but also many drug users who constitute the bulk of AIDS patients in wealthy countries. At the same time, studies show that a stress factor like drugs can trigger a new arrangement of genetic sequences (DNA) in the cells, whereby cell particles are formed—particles produced (endogenously) by the cells themselves (and interpreted by the medical industry as viruses invading from the outside, without any proof).534 535

The Early 1980s: Poppers and AIDS Drugs

Five severely ill homosexual young men became the first characters in the AIDS story, in 1981. American scientist Michael Gottlieb, from the Medical Center of the University of California in Los Angeles, had brought these five patients together after a search of several months, using the highly dubious clustering method (see chapter 2).⁵³⁶ Gottlieb dreamed about going down in the history books as the discoverer of a new disease.⁵³⁷ The afflicted patients suffered from the pulmonary disease pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP). This was remarkable, because young men in their prime years do not usually suffer from this, but rather babies who come into the world with an immune defect, older adults, or those on immunosuppressive medication (which burdens or damages the immune system).⁵³⁸

The medical researchers apparently took no other factors into account concerning the causes, as the patients’ drug use. Instead, the medical establishment and above all the Center for Disease Control (CDC) gave the impression that the cause of PCP was completely mystifying, so the basis was set to launch a new disease. The CDC eagerly seized up Gottlieb’s theses: “Hot stuff, hot stuff,” cheered the CDC’s James Curran.⁵³⁹ It was so “hot,” that, on 5 June 1981, the CDC heralded it as a red-hot piece of news in their weekly bulletin, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), which is also a preferred information source for the media.⁵⁴⁰

In this MMWR, it was immediately conjectured that the puzzling new disease could have been caused by sexual contact, and was thus infectious. In fact, there was no evidence at all for such speculation, for the patients neither knew each other, nor had common sexual contacts or acquaintances, nor had they comparable histories of sexually transmitted diseases.

“Sex, being three billion years old, is not specific to any one group—and thus naturally does not come into question as a possible explanation for a new sort of disease,“ points out microbiologist Peter Duesberg of the University of California, Berkeley. “But buried in Gottlieb’s paper was another common risk factor [criminally neglected by the CDC] that linked the five patients much more than specifically than sex.” These risk factors included a highly toxic lifestyle and use of recreational drugs that were massively consumed in the gay scene, primarily poppers, or in medical jargon “nitrite inhalants.”⁵⁴¹

“Inhalants” is used because these drugs are normally sniffed from a small bottle, and like the customary “poppers” expression the term can be traced back to the-mid 19th century. In 1859, the vasodilatory effect that follows inhalation of amyl nitrite was described. This led to its first therapeutic use in 1867 as muscle relaxants for (cardiac disease) patients suffering from angina pectoris (chest pain). The original form of the drug was glass ampules enclosed in mesh: they were called pearls. When crushed between the fingers, they made a popping sound; hence, the colloquialism “poppers” evolved.⁵⁴²

The US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) dates their use as recreational drugs from 1963.⁵⁴³ From then on, the drug experienced a proper boom, assisted by the fact that in industrialized countries like the USA, drug consumption in general sharply increased in and since the 1960s and 1970s, the years of sexual and political revolution (between 1981 and 1993, alone the number of cocaine overdose victims delivered to hospitals jumped from 3,000 to 120,000, a 4,000 percent increase).⁵⁴⁴

The gay scene made use of poppers’ well-known muscle relaxant property. Taking poppers enables “the passive partner in anal intercourse to relax the anal musculature and thereby facilitate the introduction of the penis,” according to a 1975 report in the journal Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality.⁵⁴⁵ Poppers also helped prolong erection and orgasm.⁵⁴⁶ The substance was (and is) easy to make at home, and it is very cheap to buy (a few dollars per vial).⁵⁴⁷ At the same time, poppers were massively advertised in popular gay media.548 549 And for promotional purposes, the drugs even had their own comic strip spokesperson—a handsome blond hunk who promoted the (in truth, irrational) idea that poppers make you strong and that every homosexual simply had to take them.⁵⁵⁰

Poppers can be bought in approximately 5 cm (2 inches) high bottles. They’re sold under names such as “room odorizer,” “liquid aroma” or “RUSH–liquid incense”; warnings like “highly flammable” or “may be fatal if swallowed” are emblazoned in small letters on the brightly-colored vials. © Alejandro Rodriguez

The toxic lifestyle drug poppers even got his own comic strip for promotional purposes—with a muscled and always cheerful blonde pretty boy as a hero who carried the message that the sex drug poppers makes beautiful and strong and ever real gay just had to take it, which, as outlined, was simply nonsense. The image shows the cover of the gay comic “Poppers: The Collected Cartoons of Jerry Mills”, number 9, winter 1986/87.

NIDA reported that sales of in just one US state added up to $50 million in 1976 (at $3 per vial, that equals more than 16 million bottles).⁵⁵¹ “By 1977, poppers had permeated every angle of gay life,” writes Harry Haverkos, who joined the CDC in 1981 and the American drug authorities NIDA in 1984 and was the leading AIDS official for both institutions. “And in 1979, more than five million people consumed poppers more than once a week.”⁵⁵²

Poppers can severely damage the immune system, genes, lungs, liver, heart, or the brain; they can produce neural damage similar to that of multiple sclerosis, can have carcinogenic effects, and can lead to “sudden sniffing death.”553 554 Even the drug’s label warns it is “highly flammable; may be fatal if swallowed.”⁵⁵⁵ And the medical establishment knew about its various dangers. In the 1970s, the first popper warnings appeared in scientific literature. In 1978, for instance, L.T. Sigell wrote in the American Journal of Psychiatry that the inhaled nitrites produced nitrosamine, known for its carcinogenic effects⁵⁵⁶—a warning which Thomas Haley of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) likewise articulated.⁵⁵⁷

In 1981, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), one of the world’s most significant medical journals, published several articles at the same time singling out the so-called fast-lane lifestyle as a possible cause of AIDS.558 559 560 This lifestyle is characterized by an extremely poor diet and long-term intake of antibiotics and antifungal substances, which damage the mitochondria, the cells’ powerhouses (plus numerous other medicines, later primarily chemotherapy-like antiviral AIDS preparations including AZT, ddC, d4T, aciclovir and ganciclovir).

Besides poppers, many other, likewise highly toxic, drugs were on the menu, including crystal meth (methamphetamine), cocaine, crack, barbiturates, ecstasy (XTC), heroin, Librium, LSD, mandrex, MDA, MDM, mescaline, mushrooms, purple haze, Seconal, special K, tuinol, THC, PCP, STP, DMT, LDK, WDW, window pane, blotter, orange, sunshine, sweet pea, sky blue, Christmas tree, dust, Benzedrine, Dexedrine, Dexamyl, Desoxyn, clogidal, nesperan, tytch, nestex, black beauty, certyn, preludin with B12, zayl, quaalude, tuinal, Nembutal, amytal, phenobarbital, elavil, valium, darvon, mandrax, opium, stidyl, halidax, caldfyn, optimil, and drayl.⁵⁶¹

Poppers on sale in a sex shop. Source: Lauritsen, John. The AIDS War, 1993. © John Lauritsen

David Durack asked the (still relevant) question in his lead article in the December 1981 NEJM: how can AIDS be so evidently new, when viruses and homosexuality are as old as history? Lifestyle drugs, according to Durack, should be considered as causes. “So-called ‘recreational’ drugs are one possibility. They are widely used in the large cities where most of these cases have occurred. Perhaps one or more of these recreational drugs is an immunosuppressive agent. The leading candidates are the nitrites [nitrite inhalants, poppers], which are now commonly inhaled to intensify orgasm.”

American author and AIDS chronicler Randy Shilts addresses this issue in his famous 1987 work The Band Played On: “[The poppers-AIDS starting point] would explain why the disease appeared limited to just three cities—to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, the three centers of the gay community,”⁵⁶² a conspicuous feature also described in the CDC’s MMWR from 24 September, 1982.⁵⁶³

Durack additionally notes that, other than drug-using homosexuals, the only patients with AIDS symptoms were “junkies.” In fact, in affluent nations like the USA or Germany, intravenous drug users have always made up a third of all AIDS patients, a fact that hasn’t been acknowledged to the general public.

Immune system destruction is even more common among intravenous drug users than poppers-inhaling homosexuals. Junkies’ lives are wrecked not by a virus, but (primarily) by excessive drug use over years. If the general public had known that a consistently high percentage of AIDS patients were intravenous drug addicts, perhaps the medical establishment would have been forced to study drugs as a possible cause of AIDS.

How the “Fast-Lane Lifestyle” Topic Got Out of Sight

A number of high-power organizations sought to prevent this message from getting through. First, the CDC purposely skewed their statistics. Their weekly bulletins divided AIDS patients into groups (homosexuals, intravenous drug users, racial minorities, hemophiliacs), yet they attributed a lower percentage to junkies than homosexuals. At one point, 17 percent were identified as drug users, and 73 percent were homosexuals, according to the CDC. This gave the impression that drug users were a less significant group among AIDS patients.

The CDC only admitted they played with the numbers to those who meticulously probed for more information. Journalist and Harvard-educated analyst John Lauritsen discovered that 25 percent of AIDS patients statistically labeled homosexual were also drug users. But the CDC simply lumped all of these gay drug addicts into the homosexual category. For this reason, the portion of drug users was 17 percent whereas in reality it should have been 35 percent (that is, more than one in three AIDS patients fits into the intravenous drug user category).⁵⁶⁴

Based at least in part on these skewed stats, the gay community certainly became active in the AIDS war and some became powerful gatekeepers of the AIDS establishment. “Gay men, some of them affluent and relatively privileged, found their way into private doctors’ offices and prominent teaching hospitals—and from there into the pages of medical journals [and from there into the mass media]—while drug users often sickened and dies with little fanfare,” describes sociologist Steven Epstein. And many reports in medical journals were penned by doctors who were very close to the gay scene and for that reason had treated many AIDS patients.⁵⁶⁵

Der Spiegel, 23/1983. © Der Spiegel

The focus on homosexuals was so strong that, at the beginning AIDS was even called Gay-Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome (GRID).⁵⁶⁶ Or simply, “’gay-disease,’ primarily because clinicians, epidemiologists, and reporters perceived [the syndrome] through that filter of the ‘gay men’s health crisis,’” as Epstein outlines.⁵⁶⁷

It was also far from random that the first Spiegel cover on AIDS depicted two well-endowed young men, looking at each other’s genitals (see picture). But with gays, focus remained on the topic of sexual transmission, and drug use was not tied in. And so it was also said right at the beginning of the first Spiegel cover story in 1983: “An Epidemic That Is Just Beginning”: “the gay epidemic‚ ‘AIDS’, a deadly immune deficiency, has reached Europe.”⁵⁶⁸

These media messages quickly caused widespread belief and panic that a deadly contagious sexually transmitted epidemic was occurring, at least among gay men. Even though there was no scientific data to back these perceptions up and Gallo and Montagnier had yet to publish their 1984 papers, claiming to have discovered HIV as the cause of AIDS.

Why was the gay scene such a focus of interest? And the much more obvious connection between drugs and immune disorders ignored? Particularly since in developed countries, almost all patients said to have the one of the immune deficiency diseases called AIDS have always been homosexuals and drug users. In other words, almost all AIDS patients take immunosuppressive and potentially deadly drugs and/or medications. ⁵⁶⁹

Firstly, mainstream culture knew next to nothing about poppers and they are still used almost exclusively in the gay community. In the 1980s, gay organizations strongly objected to the idea that their much-loved drugs could play a role, particularly a decisive role, in the development of AIDS symptoms. The AIDS establishment, attached to its virus-fixation, also lured the community into their fold by creating opulently paid consulting contracts for important members of gay organizations. Pharmaceutical companies also invested money in the gay community with innumerable advertisements for AIDS medications, like a Hoffmann-La Roche ad reading, “Success creates courage,“ and a Wellcome ad for poppers calling amyl nitrite [i.e. poppers] “the real thing.”⁵⁷⁰

The gay community even ignored urgent medical warnings from scientists about the dangers of poppers. Editors of The Advocate, a popular US magazine for homosexuals, ignored their letters, but accepted a whole series of poppers advertisements called “Blueprint for Health” from Great Lakes Products, at the time probably the largest manufacturer of sex drugs. “In this, it wrongly said that government studies had exonerated poppers from any connection to AIDS, and that poppers were harmless,“ writes analyst John Lauritsen, who has studied the topic of poppers and AIDS in depth.⁵⁷¹ These ads also suggested that poppers—just like vitamins, fresh air, exercise and sunshine—belonged to a healthy lifestyle,⁵⁷² and that they were an integral part of the gay community’s “Fantasyland” and “wonderful land of drugs, parties and sex.”⁵⁷³

The scene is no different today. Although certain versions of the drugs were prohibited because of high toxicity in 1988 and 1990, promotional websites for the lifestyle drug, such as bearcityweb.com or allaboutpoppers.com claimed that “poppers are the closest thing to a true aphrodisiac that exists today, and in addition they have been shown to be among the safest and most pleasurable compounds the world has ever seen.”574 575

Many important gay publications and organizations continue to promote poppers and censor data on adverse effects. This has had devastating consequences in society, since the gay media play an important role in informing and educating writers and journalists, who themselves deliver important messages about AIDS to the general public. “Indeed, some media organs of the AIDS movement, such as AIDS Treatment News, are widely recognized as agenda-setting vehicles for the circulation of scientific knowledge, and are read by activists, doctors, and researchers alike,” writes Steven Epstein.⁵⁷⁶

A further decisive building block on the way to the construction of the dogma that AIDS is a contagious viral disease was the behavior of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). From the beginning, they were unwilling to explore the drug connection.577 578 The CDC set on the search for a deadly virus, without hesitating to suppress disagreeable data. In 1982, their own AIDS expert Haverkos analyzed three surveys of AIDS patients conducted by the CDC. He came to the conclusion that drugs like poppers did play a weighty role in disease onset.

But the CDC refused to publish their own high-ranking employee’s study, and Haverkos transferred to the FDA in 1984 to become AIDS coordinator there.⁵⁷⁹ The paper finally appeared in the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases in 1985.⁵⁸⁰ This prompted the Wall Street Journal to pen an article unambiguously stating that drug abuse was so universal among AIDS patients that this, and not the virus, must be considered the primary cause of AIDS.⁵⁸¹

But such reports fell on deaf ears, for the world had already been sent down the virus road years before. Talk of drug factors ended with the CDC’s second AIDS-related MMWR (3 July, 1981), in which further “highly unusual cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma” were reported.⁵⁸² This had a viral effect upon media coverage. “When the first reports of the peculiar deadly illness from California began to wash up here, the CDC releases were our only proper source of information,” remembers Hans Halter, who penned the Spiegel’s first cover story on AIDS. Its headline: “An epidemic that is just beginning.”

Halter, himself a specialist in sexually transmitted diseases, had, as he relates, looked through the CDC data with a virologist friend. “It was clear to us,“ Halter claims, “that a retrovirus transmitted through sperm and blood was to blame!“⁵⁸³ Halter admitted in that story that the “immune system [in homosexuals], as scientific examinations show, is also compromised through antibiotic treatment, drug consumption, and intensive use of poppers.”

Yet, incomprehensibly, in the very same article, only a few paragraphs previously, Halter wrote: “First, the ‘poppers’ hypothesis collapsed: a control group of non-AIDS-infected homosexuals also took the stimulant, which expands blood vessels and is said to improve orgasm.”⁵⁸⁴ Not only does this contradict Halter’s own understanding that a drug lifestyle damages the immune system. Also, even if the experiment Halter mentioned had actually existed, this is still a far cry from demolishing the hypothesis that poppers play a (significant) role in the onset of the disease symptoms termed AIDS.

You would think this writer must have first reviewed this study to come to such a conclusion. What exactly was being investigated? Was the paper compiled without bias or conflicts of interest? Is the argument conclusive? We don’t know because no such study has ever been conducted. It’s no wonder that Halter couldn’t name the study upon request. Instead, he recommended looking in Shilts’ book, And the Band Played On, adding, “maybe there are answers in it.”⁵⁸⁵ Indeed there are. According to Shilts, the poppers starting-point does offer an explanation for AIDS. “Everybody who got diseases seemed to snort poppers,” writes Shilts.⁵⁸⁶

Of course, there will always be people who take drugs like poppers and do not get one of the AIDS diseases like lymphatic cancer. But dosage and the length of time a person uses a drug, as well as other individual behavior patterns, living conditions, and genetic make-up always play a role. Just as a casual smoker is less likely to get lung cancer than a chronic smoker.

New York, February 2005: From Super-Drug Consumers
to “Super-AIDS-Virus” Patients

On 11 February 2005, Dr. Thomas Frieden, a New York City health official, stepped up to the microphone and announced the discovery of a supposedly deadly new strain of HIV that was resistant to around 20 different AIDS medications. The world press went ballistic. German newspaper Die Welt headlined: “Super-AIDS in New York,” and the Süddeutsche Zeitung speculated that the one gay male whose illness had led to Dr. Frieden’s big announcement had become infected with the virus at a “bareback party,” a gay sex party (bareback refers to anal sex without a condom). It was only incidentally mentioned in the article that the man had taken drugs including cocaine and crystal meth (methamphetamines) to keep him going all night long.⁵⁸⁷

By the end of the month, an article in the gay/lesbian magazine San Francisco Bay Times, points out that, “what the [mainstream] media has failed to report is that the 46-year-old patient had been on a three-month run of crystal [meth], 90 days in a row, [and] when he [finally] went to the doctor, he was just a shell of a person.”⁵⁸⁸ The man had also been a chronic drug-taker since the age of 13: first marijuana and alcohol, then later heavier drugs like cocaine or crystal meth—substances that have similarly stimulating and short-term performance-enhancing effects, and are just as toxic as poppers (which were probably also among the drug-repertoire for the man in his mid-forties).⁵⁸⁹

We are looking at an example of a classic AIDS patient. Let’s remember here that the first AIDS patients were described as young homosexuals heavily addicted to drugs, ranging in age from 30 to mid-40.⁵⁹⁰ How then, could these patients possibly be helped by further chemical poisoning in the form of highly toxic medications? That the above-mentioned patient did not respond positively to any of the twenty AIDS medications had nothing to do with a drug-resistant virus (as is continually asserted), but rather to the fact that the already unhealthy, immune-compromised man could not handle the highly toxic preparations.

Shortly after the news of a mutant HIV strain, a striking article appeared in Science, acknowledging that there was still no proof that what had been termed the “nightmare virus strain” can cause disease.⁵⁹¹ Jacques Normand, director of AIDS research at the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), confirmed in an interview we got published in the weekly newspaper Freitag, that “the question of whether we are dealing with a super AIDS virus remains unanswered.” And drugs, continued Normand, cannot be ruled out as the main cause of the 46-year old’s health problems.⁵⁹²

These sentences carry even more weight when you consider that both the drug administration and specialist journals like Science normally stay right in line with orthodox AIDS medicine, and that real criticism or doubts on the HIV = AIDS dogma are rarely ever heard.

Gallo, 1994:
Not HIV, but Sex Drugs like Poppers Cause AIDS

At a high-level meeting of US health authorities in 1994— titled “Do Nitrites Act as a Co-Factor in Kaposi’s Sarcoma?”—The best-known speaker was the National Cancer Institute’s Robert Gallo, so-called co-discoverer of HIV. His statements were noteworthy. According to Gallo, HIV was surely a “catalytic factor” in Kaposi’s, but even he acknowledged, “there must be something else involved.” Then he added: “I don’t know if I made this point clear, but I think that everybody here knows—we never found HIV DNA in tumor cells of KS. So this is not directly transforming. And in fact we’ve never found HIV DNA in T cells although we’ve only looked at a few. So, in other words we’ve never seen the role of HIV as a transforming virus in any way.”

Besides poppers, many other, likewise highly toxic, drugs were on the „menu“ of so-called AIDS patients. Among them: crystal meth. In February 2020, the German Stern reported: “The psychological dependency is high because meth keeps you awake and initially conveys superhero feelings. And also because, for example, many consumers experience sex much more intensely. But the supposed advantages wear out quickly—the kick goes, the greed remains. And with him a nasty addiction. The destruction is manifold: paranoia and psychoses, delusional ideas such as the obsession with being under the skin of insects, wild aggressiveness, deterioration of memory, teeth, mucous membranes, destruction of the kidneys, emaciation. The hard consumption, often with the syringe, leads to exhaustion and emaciation and ruins relaxation and sleep. Source: stern.de

And in response to a question from Harry Haverkos, then director of the AIDS department at NIDA, who said that not a single case of KS had been reported among blood recipients where the donor had KS, Gallo allowed: “The nitrites [poppers] could be the primary factor.”⁵⁹³

To fully appreciate Gallo’s statement, we must recall that, in wealthy nations like the USA and Germany, Kaposi’s sarcoma was—next to PCP—the most significant disease among patients labeled with “AIDS.”⁵⁹⁴ In 1987, for example, Der Spiegel described Kaposi’s sarcoma patients defined as AIDS patients as the “sarcoma-covered skeletons” from the “same-sex scene.”⁵⁹⁵

Indeed, “At present, it is accepted [even by CDC scientists] that HIV plays no role, either directly or indirectly, in the causation of Kaposi’s sarcoma,“ writes Australian biologist and AIDS expert Eleni Papadopulos.596 597 598 Given this background, it seems paradoxical that Kaposi’s sarcoma is still part of the official AIDS definition in industrialized countries (anyone with KS and a positive test result counts as an AIDS patient)—and that, contrary to the facts, even respected magazines like The New Yorker still assert that “Kaposi’s sarcoma is a sign of AIDS”⁵⁹⁹ (i.e. HIV causes KS).

Der Spiegel: On the Path of Sensationalistic Journalism

The media tend to have difficulties with the facts anyway.⁶⁰⁰ They prefer to occupy themselves with their favorite theme: sex. By the end of 1982, dozens of articles on the “mysterious new disease” had appeared in the US print media alone. Soon enough, the number jumped to hundreds per month.⁶⁰¹ And they constantly tossed around the idea that this virally-caused and sexually transmitted disease posed a threat to the general public. In Germany, the news magazine Der Spiegel took a leading role in this virus propaganda, publishing approximately 20 cover stories on HIV/AIDS since 1983, and, according to a Spiegel‘s internal release, the magazine has reported far more on AIDS than on any other medical topic, including cancer.⁶⁰²

By late 1984, the Hamburg-based news magazine was so confident with its AIDS dossier, that they headlined, “The Bomb Is Planted” and that, in developed nations like Germany “the epidemic is breaking out of the gay-ghetto. Women are also in danger.”⁶⁰³ The following year, Der Spiegel explicitly expressed certainty that everyone was at risk with the cover story headline: “Promiscuity Is the Epidemic’s Motor.” The story goes on to state “it has become clear that the disease has started to reach out from its previous high-risk groups [homosexuals and intravenous drug users].”

The article went on to offer up the doctors’ orders for curbing the spread of HIV: “Still without a cure in the fight against AIDS, doctors advise monogamy to heterosexuals and celibacy to gays.” To support these theses, the magazine, which in Germany still epitomizes investigative journalism, looked to headlines from the rainbow press, including “Danger For Us All: A New People’s Epidemic” from The Munich glossy Quick and “AIDS—Now the Women Are Dying“ from the “master” of media warhorses, the Bild am Sonntag.⁶⁰⁴

The Spiegel practiced a juicy double strategy by incorporating the tabloid media’s sensationalized statements into its text in such a way that they substantiated The Spiegel’s own theses. Yet it tried to distinguish itself from the cheap tabloids by writing that “hardly a day goes by without the boulevard press seizing up the subject [of AIDS] with headlines that go down easy.” But Der Spiegel was fully invested in the game of muckraking AIDS coverage.

Particularly in the 1980s, Spiegel had sex on the brain, so articles were teeming with questions like, “Should only’ homosexuals believe in it, maybe because the Lord has always had a whip waiting for them?”⁶⁰⁵ So-called journalists gushed about “doing it upright” and “cock-centered routines”⁶⁰⁶ and lamented the end of the “quickie” or the “good old one-night stand.”⁶⁰⁷ And where would tabloid journalism be without reporting on “Hollywood stars’ fears of AIDS”? According to Der Spiegel, “Linda Evans, who was thoughtlessly kissed by AIDS-infected Rock Hudson from the ‘Denver Clan,’ awoke night after night in terror. She cries on the telephone for help, for her nightmares show her all the stages of the disease. Burt Reynolds has to reaffirm again and again that he is neither gay, nor has AIDS.”⁶⁰⁸ Or what about this hook? “Rock-Vamp Madonna and other pop stars back off singing: ‘Take your hands off me.’”⁶⁰⁹

Bo Derek, the sex icon of the 1970s and 1980s, “was even forbidden [by her husband] to kiss on-the-job, except with AIDS-tested film stars,“⁶¹⁰ according to the “Credo: ‘No kiss, no AIDS.’”⁶¹¹ All sorts of celebrities weighed in with their own brand of homophobic hysterics, like ‘Denver Clan’ star Catherine Oxenberg, who said, “If I have to work with a gay in the future, I won’t kiss him.” Der Spiegel even took a jab at then US President: “30 percent of all actors are gay. Does Ronald Reagan know that?” Rock Hudson seemed to be the prime target of every AIDS-related riff: “The beasts with AIDS threaten Hollywood society. To counter the hysteria, Ed Asner, the esteemed president of the Screen Actors Guild, suggested ‘striking kissing scenes from screenplays for the time being.’ Now it’s getting serious, by holy [Rock] Hudson!”⁶¹²

Kissing phobia became so infectious that the CDC issued an official notice that “Kissing is not a risk factor for the transmission of AIDS.”⁶¹³

In his 1987 cover story, Spiegel writer Wilhelm Bittorf didn’t shy away from giving his own personal views, portraying the homosexual community as a “potential pest hole,” and sexual interaction with a single woman as a “necessary evil”: “A woman who I had slept with a few times, and who I found rather exciting, later told me that she was particularly proud that she had also converted gays to her charms. Gays! I felt as if someone had rammed a giant icicle into my gut. The fear that I had gotten myself infected was enormous. I have no idea why. Of course, I had earlier read, and written, a lot about AIDS, but the fear first clutched me there. The weeks leading up to the decision to take the blood test were awful. It is as if you submit yourself to an irrevocable judgment of your entire life. Then the blood test, anonymous; a week of waiting, hardly sleeping at night: one can only think of oneself. Test result: negative. But the shock is still bone deep. My sex life according to the motto ‘good is what turns you on’ has been over since that time. Sex afterwards, unlike beforehand, was sex with a condom, even when the girls grumbled about it. And now, months of living with just one, who I chose based on the criteria of whether she can be faithful. I live monogamously and am concentrated on just one person. I do lust after others, but I deny myself.”⁶¹⁴

That the Spiegel readers do not “know more,“ as the magazine is fond of saying about itself in its ads,⁶¹⁵ becomes clear when one looks more closely at coverage since the beginning of the 1990s. Since then, Der Spiegel has forced the constant interplay between fanning hopes and dashing them, continually stringing its readers along emotionally. In the 1991 story “Mother Nature Improved,“ “AIDS pioneer Robert Gallo“ was quoted, boasting: “In ten years at most, a vaccine against AIDS will have been developed and will be ready to use”;⁶¹⁶ and in 1995, it was optimistically reported that after the “disappointment with AZT, the new pill of hope from Basel is being generated by the kilogram in the cauldrons of the Swiss group Hoffman-La Roche: saquinavir.”⁶¹⁷

Then in 1996, sudden pessimism: “Since 1985, virologists, epidemic doctors, geneticists, and pharmaceutical researchers have discussed the pandemic’s fatal march of victory at international AIDS congresses. The sobering result was constantly the same: AIDS can apparently not be brought under control, possibility of a cure or an effective vaccine still lies in the distant future.”⁶¹⁸

Only one year later, when the pharmaceutical industry brought new active substances onto the market, Der Spiegel conveyed to its readers, another uplifting message: “Now, words of hope are everywhere—Newsweek and the New York Times proclaim a possible ‘end of AIDS.’”⁶¹⁹

Yet we’re still no closer to the “end of AIDS.” This did not escape the Spiegel either; the magazine quoted Reinhard Kurth, director of the Robert Koch Institute, with these resigned words: “The optimism of the beginning of the 1980s is long gone,” since “vaccines limiting the transmission of AIDS are the only way that promises long-term success against this most serious medical catastrophe of modern times; [but], the simplest roads to the development of an HIV vaccine are unfortunately blocked.”⁶²⁰

To this, media researcher Michael Tracey writes that media coverage of AIDS “satisfied a certain kind of news value that is ignorant but loves to wallow in gore, and that readily has the ear of a public which is fascinated by the bizarre, the gruesome, the violent, the inhuman, the fearful.”⁶²¹ In 1987, Spiegel writer Wilhelm Bittorf described, possibly without really realizing it himself, this method of shock journalism:

“AIDS has what the others are missing: nuclear death is anonymous, blind, impersonal, unimaginable even after Chernobyl, and thus dead boring. It may threaten to depopulate the earth, but that has little to do with the most private spheres of human experience. Even the worst environmental damage lies further away than the doom of infection in the erogenous zone. And if the Pershing rockets in [the German federal state] Baden-Wuerttemberg had only compromised the sex lives of the Germans, they would have been gone a long time ago.”⁶²²

Der Spiegel generated its own “grotesque street ballads,” like the story “of the Munich German teacher, infected with AIDS through mere French kissing. ‘I didn’t even have sex with him,’ the 26-year old said, bewildered. She cannot work anymore and is waiting for death.” Or a woman from Düsseldorf, who purportedly destroyed her life during a holiday adventure in Portugal and lamented, “I only slept with him once.”⁶²³

These stories clearly impede the search for truth, because they suggest that the conditions illustrated are true, although nobody has verified the facts in question—and much speaks for the fact that the illustrated conditions do not represent the truth.

AIDS Is Not a Sexually-Transmitted Disease

And so, the simple and yet “politically incorrect truth is rarely spoken out loud: the dreaded heterosexual epidemic never happened,“ Kevin Gray, of the US magazine Details reported to his readers’ in early 2004.⁶²⁴ The “degree of epidemic” in the population of developed nations has remained practically unchanged. In the USA, for example, since 1985, the number of those termed HIV-infected has remained stable at one million people (which corresponds to a fraction of one percent of the population). But if HIV were actually a new sexually transmitted virus, there should have been an exponential rise (and fall) in case numbers.⁶²⁵

Additionally, in wealthy countries like the USA and Germany according to official statistics, poppers-consuming homosexuals have always made up around 50 percent of all AIDS patients, and intravenous drug users about 30 percent—a further seven percent are both. With this, almost all AIDS patients are men⁶²⁶ who lead a self-destructive lifestyle with toxic drugs, medications, etc. In contrast, the official statistics say that in poor countries:

a much larger proportion of the population has AIDS

men and women are equally affected and

primarily, malnourished people suffer from AIDS⁶²⁷

Stern 18/1987. © Stern/Picture Press

This clearly shows that AIDS symptoms are triggered by environmental factors like drugs, medications and insufficient nutrition. And it clearly speaks against the presumption that a virus is at work here “that moves like a phenomenon of globalization—just like data streams, financial rivers, migration waves, jetplanes—fast, borderless, and incalculable,“ as the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit urgently warned on its front page in 2004.⁶²⁸

Such a pathogen would inevitably have to attack all people in all countries of the world equally: men and women, straight and gay, African and German—and not, as statistics reveal, in a racial and gender-biased way, attacking certain populations at different rates. In this context, Details writer Gray mentions a joke which made the rounds in the New York City Department of Health when the accumulation of AIDS statistics began: “What do you call a man who [says he] got AIDS from his girlfriend? A liar!”⁶²⁹

In fact, the largest and best-conceived studies on the subject of sex and AIDS show that AIDS is not a sexually transmitted disease. 630 631 632 The fact is glaringly obvious in the most comprehensive paper on this topic: Nancy Padian’s 1997 study on seroconversion rates among couples, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology with an observation period of ten years (1985-1995). In it, not a single case could be uncovered in which an HIV negative partner eventually became “positive” (or “sero-converted”) through sexual contact with his or her HIV positive partner. That is to say, the observed transmission rate was zero.⁶³³

23 April 1984: Gallo’s TV Appearance
Carves the Virus Dogma in Stone

American virologist Robert Gallo and US Health Minister Margaret Heckler stepped in front of the cameras on 23 April 1984, with an important message: “Today we add another miracle to the long honor roll of American medicine and science. Today’s discovery represents the triumph of science over a dreaded disease. Those who have disparaged this scientific search— those who have said we weren’t doing enough—have not understood how sound, solid, significant medical research proceeds.”⁶³⁴

The media immediately passed the news on to their audiences, without questioning what kind of “medical research” had led these scientists to believe what would soon become the dogma of the AIDS establishment: that AIDS can only occur in the presence of a viral infection, and that the virus dramatically destroys the patient’s helper cells (T cells). Gallo and Heckler then promised that an AIDS vaccine would be ready by 1986.⁶³⁵

“The probable cause of AIDS has been found: a variant of a known human cancer virus,” asserted US microbiologist Robert Gallo at a press conference on 23 April 1984 (at his left, then American health minister Margaret Heckler). Source: TV documentary “AIDS—The Doubt” by Djamel Tahi, broadcasted on German Arte Television, 14 March 1996.

The public is still waiting for this promised vaccine. And the rest of us who have questioned the HIV = AIDS theory are still asking for evidence of Gallo’s thesis that a virus is involved in the onset of AIDS symptoms like the rare cancer Kaposi’s sarcoma, the lung disease PCP, herpes zoster, the deficiency-caused tuberculosis, and a growing number of other diseases and disorders added to the “AIDS-related” list yearly. Neither can the AIDS establishment explain why even AIDS patients in the end-stage have very few helper cells said to be “infected” with what is termed HIV (although the orthodoxy precisely alleges that HIV attacks and kills these T cells). For this reason, the collapse of the immune system cannot be plausibly explained by the HIV = AIDS theory either. In 1985, the specialist publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences drew attention to this helper T cell “paradox.”⁶³⁶

Gallo’s papers were first printed in the journal Science weeks after the press conference. Thus, prior to his spectacular TV appearance, and for some days afterwards, nobody was able to review his work. This presented a severe breach of professional scientific etiquette, especially as review later showed that Gallo’s studies did not deliver any proof for the virus thesis.⁶³⁷

But nobody opposed these very serious breaches of public trust. Instead, Gallo cast himself—surfing on the global wave of virus panic—as an infallible researcher. And the journalists believed him, so this virus-driven AIDS plan quickly embedded itself in the media, and from this time onwards it would drive all public information on AIDS. The words “virus,” “cause,” and “AIDS’ were inseparably linked—and the world believed that AIDS is contagious. Scientific journalists around the globe were thrilled to have a great story about a sexually transmitted epidemic, not to mention a brave medical hero and savior in Robert Gallo.

The fact that most of the world fell for Gallo’s theory hook, line and sinker was confirmed in an investigation by Steven Epstein. The sociologist analyzed AIDS reports in leading specialist magazines in the opinion-shaping time from 1984-1986. It was shown that, among published texts referencing Gallo’s Science paper, the proportion that described the virus = AIDS hypothesis as a fact jumped from 3 percent to 62 percent between 1984 and 1986.

“Expressions of doubt or skepticism [of the virus thesis]—let alone support for other hypotheses—were [in contrast] extraordinarily rare throughout this period from 1984 to 1986,“ Epstein argues.⁶³⁸ “Findings such as these certainly support [culture critic Paula] Treichler’s claim—that Gallo and his close associates established a network of citations that served to create the impression of greater certainty than Gallo’s own data warranted. In circular fashion, each article points to a different one as having provided the definite proof; the buck stops nowhere.”⁶³⁹ This had a huge influence on the mass media (and with it on public opinion), which typically merely regurgitates information printed in Nature, Science or other specialist journals.⁶⁴⁰

New York Times: Chief Medical Reporter Altman’s
Cozy Relationship with Epidemic Authorities

The reports of much of the mass media also influenced the content of scientific journals, according to a study published in 1992 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Even top scientists trust mass media sources like the New York Times,⁶⁴¹ a paper that often serves as the measure for other mass media. That is why editors often ask American journalists pitching their story ideas, “Has the New York Times broken the story yet?”⁶⁴²

But, how objective and sound was the New York Times’ coverage of AIDS? Epstein also investigated this and found that in the specialist publications between 1984 and 1986, both the proportion and the total number of articles in which it was blindly assumed HIV caused AIDS increased drastically.⁶⁴³

The chief medical reporter for the New York Times, Lawrence Altman, distinguished himself as the leading media protagonist for the theory that AIDS is caused by HIV. Altman was so convinced of Gallo’s assertions that within weeks of the Heckler-Gallo conference on 23 April 1984, he was using the neologisms “AIDS virus” and “AIDS test” even though Altman’s 15 May 1984 article acknowledges that, “As the Red Cross and other studies progress, one of the most difficult questions that needs to be answered is: What does a positive blood test result mean? At this stage of AIDS research, scientists do not know if a positive test result means that the individual has an active infection, could transmit AIDS, had the infection at some unknown point in the past but recovered without becoming ill, or could still develop a fatal case at some future time.”⁶⁴⁴

Yet, no mainstream media reports have since answered this “difficult” question, and soon enough, it was simply dropped from public discourse. “AIDS virus” has become a synonym for “HIV,“ just as “AIDS test” has replaced the more correct though still puzzling term “antibody test” even though Altman himself acknowledged some months later that “scientists have not yet fulfilled Koch’s postulates for AIDS.”⁶⁴⁵

Both terms have firmly established themselves.⁶⁴⁶ This is highly problematical, however, because it allows scientific theories that have never been proven to pose as facts. In this case:

That a virus called HIV causes the diseases grouped together under the term “AIDS” (Kaposi’s sarcoma, shingles, tuberculosis, etc.)

That the existence of HIV antibodies can actually be proven with an HIV test

Critics have questioned Altman’s objectivity and accused him of bias towards the Centers for Disease Control. In 1963, as a doctor, Altman joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), which had been formed a few years after the Second World War. Altman was a high-ranking EIS scientist.⁶⁴⁷ And like the CDC, which is so fixated on the dangers of infections so that it has practically excluded other possible causes, such as chemical substances or toxins,⁶⁴⁸ the EIS has always been biased towards one goal: fight the viruses.

The EIS website information proudly claims that EIS pupils had “discovered how the AIDS virus was transmitted.”⁶⁴⁹ And so that as few people as possible leave the elite squad, its own alumni association fundamentally “attempts to foster a spirit of loyalty to the EIS program through its activities.”⁶⁵⁰

The virus-fixated CDC, likewise, cannot be classified, in principle, as an objective information source at all. However, politicians and journalists continue to trust that any information the CDC makes public can be relied on without examination.⁶⁵¹ For instance, in 2005, the German Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: “Worldwide, the ‘Centers for Disease Control’ [CDC] in the USA are considered a model of a fast and consistently acting epidemic authority.”⁶⁵²

Altman, thanks to his high-level connections at the CDC, received various scoops from the epidemic officials.⁶⁵³ And in 1992, he even openly admitted in Science that he had relied on the views of the CDC. And when “the CDC was not confident to publish” the story Altman “didn’t think it was his paper’s [The New York Times’] place to announce” it.⁶⁵⁴ But strangely, nobody found it necessary to ask why the top medical reporter from the New York Times, who has a substantial influence upon the formation of public opinion, feels bound to follow the line of a federal authority.

1987: Top Experts Take the Stage
as Critics of the AIDS Orthodoxy

In the mid-1980s, with “fast-lane lifestyle” theme cleared from the table to make room for the virus feast, there were no really weighty voices of opposition to the dominant views on AIDS. As social psychologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann fittingly argues, only members of a certain elite had the necessary influence upon people in power to decisively influence the formation of public opinion.

At the same time, “excellence must appear early before the public eye,” says Noelle-Neumann.⁶⁵⁵ And so it did, in the form of Peter Duesberg, member of the National Academy of Sciences, the USA’s highest scientific committee, and one of the best-known cancer researchers in the world. A critic of the first class had entered the ring to dispute the cause of AIDS.⁶⁵⁶ But Duesberg’s first major critique did not appear until 1987, in the journal Cancer Research—in other words, at a time when virus panic had already bombarded the public conscience for many years.

And, as those days and years ticked by, it became less and less likely that advocates of the “AIDS virus” theory would back-pedal, since they had already heavily invested, financially, personally and professionally, in HIV. Be it in the Spiegel, Die Zeit, The New York Times, Time or Newsweek—the AIDS orthodoxy’s theory had been championed everywhere. Researchers such as Gallo found themselves simply unable to retreat from their original claims because “stakes are too high now,” notes American journalist Celia Farber. “Gallo stands to make a lot of money from patent rights on this virus. His entire reputation depends on the virus. If HIV is not the cause of AIDS, there’s nothing left for Gallo. If it’s not a retrovirus, Gallo would become irrelevant.” And Gallo wouldn’t be the only one to sink into insignificance. Additionally, “it would be very embarrassing to say that now, maybe, the antibody [test] wasn’t worth committing suicide for or burning houses for,” states Farber.⁶⁵⁷ And, in fact, numerous people, many of them completely healthy have killed themselves just because they tested HIV positive.⁶⁵⁸

As with the polio epidemic, with AIDS the clear toxicological connections have been completely removed from the picture in the course of virus mania. Here, we must consider that there is no money to be earned with recreational drug-related hypotheses, which emphasizes poisoning by drugs, medicines and other chemical substances like pesticides. On the contrary, prohibiting certain chemical substances would cause huge profit losses for production and processing industries as well as the pharmaceutical, chemical, automotive and toy industries—and also for the media, whose existence is largely dependent on proceeds from these industry’s advertisements.

In contrast, the virus theory clears the way for profits in the multibillions, with the sales of vaccines, PCR and antibody tests and antiviral medications. “In the world of biomedical research, ties to industry are pervasive but mentioning the fact is not,“ writes William Booth in Science as early as 1988.⁶⁵⁹ Correspondingly, new viruses are constantly invented— Ebola, SARS, avian flu, human papillomavirus (HPV)— to keep the cash flowing.⁶⁶⁰

But doubts on the virus dogma were so clearly and comprehensibly formulated, that from the end of the 1980s, more and more people began to share in the criticism. Among them were several renowned scientists such as former Harvard microbiologist Charles Thomas,⁶⁶¹ who founded the organization “Rethinking AIDS” at the beginning of the 1990s⁶⁶² (renamed “Reappraising AIDS” in 1994⁶⁶³—and renamed later again “Rethinking AIDS”). Thomas assembled hundreds of medical professionals, molecular biologists and other identified critics of the HIV = AIDS theory. Among them was Harvey Bialy, co-founder of the Nature offshoot Nature Biotechnology, and Yale mathematician Serge Lang (who died in 2005); like Duesberg, Lang was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (a list of more than 2000 critics is found on Rethinking-AIDS’ website, which re-formed in early 2006: www.rethinkingaids.com).

“It is good that the HIV hypothesis is being questioned,” Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry, Walter Gilbert told the Oakland Tribune in 1989.⁶⁶⁴ Duesberg, Gilbert acknowledged, “is absolutely correct in saying that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by the AIDS virus. And he is absolutely correct that the virus cultured in the laboratory may not be the cause of AIDS. There is no animal model for AIDS, and where there is no animal model, you cannot establish Koch’s postulates.” These arguments were so convincing, according to Gilbert, that he “would not be surprised if there were another cause of AIDS and even that HIV is not involved.”

Some time later, Gilbert expressed fundamental reservations in an English TV documentary critical of HIV/AIDS: “The community as a whole doesn’t listen patiently to critics who adopt alternative viewpoints, although the great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through the conflict of viewpoints, that if you have simply a consensus view, it generally stultifies, it fails to see the problems of that consensus; and it depends on the existence of critics to break up that iceberg an to permit knowledge to develop.”⁶⁶⁵

The media prefer to make this consensus argument their own, even though it’s their duty to diligently research every medical claim, sort fact from theory and question even majority rule (however formed) to clarify every issue. But in 1990, for instance, even the venerable New York Times countered the provocative argument of alleged “solitary dissenter” Peter Duesberg when it claimed that “virtually all of the leading scientists engaged in AIDS work believe that Duesberg is wrong.” Yet, by 1990, as shown above, many renowned researchers said that mainstream research could not deliver any proof for their HIV = AIDS theory.⁶⁶⁶

In 2000, Newsweek magazine expressed its incredulity that the “consensus doesn’t impress” the critics of the virus hypothesis in the article “The HIV Disbelievers.” Simultaneously, the piece calls the arguments of orthodox scientists “clear-cut, exhaustive, and unambiguous.” But evidence to support this statement could not be provided by Newsweek (not even upon request).⁶⁶⁷

1994: AIDS Researcher David Ho— as Convincing as a Giraffe with Sunglasses

John Maddox, the editor at Nature from 1966-1996 led a personal campaign against critics of the HIV = AIDS hypothesis. He even publicly censored Duesberg. On 7 November 1994 he justified this to the Spiegel, saying he found it “irresponsible” to say “drug consumption is the cause of AIDS.”⁶⁶⁸ Sir Maddox later contradicted this in a personal letter to Kiel internist Claus Köhnlein on 20 September 1995, saying that he had “not censored Duesberg because of his views but because of the manner in which he insists on expressing them.” And Maddox added, “that a hemophiliac relative of my wife died of AIDS.”⁶⁶⁹

But Maddox’s behavior—steering a scientific discussion in such a way based on personal views—is most frivolous and unethical. By doing this, he does no justice to his responsibility as Editor in Chief of Nature—a publication whose contents are taken at face value by the mass media.

Maddox took advantage of the huge influence of “his” Nature magazine again, at the beginning of 1995, when he published a paper by AIDS researcher David Ho, who claimed to have conclusively proven that HIV alone causes AIDS.⁶⁷⁰ But critics ripped Ho’s paper to pieces. The quality of the data and the modeling were incomprehensible and “about as convincing as a giraffe trying to sneak into a polar bears only picnic by wearing sunglasses,” as Australian scientist Mark Craddock jokes in his detailed critique.⁶⁷¹

In turn, Nobel laureate Kary Mullis concludes: “If Maddox seriously thinks or thought that these publications really prove that HIV causes AIDS, then he should go outside and shoot himself—because if he had had no justification before, why did he reject all my possible explanations and alternative hypotheses? Why did Maddox have such a fixed opinion? Why did the whole world have such a fixed opinion? If it had taken until 1995 to find out what produces AIDS—how could everyone have known it for ten years? The facts are now on the table, and when one examines them closely, HIV cannot be the cause of AIDS. There is no reason to believe that all these AIDS diseases have the same cause.”⁶⁷²

This staggering critique eventually found public validation in November 1996, when a paper was printed in Science that “took the ground out from under the feet” of Ho’s theses, according to journalists Kurt Langbein and Bert Ehgartner in their book The Medicine Cartel.⁶⁷³ The Science paper revealed that Ho had actually found no trace at all of the annihilating battle in the body between HIV and the immune system, the connections of which the renowned scientist claimed to have discovered.⁶⁷⁴

The Media under the Spell of Celebrity Researchers

Unfortunately, few reporters in the mass media did the necessary homework before writing about HIV and AIDS. Instead, the papers were constantly packed with stories approved by the AIDS establishment, for which heroes and kings, traitors and villains are needed.⁶⁷⁵ And scientific journalists are particularly prone to striking up hymns of praise.

“First came God, then came Gallo,” decreed Flossie Wong-Staal, Gallo’s closest collaborator and consort in the Los Angeles Times in 1986.⁶⁷⁶ One year later, the Washington Post quoted Sam Broder, director of the American National Cancer Institute, as saying: “Einstein, Freud—I’d put him [Gallo] on a list like that, I really would.”⁶⁷⁷

With David Ho, such excess was likewise not held back. On Christmas Day, 1996, just a few weeks after the journal Science had criticized the foundation of Ho’s work, the German Tageszeitung, without any irony intended, called him the “redeemer” and “the long-awaited Messiah of the AIDS scene.”⁶⁷⁸ The reason for such jubilation? A catchy slogan with which Ho became famous in the mid-1990s, and which at least for a few years became the global chief doctrine for AIDS therapy: “Hit HIV hard and early!” It endorsed prescribing high dosages of antiretroviral medication as early as possible, even on patients testing HIV positive who do not show any disease symptoms.⁶⁷⁹

A few days after his canonization by the Tageszeitung, Ho was celebrated on the cover of Time magazine as “Man of the Year 1996.” He was portrayed as a “genius,” whose “brilliance” had produced “some of the boldest yet most cogent hypotheses in the epidemic campaign against HIV. [His] spirit is startling, manifested in a passionate transcendence [that] is evident in his gestures … [Ho] is an extraordinary American success story.” The Spiegel didn’t want to be out-of-step and soon declared Ho, thanks to his “decided optimism” to be “the new shining light in the research world.”⁶⁸⁰

This euphoria did not last. In February 2001 even Altman had to admit in his New York Times that there had been an official turnaround in AIDS therapy and Ho’s concept (“hit HIV hard and early”) had to be abandoned. It had turned out that the medications were much too toxic, causing liver and kidney damage, and that their effects were immunosuppressive—in other words, they put patients’ lives in danger.⁶⁸¹ Yet, even this defeat didn’t stop the Süddeutsche Zeitung from incorrectly writing at the beginning of 2004 that, “Ho’s maxim ‘hit HIV hard and early,’ with which he revolutionized HIV therapy,“ had led to “patients having better chances of survival.”⁶⁸²

AIDS Medications: The Fable of Life-Prolonging Effects

In 1987, the antiretroviral medication AZT became the first authorized AIDS medication. At the time, and for years afterwards, HIV/AIDS patients were typically given only one drug. This changed in 1995, when the multiple combination therapy (HAART) was introduced, in which, as is evident from the name, multiple substances are administered at the same time. Here, once again, the media broke out the streamers and confetti for another AIDS establishment party. For instance, Science declared the “new weapons against AIDS” as the “breakthrough of 1996.”⁶⁸³ And, it was universally reported that the antiretroviral preparations would “help people with AIDS live longer,” as the Washington Post announced in 2004.⁶⁸⁴

Hans Halter from the Spiegel even gave concrete numbers: “Those who are under the influence of medications, presently live on average 10 to 15 years. In contrast, the others who do not take any preparations only live five to ten years.”⁶⁸⁵ These drugs generated billions of dollars in excess revenue for drug-makers: in 2000, global revenue was $4 billion; by 2004, it jumped to $6.6 billion, and in 2010, it should crack the $9 billion mark. For pharmaceutical giants, the preparations are bestsellers. At Roche, for example, Fuzeon, a medication that has been on the market since August 2004, triggered a 25 percent turnover increase.⁶⁸⁶

But claims for the lifespan-increasing effectiveness of HAART medications are untenable. A close look at Halter’s comparison of survival rates, for instance, as gathered from the Ärzteblatt (Medical Journal) for Schleswig-Holstein, shows that the average survival time for patients taking medication was four months in 1988 and 24 months in 1997.⁶⁸⁷ And according to CDC bulletins, it now amounts to 46 months⁶⁸⁸—a long way from the 15 years mentioned by Halter. But however big the increase in lifespan, one glaring omission is that everyone—doctors as well as patients—approaches the issue more carefully, because they have become ever more aware of drug toxicities.

Now, these drugs are often administered or taken with interruptions (so-called drug treatment “holidays”) and also in lower doses. The earliest example of this treatment about-face happened with the first AIDS medication, AZT, which, at the end of the 1980s, was still given in doses of 1,500 mg a day. But at the beginning of the 1990s, the daily dose was reduced to 500 mg, since even mainstream medicine couldn’t overlook the fact that the administration of higher doses led to much higher death rates.⁶⁸⁹

Apart from that, we must soberly recognize that even a remaining lifetime of 46 months is not all that long, especially when you consider that perhaps millions of these medicated people are living with serious drug side effects that adversely affect quality of life. We must also recognize that there are these so-called long-term survivors or “non-progressors”. Common to these “positive” people is the fact that they have rejected AIDS medications from the start or only took them for a short time. Many of them tested positive more than two decades ago and are still living.690 691

The AIDS establishment now calls these HIV positive individuals who reject AIDS medications “elite controllers” as if they are somehow super-human.⁶⁹² The establishment now claims that 2 percent of AIDS patients may fit this category, but only a large controlled global study (which is actually missing) would be able to determine the exact number of HIV positive individuals remain healthy without taking AIDS drugs. However, the number of “elite controllers” is probably much higher, yet the “vast majority of [so-called] HIV-positives are long-term survivors!” as Berkeley microbiologist Peter Duesberg states. “Worldwide they number many, many millions.”⁶⁹³

A look at the CDC statistics before 1993⁶⁹⁴ (and 2003 statistics from the Robert Koch Institute)⁶⁹⁵ shows that the number of AIDS deaths in the USA and also in Germany had already peaked in 1991, and decreased in the years following. And logically, the multiple combination therapy introduced in 1995/1996 cannot be responsible for this decrease. Newer CDC statistic, however, do show that the mortality peak lies approximately in 1995/1996. How can this be?

According to statistician Vladimir Koliadin, who analyzed the mortality data, this is due to the fact that in early 1993, AIDS in the USA was once again significantly redefined. From 1993 on, any individual testing HIV positive with less than 200 CD4 cells per microliter of blood was counted as an AIDS patient. If both criteria were met, a diagnosis of “AIDS defining” diseases like shingles (herpes zoster) or Kaposi’s sarcoma was no longer necessary (although the old definition of, say, a positive HIV test + Kaposi’s = AIDS was still valid).

This broadening of the AIDS definition meant that many people had the “AIDS patient” label superimposed upon them, even though they were actually not sick at all. A laboratory figure showing that an individual had less than 200 CD4 cells per microliter of blood was good enough for the AIDS establishment. But what this value ultimately means is, as discussed, anything but clear.⁶⁹⁶ Countries such as Canada have even decided not to introduce the CD4 cell count as criteria for the AIDS definition.⁶⁹⁷

Diagram 5 Number of AIDS cases in the USA, 1982-1995
according to the old AIDS definition (dark bars; “classical AIDS”) and according to the 1993 definition (white bars; includes CD4 cell criterion)

The number of AIDS cases in the USA doubled overnight as a result of the widening of the AIDS definition in 1993. This ensured the peak number of AIDS cases, and with it the mortality peak was pushed back from the early to the mid-1990s. “If public and policy makers would have realized that epidemic of AIDS was declining, this might have resulted in reduction of budget for AIDS research and prevention programs, including the budget of the CDC themselves,“ stated the research scientist Vladimir Koliadin. Source: Koliadin, Vladimir, Some Facts behind the Expansion of the Definition of AIDS in 1993, March 1998; see https://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/vknewdef.htm

In any case, the number of AIDS cases in the USA doubled overnight as a result of the widening of the AIDS definition in 1993. This ensured the peak number of AIDS cases, and with it the mortality peak was pushed back (see diagram 5) from the early to the mid-1990s. “If public and policy makers would have realized that epidemic of AIDS was declining, this might have resulted in reduction of budget for AIDS research and prevention programs, including the budget of the CDC themselves,“ according to Koliadin. “Expansion of the definition of AIDS in 1993 helped to disguise the downward trend in epidemic of AIDS. It is reasonable to suppose that an essential motive behind the implementation of the new definition of AIDS just in 1993 was strong unwillingness of the CDC to reveal the declining trend of AIDS epidemic.”⁶⁹⁸

Even if we pushed all these considerations to the side, the introduction of combination therapy (HAART) and new active substances (particularly protease inhibitors) in 1995/1996 cannot explain the reduction in AIDS mortalities anyway; when the new substances were introduced, they were not available to even a good proportion of patients.

The opposite was probably the case. A meta-analysis with data from Europe, Australia and Canada shows that in 1995, patients used combination therapy during only 0.5 percent of treatment time. In 1996, the value lay at 4.7 percent, which is still extremely low.⁶⁹⁹ Former CDC director James Curran told CNN that, at the time, “less than 10 percent of infected Americans had access to these new therapies, or were taking them.”⁷⁰⁰

Ten years later, while the media celebrated HAART’s 10th birthday, the Lancet published a study that challenged the propaganda about HAART, showing that decreases in so-called viral load did not “translate into a decrease in mortality” for people taking these highly toxic AIDS drug combinations. The multi-center study—the largest and longest of its kind— tracked the effects of HAART on some 22,000 previously treatment naive HIV positives between 1995 and 2003 at 12 locations in Europe and the USA. The study’s results refute popular claims that the newer HAART meds extend life and improve health.⁷⁰¹

Commenting on the article, Felix de Fries of Study Group AIDS-Therapy in Zurich, Switzerland had this to say: “The Lancet study shows that after a short period of time, HAART treatment led to increases in precisely those opportunistic diseases that define AIDS from fungal infections of the lungs, skin and intestines to various mycobacterial infections.” De Fries also notes that HAART has led to no sustained increases in CD4 cell counts, no reduction in AIDS-defining illness and no decrease in mortality rates; its use is also associated with a list of serious adverse events such as cardiovascular disease, lipodystrophy, lactic acidosis, liver and kidney failure, osteoporosis, thyroid dysfunction, neuropathy, and cancers among users.⁷⁰²

Yet, why even argue over pros and cons of HAART since statements about the life-prolonging effects of the medications are impossible to verify in the first place? Statements about the life-prolonging effects of the preparations are namely impossible, because the precedent condition has not been met: placebo-controlled studies. Since if one has no comparison with a group taking an ineffective preparation (placebo), it is not possible to know if the changes (improvement or worsening in patient’s health) are due to the medication or not. Placebo studies, however, have practically not been carried out anymore since the 1987 Fischl study published in the NEJM, because, as it is said, the Fischl study found AZT to be effective.⁷⁰³

For this reason, the AIDS establishment has since argued that it’s no longer ethically justifiable to withhold the (allegedly) lifesaving antiretroviral medication from the patients (not even in test series).

People as Guinea Pigs

There are several objections, however, to this “ethical” argument. Not only do even leading orthodox AIDS scientist state that in medical science “no researcher can assess a drug’s effectiveness with scientific certainty without testing it against a placebo.” Also, as outlined, it was not HAART, but the huge widening of the definition of the disease as well as the drastic reductions in doses of AIDS drugs such as AZT that made the death rate from AIDS come down in the mid-1990s. Moreover, new studies show that most of the medical industry’s drug promises are false. Pharmaceuticals hyped in glossy advertisements and TV commercials aren’t responsible for improving test patients’ health—rather, this can largely be traced back to the placebo effect. This is particularly worth noting when you consider that no expense is spared in bringing effective medications onto the market: expenditures for pharmaceuticals increased by 2,500 percent between 1972 and 2004—from $20 billion to $500 billion annually.704 705

Moreover, two studies by the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) make a case for the general introduction of placebo controls. This makes sense, since it is fully possible that proposed new drugs will have no effect at all. Or that, compared to the placebo, they are harmful; something that is also very possible, because medications are, as a rule, often connected with side effects—even fatal ones sometimes.706 707

What right does the medical industry have to preach about ethics when its own human trials sweeps mortalities and physical damage under the carpet in the lust to get authorization to market their medications to the general public? In the USA alone, 3.7 million people—mostly poor hispanic immigrants—have registered to participate in medical trials.

Lack of transparency and conflicts of interest continue to plague these drug trials, which are sponsored by the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.⁷⁰⁸

Even our most vulnerable citizens aren’t protected from the machinations of the medical industrial complex, as revealed in 2004. Infants as young as a few months old were experimented upon in US clinical trials, partly financed by pharmaceutical firms like GlaxoSmithKline, involving cocktails of up to seven medications. They were mostly black and latino children from the poorest of circumstances gathered together under the auspices of institutions like the Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) in New York; the ICC was even remunerated for supplying children for the tests. “Stephen Nicholas, for example, was not only director of the ICC until 2002; he also simultaneously sat on the Pediatric Medical Advisory Panel, which was supposed to check the tests—which signifies a serious conflict of interest,“ criticizes Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), a medical industry watchdog organization.

These first-line Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials are associated with the highest health risk because they are not meant to establish efficacy, so impact on the trial participants is highly unpredictable. These early trials aren’t meant to deliver an effective therapy, but rather, figure out how toxic the substance is (Phase 1) in order to then estimate if the active substance being tested has any effect at all (Phase 2). Biotechnologist Art Caplan explained that the odds are typically stacked up against the drug: if Phase 1 trials prove that a substance is useful for an individual, this would have to be termed a “miracle.”⁷⁰⁹

“The children were suffering horribly from the side effects of the drugs tested on them,” according to journalist Liam Scheff, who broke the story in early 2004, on an alternative website. “And children who didn’t want the substances were even forced to take them. For this, plastic tubes were sewn through the abdominal wall by surgeons, through which the substances can be directly injected into the stomach.” The result: brain and bone marrow damage, blindness, strokes—and “some children also died,“ according to Scheff.⁷¹⁰ The New York Post seized upon the story and ran the headline: “AIDS Tots Used as ‘Guinea Pigs’”⁷¹¹—a term which the BBC also used for their television documentary “Guinea Pig Kids.”⁷¹²

In 2005, an official investigation ultimately came to the conclusion that “government-funded researchers who tested AIDS drugs on foster children over the past two decades violated federal rules designed to protect vulnerable youths.”⁷¹³

This finally prompted the New York Times, which is otherwise always the first on the scene on the subject of HIV/AIDS, to take up the highly explosive topic as well, with a decidedly different spin. In an article, two pediatricians were quoted as saying that, “to have withheld promising drugs from sick children just because they were in foster care would have been inhumane,“ and “there is impressive evidence that [the children] were helped [by the medications].”⁷¹⁴ Details on this evidence, however, were never offered up. We even requested that authors of the Times article name the studies that prove these statements—but there was no response.⁷¹⁵

This might seem incredibly shocking, but it is all-too common in AIDS research. “I have scoured the literature for evidence that the anti-HIV drugs actually prolong the lives, or at least improve the quality of the lives, of the children given these drugs—but I could not find any support for either possibility,“ says AIDS researcher David Rasnick. “For example, the study ‘Lamivudine in HIV-infected children’ by Lewis et al, not only has no control group but the authors also acknowledge that the [antiretroviral] study compound Lamivudine acts as a DNA chain terminator. And there is no data in the paper showing that the drug does anything good for the children. On the contrary, among the 90 children in the study, “11 children had to be withdrawn from the study for disease progression [in other words, it didn’t work for them] and 10 because of possible Lamivudine-related toxicity, and 6 had died.’”⁷¹⁶

But the AIDS orthodoxy continued along its own path, calling the clinical trials involving children so “resounding” in their success “that the tests are now being spread out to Asia and Africa,“ according to Annie Bayne, spokesperson for the Columbia University Medical Center, which was also involved in the trials. This is not unusual, for AIDS research often goes into poor countries to carry out its medication trials. This is also true for trials of the efficacy of so-called microbicides, which are said to prevent the sexual transmission of HIV, and from which so much is promised.

“Marvelous microbicides: [the] intravaginal vaginal gels could save millions of [human] lives,“ announced the Lancet in 2004, then qualifying their hopes by adding that, “first someone has to prove that they work.” Nothing has been proven at all, yet the miracle has already been announced far and wide. Experts, as the Lancet continues, were of the firm opinion that “microbicides will only reach everyone who needs them [if] large pharmaceutical companies get involved. In the remotest part of Thailand you can buy a bottle of coke. We want microbes to be available like that.”

This is all the more striking if you consider that the first microbicide tests of the active substance nonoxynol-9 (n-9) ended in catastrophe. At first, n-9 was also glorified by researchers as a microbicide with “ideal potential microbicide because in vitro [test tube] studies pointed to its effectiveness.”⁷¹⁷ 900 “sex-workers” from Benin, the Ivory Coast, South Africa and Thailand were selected for a clinical trial, which involved smearing gel laced with n-9 into their vaginas. But the gel not only had no medical efficacy, as UNAIDS admitted,⁷¹⁸ it also damaged the poor women’s epithelial cells.⁷¹⁹

AZT Study 1987: A Gigantic Botch-Up

“If there is really doubt about whether a standard treatment is effective, the FDA should require that clinical trials of new treatments have three comparison groups—new drug, old drug, and placebo,“ writes Marcia Angell, former Editor in Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.⁷²⁰ For AIDS research, this meant that placebo groups had to be introduced to medication trials, for there were justified doubts that the efficacy of AZT (the standard AIDS treatment) had really be proven with the 1987 Fischl study.

Journalist and Harvard analyst John Lauritsen, who has viewed the FDA documents on the Fischl study, came to the conclusion that the study was “fraud”;⁷²¹ the Swiss newspaper Weltwoche termed the experiment a “gigantic botch-up”⁷²² and NBC News in New York branded the experiments, conducted across the US, as “seriously flawed”⁷²³—criticism which is not to be found in the rest of the mainstream media either because the statements of the AIDS establishment are completely trusted, or because, like the Neue Zürcher Zeitung’s scientific editorial staff, one simply does not know of even such a significant study as that of Fischl et al.⁷²⁴

The Fischl experiments were, in fact, stopped after only four months, after 19 trial subjects in the placebo group (those who did not receive AZT, but rather an inactive placebo) and only one participant from the so-called verum group (those who were officially taking AZT) had died. Through this, according to the AIDS establishment, the efficacy of AZT appeared to be proven.

But the arguments don’t add up. A clinical trial observation period of only four months is much too short to be informative, considering the usual practice of administering AIDS medications over years, or even a lifetime⁷²⁵ and since long-term studies are missing in these and other medical research fields.

In the USA, for example, around $100 billion is spent annually on medical research. This figure has doubled since the mid-1990s, and almost a third of it comes from tax dollars. Yet long-term evaluations of pills and treatments are criminally neglected: just 1.6 percent of the $100 billion budget is allocated to long-term studies.⁷²⁶ For patients taking medications, “this is like Russian roulette,“ states British doctor Robert Califf.⁷²⁷

The AZT study was financed by AZT manufacturer Wellcome (today GlaxoSmithKline), which is clearly a conflict of interest. But somehow this, like the sloppiness of the Fischl study, didn’t bother anyone, especially not the pharmaceutical groups (nor the media!), for whom AZT would become a cash cow⁷²⁸ (it was actually said that AZT was worth its weight in gold).⁷²⁹

Yet, the Fischl study’s double blind requirements (according to which, neither researchers nor patients were permitted to know who was taking AZT and who was taking the placebo) were violated after only a short time. In their desire to be given the alleged wonder-preparation, patients even had their pills analyzed to be sure that they were among the group receiving the medication and not the placebo; public propaganda had made test subjects believe that only AIDS medications like AZT could save them.

FDA documents also reveal that the study results were distorted, because the group that took AZT, and had to battle the adverse side effects, received more supportive medical services than the placebo subjects. For example, in the AZT group, 30 patients were kept alive through multiple blood transfusions until the end of the study—in the placebo group, on the other hand, this was only true in five cases.730 731

“There was widespread tampering with the rules of the [Fischl] trial—the rules have been violated coast to coast,“ said lead NBC reporter Perri Peltz in 1988, adding that “if all patients with protocol violations were dropped, there wouldn’t be enough” to be able to continue the study.⁷³² “When preparing this report, we repeatedly tried to interview Dr. Anthony Fauci [probably the most powerful AIDS official in the USA] at the National Institutes of Health,” reports Peltz. “But both Dr. Fauci and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Frank Young declined our request for interviews.”⁷³³ These are the experiences of practically everyone who has criticized the theories of dominant AIDS medicine.734 735 The renowned British doctor and epidemiologist Gordon Stewart, for instance said: “I have asked the health authorities, editors-in-chief and other experts concerned with HIV/AIDS repeatedly for proof of their theses—and I’ve been waiting for an answer since 1984.”⁷³⁶

Harvey Bialy, co-founder of Nature Biotechnology said: “I am very tired of hearing AIDS establishment scientists tell me they are ‘too busy saving lives’ to sit down and refute Peter Duesberg’s arguments although each one assures me they could ‘do it in a minute if they had to.’“⁷³⁷

We also contacted leading mainstream mass media and specialized journals including the New York Times, Time, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Stern, Tageszeitung, Weltwoche, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Nature, Science, Spektrum der Wissenschaft, asking them to send us clear evidence:

That the existence of HIV has been proven

That so-called HIV antibody tests and PCR viral load tests as well as the CD4 helper cell count specifically diagnose HIV/AIDS

That HIV is the sole or primary cause of the diseases grouped together as AIDS

That HIV is contagious and can be transmitted through sexual contact or blood

That antiretroviral preparations are effective and prolong lifetime

That the AIDS statistics proclaimed by the WHO and UNAIDS are sound

That non-viral factors such as drugs, medications and malnutrition can be ruled out as primary causes⁷³⁸

But to date, not a single study has been revealed to us, not even from any of the many orthodox scientists and journalists we queried. This includes Nature writer Declan Butler, who wrote in the world-renowned journal in 2003: “Most [mainstream] AIDS researchers strongly dispute these statements” that there is no proof that HIV causes AIDS, that HIV is contagious, and so on. But Butler failed to respond to our request that he provide evidence of this in the form of relevant studies.⁷³⁹

We also contacted John Moore of Cornell University in New York, who was quoted in Butler’s Nature piece, and who thinks “revisionists are best ignored. [They are leading] an unwinnable debate based on faith not fact.”⁷⁴⁰ But when we asked Moore if he could name the factual evidence for his HIV = AIDS = death-sentence theory, he responded by calling these critics the “HIV-is-a-pussycat-fraction” and charged them with “pure stupidity and malice.”⁷⁴¹

Scientific historian Horace Judson writes that, “Central to the problem of misconduct is the response of institutions when charges erupt. Again and again the actions of senior scientists and administrators have been the very model of how not to respond. They have tried to smother the fire. Such flawed responses are altogether typical of misconduct cases.”⁷⁴²

These opinions were never known by the Fischl trial subjects. After four years, 80 percent of them had died; a short while later, all of them were dead. This is shocking but not really surprising, considering that AZT is an extremely poisonous chemotherapy-like medication, invented by researcher Jerome Horwitz in the 1960s. Horwitz’s goal had been to develop a DNA blocker, which inhibits cell replication, to kill cancer cells. But, his test mice perished from the extreme toxicities of AZT.⁷⁴³

“On paper, [Horwitz’s] logic was impeccable, [but] in reality, it simply didn’t work,“ summarizes BusinessWeek journalist Bruce Nussbaum in his book, Good Intentions—How Big Business and the Medical Establishment are Corrupting the Fight against AIDS, Alzheimer’s, Cancer and More. “When the experiment ended in failure, so, in a way, had the first half of Horwitz’s life. Disgusted, he turned on AZT.” Horwitz himself said he was so cloyed with the drug that he “dumped it on the junk pile. I didn’t [even] keep the notebooks.” AZT was “so worthless” to him that he “even didn’t think it was worth patenting.”⁷⁴⁴

The AIDS Therapy Dilemma

AZT was in fact stored away instead of being dumped as toxic waste, and when AIDS mania surfaced in the 1980s, it was pulled out of the cupboard again. And the “AIDS virus” hypothesis, just like the many other virus theories for serious illnesses like leukemia, breast cancer and multiple sclerosis, would probably have disintegrated long ago, if not for AZT. In 1987, it became the AIDS “therapy” even though, in the recommended dosage, it was absolutely fatal.⁷⁴⁵ The medical community ignored the possibility that AZT-poisoning was the cause of death because they still had stuck in their minds the pictures of the first AIDS patients in the beginning of the 1980s, who certainly looked as if they’d been struck down and carried off by a deadly virus.

So, when doctors looked at these AZT patients in 1987, they refused to make any connection with the highly toxic antiviral AZT. Their belief in the deadliness of HIV was so firm that they weren’t even shocked when all patients died within a short time. And so, with the Fischl study published in the NEJM, these doctors believed it worked and still allege to have tangible proof of AZT’s efficacy.

A kind of “big bang” for this HIV=AIDS dogma was the story of Hollywood actor Rock Hudson. Born in 1925, the 1.96-meter tall man died in October 1985 and was presented to the world as the first megastar the “AIDS virus” took down. Hudson practically gave AIDS “a face” and the virus hunters godlike status, although there was and is no justification for drawing the conclusion that a virus killed him (in order to do justice to the immeasurable significance of this event we sketch this deceptive AIDS legacy of Rock Hudson in the epilog at the end of this book)

This photo shows an African newborn, being administered a dose of Viramune (nevirapine), for the purpose of so-called HIV prevention (for Viramune’s side effects, see Table 2). However, what Medpage Today reported in 2011—that Viramune is “safe”—is not correct. „Viramune has a dangerous toxicity,“ as South African advocate and Viramune-expert Anthony Brink points out. “However, on the basis of HIVNET 012, an American study conducted in Uganda in the late 1990s, nevirapine is given to HIV-positive mothers in labour and to their newborn babies in dozens of developing countries—where the manufacturer Boehringer Ingelheim gives the drug away free to establish its future market.”⁷⁴⁶ Despite the revelations in December 2004 of a top-ranking US National Institutes of Health whistleblower, Jonathan Fishbein, exposing not only the extremely sloppy manner in which the study was conducted, but also the NIH’s deliberate, fraudulent suppression of serious adverse event data in the trial, including unreported deaths.

Table 2: Retrovir (AZT), Viramune (nevirapine)
Toxicity and therapeutic value of two AIDS medications (altogether, there are now around two dozen AIDS drugs)

Medication | Known Toxicities (manufacturer’s label) | Therapeutic Value (manufacturer’s label)
Retrovir (AZT) Glaxo- SmithKline | “Retrovir (AZT) has been associated with hematologic toxicity [blood toxicity], including neutropenia [anemia] and severe anemia” | “Retrovir is not a cure for HIV infection”
| “Prolonged use of Retrovir has been associated with symptomatic myopathy [muscle wasting]” | “The long-term effects of Retrovir are unknown at this time”
| “Lactic acidosis and severe hepatomegaly [liver swelling] with steatosis [fat degeneration], including fatal cases, have been reported with the use of nucleoside analogues [Retrovir, Epivir, Zerit] alone or in combination” | “The long-term consequences of in utero and infant exposure to Retrovir are unknown, including the possible risk of cancer”
Viramune (nevirapine) Boehringer Ingelheim | “Patients should be informed of: the possibility of severe liver disease or skin reactions associated with Viramune that may result in death” | “Viramune is not a cure for HIV-1 infection”
| “Severe, life-threatening and in some cases fatal hepatotoxicity [liver damage], including hepatic necrosis [liver death] and hepatic failure, has been reported in patients treated with Viramune” |
| “Severe, life-threatening skin reactions, including fatal cases…have included cases of Stevens-Johnson syndrome, toxic epidermal necrolysis [skin death]” |

Source: Scheff, Liam, The House That AIDS Built, see www.altheal.org/toxicity/house.htm, package inserts

HIV mania appears to cause its own range of symptoms: primarily a strong bias against the facts, including that chemical substances like drugs or prescription medications (particularly antiviral) are extremely toxic and can trigger precisely the observed symptoms (also mentioned on package labels) which they aim to prevent: destruction of mitochondria, anemia, bone marrow, and consequently immune system, damage, etc.⁷⁴⁷

In the end, a vicious circle arises. Virologists have no proof of their thesis that a virus triggers the diseases grouped together under the term AIDS. So they consider proof to be collecting subjective information from clinicians who assert that the medications are effective. But, in industrialized countries, doctors very often treat patients not because they are sick (a large proportion have no physical complaints whatsoever), but rather because they have tested positive, they show only a certain number of helper cells or a slight so-called viral load has been measured via PCR.

Virologists tell general practitioners that patients are carrying the deadly HIV. The medications available for this, however, are highly toxic; their use produces an immune deficiency syndrome—and exactly fulfils the predictions of the virus hypothesis (that people will become severely ill and die). Healthy people are “treated” and worsening health is then attributed to the viral illness, which the drug therapy cannot counter.#

Ultimately, if the medication doesn’t have any health-stimulating effects, this is also attributed to HIV’s alleged craftiness; the virus itself is said to cause “treatment-resistant viral mutations.” The patient dies with typical AIDS symptoms like dementia, wasting (weight loss), and neural damage. In their virus fixation, nobody imagines that the patient dies, not of AIDS, but of the very medical endeavors meant to heal.

Some HIV patients who are really sick do respond to antiretroviral medications. But this is because most of these patients suffer from what are called opportunistic infections (infections that occur as a result of an immunological/physical weakness, which in turn can have many non-viral causes). This means that they are infested by bacteria or fungi. In this context, antiretroviral treatment works like a shotgun therapy, destroying everything bound to DNA—including fungi, tubercle bacteria (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) and other microbes.

However, those who take protease inhibitors must face serious consequences in the long term, because these drugs can also cause liver failure (see livertox.nih.org) The side effects should therefore not be underestimated for any antiviral medication that is used for treatin so-called AIDS patients. And a study published in Nature Genetics in 2011 warned of the “of irreversible long-term effects of the drugs on mtDNA mutations raising the specter of progressive iatrogenic mitochondrial genetic disease emerging over the next decade.”⁷⁴⁸

Especially the smallest earthlings are not immune to such consequences. For example, the German journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt reported in 2002 that “clinical data have shown that serious undesirable side effects for the child can be expected when using antiviral combination therapies in pregnancy.”⁷⁴⁹

And in an overview analysis of the topic from 2013 it says with regard to possible birth defects caused by AZT (AZT is still often part of a HAART) that there are “increasing concerns about congenital malformations, including potential cancer, mitochondrial defects, heart abnormalities, abnormalities in the blood and urinary system and sexual apparatus.”⁷⁵⁰

Even Goethe knew that medicines could kill. Faust says:⁷⁵¹

Here was the medicine, the patients died and nobody asked who

convalesced. So we ravaged with hellish electuaries [medicine]

worse than the pestilence in these valleys, these mountains.

I myself administered the poison to thousands;

they withered, I had to witness that the brazen murderers were praised.

All on AZT: The Deaths of Freddie Mercury,
Rudolph Nureyev and Arthur Ashe

Even celebrities fall for the theory that antiretroviral substances like AZT are the only hope in the battle against AIDS. Take, for example, Freddie Mercury, former front man of British rock band Queen, who was bisexual and had himself tested during the general AIDS panic at the end of the 1980s. The result: positive. Mercury was terrified and took his doctor’s advice to begin taking AZT. Mercury belonged to the first generation of patients, who received the full AZT load (1500 mg a day). At the end, he looked like a bone rack, and he died in London on 24 November 1991 at the age of 45.⁷⁵²

Rudolf Nureyev, Tatar origin and held by many to be the greatest ballet dancer of all time, also began taking AZT at the end of the 1980s. Nureyev was HIV positive, but otherwise he was completely healthy. His personal physician, Michel Canesi, recognized the deadly effects of AZT and even warned him about the drug. But Nureyev proclaimed, “I want that drug!” Ultimately, he died in Paris in 1993⁷⁵³—the same year that former Wimbledon champion Arthur Ashe met his maker at the age of 49, after he had been declared HIV positive in 1988 and his doctor prescribed for him an extremely high AZT dose.⁷⁵⁴

At some point, Ashe discussed AZT’s toxicity. In October 1992, he wrote a column for the Washington Post. “The confusion for AIDS patients like me is that there is a growing school of thought that HIV may not be the sole cause of AIDS, and that standard treatments such as AZT actually make matters worse,” Ashe acknowledged, adding, “there may very well be unknown co-factors, but that the medical establishment is too rigid to change the direction of basic research and/or clinical trials.”⁷⁵⁵ Ashe wanted to stop taking AZT, but he didn’t dare: “What will I tell my doctors?“ he asked the New York Daily News.⁷⁵⁶

In our article “Das trügerische AIDS-Erbe von Rock Hudson” (“The Deceptive AIDS Legacy of Rock Hudson”), published on World AIDS Day (December 1) in 2017 in the online magazine Rubikon, we go into more detail about the sad fates of these three megastars and especially that of Rock Hudson (about Rock Hudson, see epilog at the end of this book).

Basketball Star “Magic” Johnson:
“There Is No Magic in AZT, and No AZT in ‘Magic’”

What Ashe didn’t have the heart to do— resist the pressure of prevailing AIDS medicine and decide against AZT intake—apparently saved the life of basketball megastar Earvin “Magic” Johnson.

At the end of 1991, Magic shocked the world with the news he had tested HIV positive. “It can happen to anybody, even Magic Johnson,“ said Time magazine on 18 November 1991.⁷⁵⁷ A few days later, Time wrote that the basketball player had “put the risk of heterosexual transmission squarely in center court.” But what was the basis of this assumption? Nothing at all, for the American magazine—just like the rest of the media world—simply referred to Johnson’s mere conjecture that he had “picked up the AIDS virus heterosexually,” that is to say through sex with a woman.⁷⁵⁸

Evidence to support this statement is not available. Magic Johnson had tested positive, but at the same time, he was the picture of health—until “AIDS ruler” Anthony Fauci and his personal doctor, the New York AIDS researcher David Ho, insistently advised him to take AZT. Johnson followed their advice.

But Magic’s health rapidly deteriorated,⁷⁵⁹ so much, in fact, that he felt “like vomiting almost every day,” according to a 1991 National Enquirer story “Magic Reeling as Worst Nightmare Comes True—He’s Getting Sicker.”⁷⁶⁰ But virus mania was by then so dominant that nobody thought that the extremely toxic medications could have caused Magic’s serious health problems.

There was not a lot of time to think about it anyway, as Johnson’s symptoms suddenly disappeared after a short time. In the summer of 1992, after the media announced his retirement from basketball in late 1991⁷⁶¹, he even led the US basketball team to the gold medal at the Olympic games in Barcelona.⁷⁶² This was a grandiose achievement, and had he still been under the influence of AZT, there was no way he could have accomplished such a thing.

One assumes, then, that Magic only took AZT for a very short time; when he discontinued the medication with the deadly side effects, his complaints likewise disappeared. Indeed, years later, in 1995, he admitted in a personal conversation in Florida that he had only taken AZT for a very short time. The medications were connected with far too severe side effects. And so came the saying, “There is no magic in AZT, and no AZT in ‘Magic.’”⁷⁶³

But AIDS drug manufacturers also play a highly competitive game in an increasingly marketing-driven industry. For several years GlaxoSmith-Kline (GSK) used “Magic” Johnson to spread its miracle cure messages especially among urban blacks. The basketball star’s image is splashed on billboards, subway posters and full-page ads in newspapers and magazines. The ads picture a robust-looking Johnson and feature messages such as, “Staying healthy is about a few basic things: A positive attitude, partnering with my doctor, taking my medicine every day.”⁷⁶⁴ Those ads are now gone because Johnson got a better offer from Abbott and is now promoting another combination AIDS drug, Kaletra.

“Magic Johnson: My AIDS Confession. The Olympic Superstar About His Life, His Women, His Ailment,” Stern 44/1992. © Stern/Picture Press

However, this does not necessarily mean that Johnson himself is taking these highly toxic drugs. As outlined, the opposite is obviously true. Magic is the poster boy for HIV positive heterosexuals and he’s a spokesman for a drug manufacturer, so he has a financial conflict of interest that may disallow him from revealing if he is really taking GSK’s Combivir or Abbott’s Kaletra and, if so, how much drug he’s really taking. “Johnson has not directly confirmed that he is taking the drugs he pushes,” says AIDS drugs researcher David Rasnick.

In October 2004, we approached the Magic Johnson Foundation to ask if the basketball player has taken any AIDS medications since the Olympic triumph in 1992, and, if so, for how long. But, as of today, we have not received a response.

Hemophiliacs and AIDS

The publication of the Darby study in September 1995 in Nature also contributed to the cementing of the belief that AIDS is a viral disease. In it, death rates of hemophiliacs in England who had tested HIV positive were compared with those of their HIV negative hemophiliac counterparts over a period from 1985-1992. The printed graph showed that the death rate of positive-tested hemophiliacs began to rise from about 1986; in 1987 it rose even more sharply. In comparison, the graph showing HIV negative hemophiliacs remained practically unchanged (see diagrams 6 and 7). Orthodox medicine claimed that this was proof that these deaths were caused by HIV.765 766

But this study stirred up sharp criticism. Previously mentioned Australian researcher Mark Craddock, for example, penned a decisive paper and submitted it to Nature. But it was rejected—along with papers by Peter Duesberg⁷⁶⁸ and the Australian Perth Group⁷⁶⁹— even though the logic behind their critiques is impressive.

Diagram 6 Death rates of hemophiliacs in Great Britain with a high degree of clotting factor deficiency (upper graphic) and of hemophiliacs in Great Britain with light to moderate clotting factor (lower graphic), from 1976 to 1992

Hemophiliac mortality increased only after the introduction of HIV medicine in 1985. Since about half of Darby’s 2,037 severe hemophiliacs were already so-called HIV-positive by this time, surely HIV-caused mortality should have exerted a detectable influence prior to 1985 in this group. Hence, “only one theory can explain why the explosion of hemophiliac mortality should occur only on the heels of HIV testing: the increased mortality was caused by the pharmaceutical drugs”, as biologist Paul Philpott in his article “Darby Debunked: Pro-HIV hemophiliac study actually points towards non-contagious AIDS”.⁷⁶⁷ Source: Duesberg, Peter; Koehnlein, Claus; Rasnick, David, The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-Viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition, Journal of Biosciences, June 2003, pp. 396-398

Hemophiliacs lack coagulation factor VIII and a replacement has been available since the 1960s causing hemophiliacs’ life expectancy to continuously rise until 1985, right when HIV antibody tests were introduced. This is a decisive factor, negligently missing from the Darby study.

The HIV antibody tests introduced in 1985 were immediately and massively deployed. At the same time, the whole world memorized the formula: positive test = HIV infection = AIDS = death sentence. Because of this, the rise in hemophiliacs’ death rates is easily explainable. Those who received a positive test result were put into a state of shock and many committed suicide. The rest, regardless of their health status, were automatically treated as AIDS patients.

Researchers and doctors tried out all sorts of toxic substances on them, administering them long-term, including antifungal medications or Eusaprim, an antibiotic that hinders cell division. This also affected hemophiliacs who had tested positive but otherwise didn’t have any health problems—until they started taking the toxic AIDS medications.

We can’t be sure exactly which medications were administered to those declared AIDS patients, since they weren’t listed in detail, as Nature editor John Maddox confirmed in 1995.⁷⁷⁰ But, the Spiegel reported in 1985 that, “more than a dozen different medications are in clinical trials in the United States alone—all of them have shown little success so far, and are burdened with severe side effects. Even ‘HPA-23,’ the substance favored by French scientists and developed at the Louis Pasteur Institute, and with which Rock Hudson was treated last autumn, has its difficulties. In Paris, a clinical study of ‘HPA-23’ is being carried out on 33 subjects; but, the medication had to be discontinued with numerous patients because of extreme blood and liver damage.”⁷⁷¹

In 1987, AZT busted onto the market and all positive patients, including hemophiliacs, immediately received the medication associated with fatal side effects—something that explains why hemophiliacs’ death rates sharply increased from this point onward.

Incidentally, Rock Hudson died in 1985, officially of AIDS. Less well-known is the fact that Hudson’s male partner had tested negative and had no AIDS symptoms—something which clearly speaks against AIDS being a viral disease (see also epilog at the end of this book). In the mid-1990s, American congressman Gil Gutknecht became aware of this and all the other inconsistencies and shortcomings of the HIV = AIDS hypothesis. And so he confronted the AIDS establishment’s highest operatives with a whole range of critical questions, including: “Where is the proof that clearly shows that AIDS is a contagious disease?” But Gutknecht never got a real answer either.⁷⁷²

Incidentally, the blood plasma designed for hemophiliacs is freeze-dried before its administration, often for long periods. If you hypothetically assume that this virus does exist, it would not survive such extreme conditions, as mainstream medicine admits. The Centers for Disease Control states that this drying process of ”human blood or other body fluids reduces the theoretical risk of environmental transmission to that which has been observed—essentially zero. Incorrect interpretation of conclusions drawn from laboratory studies have unnecessarily alarmed some people.”⁷⁷³

No surprise, then, that in specialist literature, there is not one single clear-cut case of HIV infection among health care workers who typically deal with blood on a daily basis.⁷⁷⁴

Africa: How Well-Known Diseases Are Redefined as AIDS

As statistics on HIV infection remain stable or decrease in developed nations, the AIDS establishment and the media turn their focus to Africa. Headlines and TV news stories are scary: millions of Africans have died and will die from HIV/AIDS. But in reality, these are computer-generated estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), based on a highly questionable data pool. And they seem grotesquely exaggerated when one compares them with the population statistics of precisely those countries where depopulation has been predicted for many, many years.

“Botswana has just concluded a census that shows population growing at about 2.7 per cent a year, in spite of what is usually described as the worst AIDS problem on the planet,” writes South African author Rian Malan in a cover story for the British news magazine The Spectator: “Africa Isn’t Dying of AIDS.” Malan points out that “there is similar bad news for the doomsayers in Tanzania’s new census, which shows population growing at 2.9 per cent a year. Professional pessimists will be particularly discomforted by developments in the swamplands west of Lake Victoria, where HIV first emerged, and where the depopulated villages of popular mythology are supposedly located. Here, in the district of Kagera, population grew at 2.7 per cent a year before 1988, only to accelerate to 3.1 per cent even as the AIDS epidemic was supposedly peaking. Uganda’s latest census tells a broadly similar story, as does South Africa’s.”775 776

“AIDS is a huge business, possibly the biggest in Africa,“ says James Shikwati, founder of Inter Region Economic Network, a society for economic promotion in Nairobi (Kenya). In a 2005 interview with Spiegel editor Thilo Thielke, Shikwati added that, “nothing else gets people to fork out money like shocking AIDS figures. AIDS is a political disease here: we should be very skeptical.”⁷⁷⁷ But the people in the control centers of politics, science and media aren’t suspicious, so they ignore the extreme discrepancy evident between perpetual predictions of horror (“Africa will be depopulated by AIDS”) and actual population increases.

It is still firmly assumed that the HIV antibody tests, which are an important basis for the WHO’s AIDS projections, are reliable measurement instruments. But let’s take a closer look back to 1994. At that time, the Journal of Infectious Diseases published a paper on HIV tests with lepers in Zaire, compiled by no less than Max Essex, who is said to be one of the founding fathers of orthodox AIDS science, and of the theory that HIV or AIDS originally comes from Africa.

Essex observed that lepers reacted positively to the HIV test. For this reason, Essex points out that the results of the tests should be taken with a grain of salt—above all for patients suffering from diseases like leprosy or tuberculosis. And in places where these diseases are so widespread, particularly in central African cities, antibody tests are probably insufficient to define an HIV infection without any doubt. Essex thought it best to let this observation count for all African countries.⁷⁷⁸

Neville Hodgkinson, then medical correspondent for the Sunday Times jumped on the topic and spent weeks traveling through Africa. “When I asked people what disease they were dying of, they replied: ‘from AIDS.’ Whereupon I inquired: ‘but from which disease in particular?’ To this they said: ‘This patient has tuberculosis, that one chronic diarrhea, this one malaria and that one leprosy’—all diseases that have been known in Africa for ages. But then everything was rediagnosed as AIDS—out of fear of AIDS.”⁷⁷⁹

In this context, Joan Shenton, British filmmaker and known critic of the official HIV=AIDS dogma, tells the following insightful story in her book “Positively False: Exposing the Myths Around HIV and AIDS”: “Lucy tested so-called HIV positive in Bukoba (Tanzania), with a single, unconfirmed blood test (wealthier countries typically test twice). From this time, Lucy was considered an AIDS patient, whereupon a certain Philippe Krynen and his wife Evelyne took her in. They were convinced that, if people like Lucy were properly treated (without toxic medications), they could achieve stable health again. This is exactly what happened with Lucy. The Krynens took the young African women out of her village and helped her get a more stable stone house and a better job. “And so it came that, within the next four or five months, Lucy began to recover, and also gained back weight,” says Philippe Krynen.

In 2018, the organization Medicus Mundi Schweiz reported that in African countries such as Mozambique “it is estimated that 45 percent of deaths among children are linked to malnutrition.” Mind you, that was in 2018—more than 30 years after the HIV/AIDS insanity has been “launched.” And while politics has done everything possible to push an unproven and highly contradictory HIV = AIDS thesis in these more than 30 years, it has been criminally neglected to do what is absolutely necessary: to provide social structures that ensure that not very young children are dying a miserable starvation death. Source: plone.medicusmundi.ch

Her old friends saw her with new eyes, and let go of their fear that Lucy could infect them. At the same time, they began to wonder if Lucy really had AIDS. At any rate, the AIDS stigma had been imposed upon Lucy, something which often leads to isolation. But now Lucy was doing fantastically without medication. And indeed, she never developed symptoms of any of the many well-known diseases that have been redefined under the term AIDS.”⁷⁸⁰

Nobel laureate Kary Mullis adds that, “They got some big numbers for HIV positive people [in Africa] before they realized that antibodies to malaria— which everyone in Africa has—show up as ‘HIV positive’ on tests.”⁷⁸¹ And not only malaria, but also dozens of other typical illnesses like chronic fever, weight loss, diarrhea and tuberculosis cause positive test results.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is actually a smorgasbord of well-known diseases, many of which correlate closely with poverty.782 783 You can’t speak concisely about AIDS in Africa without featuring the subject of poverty. Yet, this is still criminally neglected in a region where a third of the population is malnourished and more than 30 percent of babies are born underweight.⁷⁸⁴ As we know, malnutrition has devastating effects upon health, and is a decisive factor in many diseases such as tuberculosis.

At least The Lancet took on this topic in 2004 and printed an article titled: “Preventing HIV/AIDS Through Poverty Reduction.” This documents praises South African president Thabo Mbeki (who is generally sharply scolded for his critical position towards the AIDS establishment) by pointing out that “Mbeki has highlighted poverty as a factor contributing to the spread of the epidemic, [and] it is useful to consider the role of poverty as a factor contributing to it, and the implications of this for prevention efforts.”⁷⁸⁵

Chapter 4

Hepatitis C: Toxins Such as Alcohol, Heroin,
and Prescription Drugs Suffice as Explanation

“Where is the hepatitis C virus? Has anybody seen it?”⁷⁸⁶

MICHAEL HOUGHTON ALLEGED CO-DISCOVERER OF THE HC VIRUS AT THE 8TH INTERNATIONAL HCV CONGRESS IN PARIS, 2001

“Toxic shocks like smoking or alcohol consumption can traumatize the liver, causing genetic instabilities. The human cell itself, then, can produce the genetic particles which are fished out by orthodox researchers with their PCR tests and simply interpreted as exogenous viruses. But before jumping on the virus bandwagon, one must have closely analyzed if these really are viruses—which has not happened with hepatitis C.”

RICHARD STROHMAN PROFESSOR OF MOLECULAR AND CELLULAR BIOLOGY

HIV Mania: Detonation for Antiviral Hepatitis C Therapy

Hepatitis C is commonly known as a liver infection caused by a virus (the so-called hepatitis C virus: HCV for short). According to theories, the disease is primarily transmitted through blood and blood products. In the 1970s, American researcher Jay Hoofnagle attempted to strike hepatitis C with medications. In 1978, he joined the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue his research on treating liver diseases.

At this time, leading experts in this area, the hepatologists and even the pharmaceutical companies were still of the opinion that treatment of hepatitis C patients with antiviral medications was too difficult and too dangerous, since substances were so full of side effects, and, directly after ingestion, they landed in the organ that was stricken anyway: the liver. For that reason, advances in medication therapy could hardly be observed.

There were experiments with the antiviral interferon, which was tested on cancer patients. But these trials were anything but a success. Hoofnagle was of the opinion, however, that the antiviral preparations had the potential to fight hepatitis C, even though mainstream researchers didn’t share Hoofnagle’s optimism. “The idea of treating a liver disease [with medications] went against the grain,” Hoofnagle told the medical journal The Lancet in 1997. “Liver disease was considered to be a good reason to avoid drug therapies.”⁷⁸⁷

This is no surprise, since substances like interferon ultimately work like chemotherapy and for that reason can severely affect more than just the liver;⁷⁸⁸ it was also observed that, after interferon administration, herpes developed, or the number of white blood cells (leukocytes) decreased, something that signals a weakening in the immune system. Interferons could also influence the nervous system, causing psychological alterations like depression and confusion.⁷⁸⁹

The side effects of HCV medications are frequently so strong that treatment has to be stopped. “We need medications that are more effective and tolerable than current treatment forms with the active substances interferon-alpha and ribavirin,” says Raffaele DeFrancesco, scientific director of the biochemical department at the Instituto Ricerche Biologia Moleculare in Rome. But DeFrancesco only meant that new medications should be developed to defeat the alleged virus.⁷⁹⁰

The virus mania pattern of thought had also infected theories about hepatitis. And so, all at once, the opinion was en vogue that liver diseases could, even must, be treated by antiviral medications.⁷⁹¹

The damage to the human body and particularly to the liver caused by medications is typically less drastic than in the case of— still too often life-long—antiviral AIDS treatments. But, mainly because most patients diagnosed with hepatitis C have just a temporary treatment, with medications such as interferon and ribavirin. And even this frequently leads to severe anemia (iron deficiency) and high fever. Also a risk of cancer cannot be ruled out with ribavirin either, because it has effects similar to chemotherapy.

How to Create a Hepatitis C Virus

Mainstream science says that, based on their studies, hepatitis C is a virus with contagious potential. But the experiments carried out to prove this theory are highly questionable going back to 1978 and a paper published in The Lancet. Researchers took blood from four patients; it was assumed that they had obtained their non-A, non-B hepatitis (this is what hepatitis C was called until the late 1980s) through a viral infection via blood transfusion. They also drew blood from a blood donor who had been mixed up in two hepatitis cases. Then, this blood serum was injected into the bloodstreams of five chimpanzees that had originally been caught in the wilderness of Sierra Leone in Africa.

But none of the animals contracted hepatitis (that is to say, they did not get liver disease). Around the 14th week, liver values were slightly raised for a few days, which can be interpreted as an immune reaction to foreign blood (and not a viral infection). To rule out the possibility that this was an immune reaction, the researchers should have taken a control group of chimpanzees and injected the same amounts of blood from healthy people. But this did not happen. Instead, an animal was simply locked in a separate room and observed, without having been injected with anything at all. These experiments, then, cannot be interpreted as proof that there is a hepatitis virus with infectious potential.⁷⁹²

The hepatitis C virus was then created in 1987, by a team of scientists, including Michael Houghton, of the Californian biotechnological company Chiron, and Daniel Bradley of the CDC, whose task was to find a virus that makes hepatitis C.793 794 This found virus was then supposed to serve as the basis (antigen) for an antibody test calibrated for hepatitis C virus. Since they couldn’t find a complete virus, they decided to forage around for the tiniest traces of a virus, for fragments of genes (nucleic acid particles) presumed to represent a virus. With the help of a special laboratory process, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a tiny piece of a gene was taken from a particle that didn’t appear to belong to the host’s genetic code. From this, the virus hunters concluded that they were dealing with foreign genetic material from a not-yet-discovered virus.

But for the reasons repeatedly mentioned in this book, we must seriously doubt that a hepatitis C virus had actually been found.⁷⁹⁵ PCR is much too sensitive. It detects gene-fragments (DNA or RNA particles) which in themselves do not constitute a virus—but which are claimed to be parts of a virus that has not been identified. In any case, certainly nobody has yet managed to detect a corresponding virus structure in the blood serum of so-called hepatitis C patients. As with HIV, the virus purification necessary for a clear identification has not taken place. And there is no paper showing that a so-called high viral load correlates with viruses visible through an electron microscope (viral load is the laboratory parameter measured with PCR—the surrogate marker—upon which basis doctors decide whether to prescribe medications or not).

This even led Michael Houghton, said to be a co-discoverer of the HC virus, to put forward the key question before a large audience at a major hepatitis C congress in Paris in 2001: “Where is the hepatitis C virus? Has anybody seen it?”⁷⁹⁶

Apart from this, the genetic snippets built up into the hepatitis C virus existed in the apes’ liver tissue in such small quantities that they should not have been considered a cause of a liver disease. But Chiron saw an entirely different picture: there was the evil hepatitis C virus (HCV). And so, on the basis of these gene parts, they began to build their HCV antibody test. The Procleix test alone, with which blood bottles are said to be tested for the presence of HCV antibodies, now brings in more than $60 million per quarter for Chiron.⁷⁹⁷

Even blatant contradictions are gladly overlooked in this context. This piece of a gene said to come from a HCV can only be found in about half of so-called hepatitis patients.⁷⁹⁸ And a 1997 study printed in the European Journal of Clinical Chemistry (today Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine) shows that the gene particles officially classified as the hepatitis C virus had also been found in those who had negative HCV antibody tests. Generally, researchers contend that there is still no convincing evidence that the gene-snippets are indeed a pathogenic hepatitis C virus.799 800

The virus theory does not fulfill any of Koch’s three postulates, which must be fulfilled for virus identification. The first postulate requires that a truly pathogenic virus can be found in large quantities in every patient (this is not even close to the case). The second postulate is that the virus can be isolated and made to grow (but a hepatitis C virus has never been found in an intact form). And the third postulate says that this isolated pathogen must be able to trigger the same disease in animal models like chimpanzees. In this case, though, no isolated virus was transmitted, but rather blood; and there was no proper control group either (in which animals would be given blood—but without what was suspected to be the pathogen).⁸⁰¹

Nonetheless, the virus hunters assert that the hepatitis C virus is passed on from junkies through contaminated injections (the CDC even blamed this for most HCV infections in the USA).⁸⁰² But a 1999 study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology gives us another picture. The paper’s goal was namely to find out if needle exchange programs, through which drug addicts are provided with clean needles, help to prevent HCV transmission.

The experiment couldn’t confirm this theory. Junkies who used these needle exchange programs tested positive more often than “injecting drug users” (IDU’s) who had no access to the programs. The researchers concluded that these programs do not help to prevent a so-called HCV infection.803 804 In other words, even when junkies constantly use clean needles so-called HCV antibody tests nonetheless (or with this specific study, especially) still come out positive.

Nevertheless, the hepatitis C antibody tests have been widely used (the blood test was developed in 1994). So, the world now also had a hepatitis C epidemic to contend with. Patients who test positive are stamped as “HCV positive” and it’s hammered into their heads that they are carriers of a liver-destroying virus, which allegedly, after a dormant phase of around 30 years, triggers liver cirrhosis (the end-stage of liver damage). The patients are consequently bombarded over a long period with medications, which ultimately damages the very organ in which chemicals are metabolized: the liver.

Most HCV positive patients have no disease symptoms at all (not even in the liver!),⁸⁰⁵ and yet they are treated with toxic medications that destroy liver cells and the livers of already sick patients are additionally damaged with medications. The tragic end result of such a treatment was made clear by a study, conducted by Jay Hoofnagle and published in the NEJM in 1995. The active substance fialuridine (brand name Fiau) was tried out on hepatitis B patients. Five patients died and two could only be saved by liver transplants.⁸⁰⁶ It is well worth noting that none of the patients had any physical (clinical) complaints before the medicine treatment.

Those who still consider that medications are active in some way should know that in hepatitis C research there are no placebo-controlled randomized double-blind studies with clinical endpoints. This means that, as with AIDS or cancer research, no hepatitis C clinical trials look at two groups of subjects randomly assigned to receive either the active substance or an inactive preparation (placebo). Neither doctor nor test subject (double blind) should know who’s taking the active substance and who the placebo. The trials should run for long periods (for hepatitis C around 30 years) and be oriented on clinical endpoints (e.g., survival time). Only then can it be shown whether patients treated with the medications actually do live longer. But without such placebo studies, statements on the effectiveness or a medication’s life-prolonging effects are impossible.

Hepatitis C Can Also Be Explained Without a Virus

Just as with HIV/AIDS, there are numerous peculiarities in the theory that a virus triggers hepatitis C. There are patients whose elevated liver values can be observed using traditional blood tests, but they test negative on the antibody test. This prompts some virus-fixated researchers to speculate wildly that these could be “occult” hepatitis C viruses⁸⁰⁷—instead of suspecting that perhaps there’s no evil virus at work here whatsoever.

There are further inconsistencies. As studies show, it’s not uncommon for HCV positive individuals to later, incomprehensibly, test negative, as if by magic, without having gone through any treatment.⁸⁰⁸

Most HCV positive patients don’t even suffer from any disease symptoms. And, as is the rule, they only have real liver damage if they have consumed alcohol and drugs. Here, there is a very conspicuous overlap: almost 80 percent of drug addicts are HCV positive.⁸⁰⁹ To this Rainer Laufs, director of the Institute of Microbiology at the University of Hamburg and one of the leading advocates of the view that hepatitis C is caused by a virus, says: “It is worth noting that intravenous drug abuse plays such a large role in the spread of HCV infection.”⁸¹⁰

Mainstream medicine should ask whether the monocausal virus model for hepatitis C really makes sense. Especially considering that if hepatitis C is indeed a contagious viral disease, the number of cases would show a bell shape: at the beginning a rise in the number of hepatitis infections and— once people have built up immunity against the allegedly evil agent—a following decline. But this is not the case. Rather, the number of those officially declared HCV patients in Germany, for example, has remained at 400,000 to 500,000 for a long time.⁸¹¹

Another worthy investigation would be to look as whether toxins like alcohol, heroin or medications are, at the very least, co-factors for what is called hepatitis C, if not the fundamental cause. It’s fully justifiable to assume that substances like alcohol damage liver cells, cause the production of the genetic snippets on a cellular level, and are then picked up by PCR tests and falsely interpreted as HCV particles by orthodox researchers.

Last but certainly not least, no virus is necessary whatsoever to explain the 30 years that it takes on average until the affected patient’s liver gives up the ghost (liver cirrhosis). Sooner or later, toxic chemical substances like alcohol, heroin or cocaine take care of this on their own (without viral help), by gradually unleashing their destructive effects.

Unfortunately, these simple truths are words in the wind, ignored by the virus hunters. Since the 1980s, hepatitis doctors have been so fixated on antiviral medications that the headlines in the newspapers sound like advertisements for pharmaceutical companies: “Hepatitis C—the underestimated danger“; “Hepatitis C—the unrecognized danger“; “Hepatitis C—the new major epidemic. It’s coming silently but violently.”

A few years ago, in a Northern German city called Itzehoe, the media luridly reported that a HCV positive surgeon had infected many of his patients with HCV. HCV screening took place with antibody tests and a few patients reacted HCV positive. So, the conclusion was drawn that they had been infected by the surgeon, even though there was no evidence that a viral infection had even really taken place—not least because many people are living with what is called the hepatitis C virus; the tests must come out positive in approximately 2 percent of cases. 2,000 tests could garner 40 positives. So, a doctor could spark a hepatitis C epidemic simply by carrying out the so-called HCV antibody tests on all his patients.

From time to time, media headlines have been a bit more critical, like: “Hepatitis C danger overestimated?“ But these articles are the exception to the rule, which is puzzling since anyone who weighs up the various risks of an antiviral hepatitis C therapy would come to the conclusion that no medications should be prescribed. Mainstream medical research has shown that there is “no lasting success” to be attained with the medications.⁸¹² Nevertheless, the virus hunters are tireless and continue to claim that antiviral hepatitis medication produces significant improvements by referring to various studies, such as the one by Hadziyannis et al.813 814 But all these studies are irrelevant because they prove that the medications do not heal and, even worse, that they cause harm.⁸¹⁵

A few years ago, a large American study was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.⁸¹⁶ The blood serums of the subjects had been frozen between 1948 and 1954, and were now being tested for hepatitis C. The researchers found that there was practically no difference in liver disease between HCV positive and HCV negative patients. Simultaneously, among HCV positive subjects, little liver damage was found and few mortalities could be traced back to liver disease.

The researchers concluded that mainstream research had highly overestimated the risk that a healthy individual who is tested positive for HCV later comes down with liver cirrhosis. At the same time, it is plausible to assume that substances like alcohol and drugs (including several hundred medications known to have damaging effects on the liver)⁸¹⁷ could be the main causes. There is no reason, then, to treat HCV positive patients with antiviral active substances.

“My experience as a physician is that a positive hepatitis C test could indicate liver damage, rather than a viral infection,” says Seattle-based naturopath John Ruhland. “The patients I have seen with hepatitis C had liver damage that had primary causes such as alcohol and drug abuse. To truly understand what is causing this hepatitis C ‘epidemic,’ follow the money trail. Millions of dollars are being made by selling drugs and treating people for an often non-existing problem.”⁸¹⁸

Ruhland adds that the human body has a tremendous capacity to heal itself. This principle, known as the healing powers of nature, is the foundation of naturopathic philosophy. Ruhland’s goal as a naturopathic physician is to help restore balance to the body, the mind, and the spirit. An intermediate-range goal may be to focus on preventing specific future illnesses. The long-term goal is to work with the patient to improve his or her health, not just by eliminating illness, but also by promoting wellness.⁸¹⁹

Pamela Anderson: The Virus Industry’s Grand Marshall

Unfortunately, an objective examination of the hepatitis C subjects is thwarted time and time again by publications in specialist journals and the mass media, which dwell upon the disease’s alleged infectious and epidemic potential. The best-known hepatitis C case is probably that of American actress and “Baywatch” nymph Pamela Anderson. Anderson announced in 2003 that she had been diagnosed with hepatitis C, which elicited global consternation. Her doctors had told her she had a maximum of ten years to live.⁸²⁰ Anderson disclosed that she believed she had been infected by her ex-husband, drummer Tommy Lee, when they were tattooing each other.⁸²¹

Proof of this does not exist. But, the global media had a sensational story to boost circulation and audience ratings—and virus hunters had a global platform to claim that HCV is caused by a life-threatening virus. All of a sudden, after leading a quiet existence for so long, hepatitis C was known all over the world. Just a short time later, Anderson even became “Grand Marshall” of the American Liver Foundation, which promotes antiviral therapy.⁸²² The blonde bombshell made for an effective in-your-face advertisement of medication that had never been proven and certainly its potential damage had never been ruled out.

Chapter 5

BSE: The Epidemic that Never Was

“The assumption that BSE is an epidemic caused by an infectious agent called a prion in meat and bone meal has not been proven. To prove this, at least one controlled feed experiment with cattle herds would be necessary. But this has not been done. A feasible alternative hypothesis is that the BSE epidemic in England was caused by a combination of factors: a genetic defect in the gene-pool of a few cattle herds, which was bred into frequency in pursuit of the best-possible efficiency in milk production, poisoning from insecticides and heavy metals, copper deficiency and/or autoimmune reactions.”⁸²³

ROLAND SCHOLZ, PROFESSOR OF BIOCHEMISTRY AND CELLULAR BIOLOGY SIEVERT LORENZEN, PROFESSOR OF ZOOLOGY AUTHOR OF THE BOOK PHANTOM BSE DANGER, 2005

BSE: Prophecies of Horror and Wastes of Money

The hysteria caused by the alleged bovine epidemic BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy which is a spongelike brain disease) reached its peak in 2001 and caused people to fear that they could contract the so-called deadly new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD or vCJD) by simply tucking into a juicy steak. Scientists and politicians alike initiated the strangest safety procedures, like killing masses of cattle.

“An apocalyptical spirit ruled the country,“ cried the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in 2002. “Hundreds of thousands of BSE cattle will be discovered in the coming years, predicted serious scientists and self-proclaimed experts. There was talk of thousands, even tens of thousands of expected deaths—human, not bovine—caused by a new form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease [induced, according to theories, by ingestion of BSE-infected beef]. Reports of the allegedly impending new plague of humanity were everywhere. Two ministers had to resign.”⁸²⁴

The horror scenarios have not proved true. Not a single German has died from this variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD or just vCJD), although at the end of the 1990s, there was still talk of a “time bomb effect” and the death of up to ten million people was still held as a possibility.⁸²⁵ But in 2001, the British Medical Journal called it “Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: the epidemic that never was,“⁸²⁶ and at the beginning of 2005, a British research team gave the all-clear and reported: “Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Is Cancelled.”⁸²⁷

In reality, a giant BSE bureaucracy was erected, “which registers every twitch in the stable and tests every one of the butcher’s slices,” according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. The program came with a hefty economic price; “BSE hysteria has cost Germany at least €1.5 billion to date,“ said Sucharit Bhakdi, Director of the Institute of Microbiology and Hygiene at the University of Mainz (his comments appeared in 2002, it is worth noting). And yet, the obligatory BSE tests on cattle were “completely pointless” and “a pure waste of money.”

Among the 5.1 million tested cattle, just 200 sick animals were found. And these 200 “BSE cattle” could have “infected three people at most, and that over the next 30 years,” states Bhakdi. His advice: do nothing. It is completely sufficient to do just that when (so-called) infected animals are taken away.⁸²⁸

The Dogma of the Infectious Disease BSE

Since then, virus mania has continued to plague the beef industry. Companies like the Swiss firm Prionics, which controls 50 percent of the world market for BSE tests,⁸²⁹ continue to make millions (ultimately at a cost to the consumer). The belief that an infectious particle, or more precisely a prion (proteinaceous infectious protein) makes cattle sick is still firmly anchored in the public conscience. And yet, since the beginning of the 1990s, data has been diligently collected and published—but despite all efforts, there is still no real proof of the hypothesis that a deformed protein (prion) has infectious properties and is capable of causing brain-softening (spongiform encephalopathy): BSE in cattle, and the new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in humans.

The atomic structure of these allegedly infectious prion proteins isn’t even known.⁸³⁰ “BSE is termed an epidemic, but this is wrong—just as the presumption that BSE is contagious is also wrong,“ writes Anton Mayr, Chair of Microbiology and Epidemiology at the University of Munich. “And even BSE’s transmissibility to humans, neither with classical Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD for short) nor the new current form, new variant CJD or nvCJD, has not been proven.”⁸³¹

“Depending on the spirit of the times and which authorities are in power, one dogma or another dominates the scientific scene, often with an exclusivity that does not admit any other possibilities and hinders new ideas,” writes Roland Scholz, Professor of Biochemistry and Cellular Biology in Munich, and a critic of the dominant BSE theory. “And in the BSE drama, this dogma is infection.”⁸³² Here, Nobel Prizes can play a controlling and unhealthy role. On the one hand, these awards usually follows the spirit of the times, i.e. along conventional lines of thought. On the other, they can cement paradigms.

Into the 1960s, scientists were of the opinion that encephalopathy in sheep (known as Scrapie, because the animals constantly scratch themselves) only occurred endemically, that is, only within certain flocks. In which case, up to 30 percent of a herd can be afflicted. Scrapie [sheep disease] is said to be a genetic disease that can be eliminated by establishing adequate breeding protocols, according to research done by Herbert Parry in 1962.⁸³³ But after the awarding of the Nobel Prize in 1976 to the previously mentioned researcher Carleton Gajdusek (see Chapter 2), Scrapie, like all spongiform encephalopathies (softening of the brain), was redefined as an infectious disease. It was reclassified after Gajdusek’s 1970s research on dementia observed in the population of Papua New Guinea; he declared this spongelike brain disease (spongiform encephalopathy; BSE is also classified as one) to be a viral disease transmitted through food.

The sneaky virus culprit, however, could not be found. Nonetheless, microbe-obsessed research continued to hold tight to its pathogen theory. Virus hunters were desperate to impose the contagion theory onto dementia as well.

The work of Stanley Prusiner served as a basis for this theory. In 1982, he succeeded in identifying plaques (accumulations) in the brain, which are characteristic of a brain suffering from neural damage—and which are said to be the cause. In these plaques, certain proteins called prions are found, which primarily build up on neurons, in an abnormally altered structure (the b-pleated sheet structure). Whereas, the normal (healthy native) prion protein shows predominantly spiral-shaped a-helix structures and hardly any “abnormal” b-pleated sheet structures.

The speculative plaque development model implies, then, that prion proteins with an abnormally altered b-pleated sheet structure are the source of plaque formation. The idea is that, as particles foreign to the body, they succeed in getting into the host. Upon arrival, they impose their deformed b-pleated sheet structure upon the normal protein with its a-helix form. And this b-structure makes it easier for prion proteins to clump together, so plaques accumulate on the neurons and jam neural receptors. These plaques can then only be degraded with difficulty. This process gradually leads to a build-up of “molecular waste” in the brain, causing the death of increasing numbers of neurons. The holes that develop through this, as well as the deposits between cells (vacuoles), give the brain the spongelike appearance so typical of the disease (the term “spongiform encephalopathy“ comes from the Latin spongia = sponge).

Diagram 8 Prusiner’s speculative and unproven plaque-formation model

The illustration describes the model of the alleged infectiousness of the prion protein (PrP), with „c“ standing for „cellular“ and „Sc“ standing for „Scrapie“ (the membrane protein which is found in as an aggregate in Scrapie sheep). If the protein aggregates that have developed in a spongiform-altered brain are injected directly into a healthy brain, they trigger an accelerated aggregation process in similar proteins in this brain. Through protein-protein interaction, the aggregate causes membrane protein molecules to be rearranged from the “healthy” or “normal” helical into the b-pleated sheet form, and allows them to accumulate on the aggregate, which gradually grows to the size of a plaque. Prusiner first called this “amplification,” but not long later he (falsely) renamed it “infection,” because it sounded dangerous. But the scientific community just parrots his theory without analyzing how the ”infection” arises, or whether a simple immune reaction against foreign proteins might not possibly have left its histological traces (as researcher Alan Ebringer claims, this phenomenon has been known as EAE for decades). Apart from that, the aggregate shown in this diagram, which is said to have entered the brain as an infectious agent, did not enter the body orally (not through food), but rather through an intracerebral injection (directly into the brain). And this is of course not the way that animals in the wild or humans become infected. © Roland Scholz

In 1987, Prusiner succumbed to temptation and brought his till then largely ignored prions into the epidemic game, something that brought him an enormous degree of recognition. Ten years later, in 1997, he was even “ennobled” with the Nobel Prize, as the Deutsche Ärtzteblatt wrote.⁸³⁴ With this, the infection topic had been cemented. The “Prusiner prion” was declared to be the trigger for spongiform brain diseases, and was said to be more dangerous than all previous infectious agents.

So dangerous that it is allegedly impossible to deactivate it by the usual means (heat, radiation, chemical substances). For with the prion, a protein was branded as infectious evil-doer for the first time; it is said to be especially dangerous because the immune system can’t fight it off, since it occurs naturally in the body and is not a foreign substance. Note that, according to this theory, plaque formation is initiated by abnormally structured prion proteins from a foreign organism; these then clump together with healthy prion proteins in the new organism to form plaques; these plaques and the prions found in them are composed of proteins occurring naturally in the body.

Activism Feigned for Safety

In 1986, as the BSE epidemic hysteria began in Great Britain, health authorities believed in an infection involving a pathogen transmitted through feed. Without having any detailed evidence at hand they speculated that prions were present in the sheep suffering from brain-softening (Scrapie). These prions were said to have subsequently managed to reach cattle by way of the meat and bone meal (which contained waste from slaughtered sheep) used as cattle feed. Through this, it was said, the cattle became sick.⁸³⁵ And so a mere conjecture quickly became a hypothesis that was blown up into a threatening scenario in the interplay between the media and certain scientific circles.

“The media plays a fatal role, because, in its tendency to come to shortterm sensationalistic clear statements, it often feigns a clarity—or a threat, that really is not supported by scientific findings,” says Jürgen Krönig, England correspondent for German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, in criticism of his own profession.⁸³⁶ The media had decisively contributed to hysterical public reactions, which in turn brought the political and scientific establishment to hasty action. Pictures of stumbling cattle and of cow carcasses being shoved into incinerators further fueled the flames of hysteria. Prions became the “horsemen of the apocalypse” that threaten humanity.

But with a little critical analysis, we see the deep rift between truth and illusions. The food industry has conveyed to the public an incredibly distorted picture of food production since the 19th century, through advertisements and public relations. Truth matters little in this spin doctoring, and is massively impeded by the attempts of all sorts of cliques and interest groups to get maximum profit.

“I think that primarily to blame [in the BSE disaster] are the agricultural ministers, who have a sort of symbiotic relationship to agro-business: to the large corporations, not just the meat feed manufacturers, but the chemical groups as well,” says Krönig. “Through this, research was contaminated from the onset: this means the experts were directed too much by their interests. The research was not carried out openly. This has to change, for only when there is absolute clarity over the reasons, can something sensible really be undertaken.”⁸³⁷

How tightly research and big business are interwoven can also be seen in the example of Nobel Prize-winner Prusiner, who has developed his own BSE quick test and promoted it far and wide through an article published in the scientific journal Spektrum der Wissenschaft in early 2005. Prusiner did not hesitate to emphasize that the test could possibly also be suitable for testing human blood for BSE—something that, if it became reality, would mean that the test manufacturers had the equivalent of a money tree in their hands. One can only agree with Prusiner when he himself writes in his article: “One may suspect that I propagate the thorough CDI test [Prusiner’s quick test] in my own interests.”⁸³⁸

The Infection Hypothesis Is Founded
on Dubious Experiments

So the theory goes that prions have spread across the borders of species (for example from sheep to cow). And researchers concluded that if prions can manage the jump from sheep to cow, then humans could also become infected from beef products.

But there are numerous flaws in the experiments upon which these hypotheses are based. Extracts from the brains of animals with neural diseases were directly injected into the brains of test animals. When, after a year, they detected the existence of the nerve-damaging accumulations (plaques) and holes in the brains, it was taken as proof that a prion had caused an infection, which in turn had caused the development of the plaque.

But the alterations in the brain could also have another cause. They could be consequences of an immune reaction, for instance, with which the body defends itself against foreign proteins (in this case the foreign prion proteins). However, researchers didn’t consider this at all, even though a 1998 study by immunologist Alan Ebringer of King’s College, London pointed out the possibility that many experiments involving injecting brain material from animals suffering from encephalopathies into the brains of healthy animals didn’t necessarily cause the transmission of Scrapie or BSE (as is held to be the case); even if these animals did later develop neurological symptoms and plaques were found in their brains.839 840

We must also remember that laboratory experiments in which cerebral matter is directly transmitted from one brain to another proves nothing in terms of infection, since this is supposed to occur via the mouth (orally). When was the last time your brain came into contact with someone else’s brain mass?

Ebringer: “The Prion-research workers do something that is not allowed. They inject brain tissue homogenates into experimental animals, and when neurological symptoms appear they say they have transmitted BSE. However, they have done nothing of the sort, because what they are doing is producing experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (EAE). I think all prion experiments involve production of EAE and not transmission of BSE.”⁸⁴¹

An additional mind-boggler is that the prion experiments involved no proper control experiments (involving a comparative group of animals that are injected with something that can be compared to what the original test subjects receive).

In 2004, a paper was published in Science claiming to have produced a sort of irrefutable proof for the prion infection = brain-softening theory. In the experiment, brain extracts from infected animals were not injected directly into the brains of the test mice. Instead, a deformed prion with a b-pleated structure was artificially produced, and it was assumed that this structure would give the prion an infectious property. Then this prion protein with the b-pleated structure was injected into mouse brains. After one to two years, the mice developed neurological disorders.⁸⁴²

But, once again, the experiments have no scientific value. Not only because neurophysiology and immunology differ between mice and humans, so results can be fundamentally misleading.⁸⁴³ Also, as with many experiments conducted by the guild of prion researchers, there were no control experiments involving an extract that can be compared to the originally administered fluid. The salt solution alone, which was injected into the brains of the control animals, is not a true control. The researchers should have taken at least one other solution containing a protein and have introduced it into the brains of the test mice. Or, even better, a genetically engineered prion protein that did not have the b-pleated structure, but rather the “healthy/normal” a-helix form.⁸⁴⁴

Defendants of the “prions in meat and bone meal hypothesis” also refer to tests in which raw brain material is fed to laboratory animals. But raw brain that comes from brain-diseased animals cannot be equated with animal feed meal, since these substances have completely different contents. Here as well, the test results cannot be carried over to reality. Furthermore, adequate control groups are missing from these experiments as well (groups of animals that are fed healthy cow brain).

For this reason, it cannot be asserted that a certain constituent in the brain material fed to the mice (a deformed prion, for example), had produced alterations in their brains after a year or more—or if the brain material itself had not been responsible.⁸⁴⁵ For this reason, the observed symptoms can also be interpreted as portraying the results of an immune reaction.⁸⁴⁶

Of course, experimental games and speculation are perfectly suitable for impressing gullible research colleagues, politicians, journalists and the public. But, they are scientifically worthless. “For no controlled feeding experiments in the field exist—studies that anyone with a healthy dose of common sense would require, and which everyone believes have long been carried out by inventors of the meat and bone meal hypothesis,“ criticizes Roland Scholz.

This means, a large herd should have been separated into two halves: one group receives meat and bone meal and the other doesn’t receive this feed. Since this has been neglected, however, the conclusion is evident: it has not yet been shown that cattle become infected with BSE by being fed meat and bone meal. That an infectious protein in meat and bone meal triggers BSE is still an unproven conjecture.

Incidentally, it would have been even more informative, if a controlled experiment had been carried out with specifically manufactured meat and bone meals (consisting of material from Scrapie sheep or BSE cattle), something that, incidentally, could still be done. Then one could figure out whether the meat and bone meal is a trigger at all—and if so, what kind of infectious agent it was—or if a change in the animal meal’s manufacturing process could possibly have been the cause.⁸⁴⁷

BSE: A Genetic Defect Due To Inbreeding

Due to the lack of proof for the thesis that prions in meat and bone meal can trigger the bovine disease BSE, it seems particularly advisable to keep an eye out for other attempts at explanation as well. It could very well be that a defect in the genetic make-up of cattle from a few British herds was multiplied to such an extent through overbreeding that the animals became ill.

BSE manifests primarily in young cattle aged two to five years (cattle can live up to 25 years), while most diseases comparable to BSE tend to appear at an advanced age. With the rare disease called “mad cow disease,“ the animals were considerably older. And with humans as well, these spongiform encephalopathies (brain-softening) that do not appear within families are typically age-related diseases. But children and adolescents also come down with the spongiform encephalopathies, which can be frequently observed within families.

With modern high-performance cattle breeding, most cows are descended from only a few bulls that are often related to each other. Thanks to artificial insemination, the semen of a single bull is said to guarantee high-performance cows as daughters and can supply an entire region. Incest should be avoided, but with breeding geared only towards high performance—in England, a cow provides 60-70 liters of milk daily—this rule is usually not observed. “A single bull in a region’s insemination institute could then be the father of many of a district’s cattle herds, and simultaneously also their grandfather,“ writes Roland Scholz. “With this, what has been usual in flocks of sheep for centuries has arrived in cattle herds over the past few decades.”

With spongiform encephalopathies, the paradigm shift from infection to genetics could have been executed with Prusiner. In his investigations into the cause of SE on a molecular level, he found that a certain membrane protein on neurons (prion) had a tendency to reshape from the functional/sound β-helix form into the functionless β-pleated sheet form.

These β-pleated sheet proteins shaped like corrugated metal tend to clump together with other proteins that likewise feature a β-pleated sheet structure. The aggregates grow, develop the plaques (clumps) on the nerve cells typical of brain-softening, and can then force other prion proteins to re-shape: first on the same cell, then on neighboring cells, so that the process spreads throughout a brain area (like a row of falling dominoes after the first one has been knocked over).⁸⁴⁸ Prusiner called the plaques, which multiply autocatalytically (driving themselves on) prions. He originally termed the process the “amplification“ (replication) of a protein that had an abnormally altered structure—something that was later confused with infection.⁸⁴⁹

This amplification process is considerably accelerated when an amino acid is substituted at a critical point through a mutation in the respective gene. For example, in carriers in a family, in which a certain type of encephalopathy frequently appeared, the base thymine was substituted for cytosine in the gene codon 102, which usually encodes the amino acid leucine. The consequence is that this codon 102 gene no longer encodes leucine, but rather the amino acid proline. Proline, however, is known as a “helix breaker.” By 1995, 18 different mutations had been discovered in SE families (in which spongiform encephalopathies or brain-softening conspicuously frequently occurred). Time of occurrence, degree of severity and the course of disease were dependant upon mutation type and position.⁸⁵⁰

BSE as an Effect of Chemical Poisoning

The general acceptance of the hypothesis that BSE is an epidemic (triggered by feeding animals meat and bone meal in which infectious prions can be found) means that no attention is paid to the fact that BSE’s epidemiology does not correspond with the feeding of meat and bone meal at all. As an article in The Lancet shows, within Great Britain, most cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) were observed in people in northern Scotland,⁸⁵¹ while most cattle with BSE were to be found in southern England, as shown in a paper printed in Nature (see diagram).⁸⁵² But according to the mainstream BSE theory, consumption of BSE meat triggers Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (a theory that, to stress one more time, is completely unproven), but, this could only be explained if the meat from the BSE-infected cattle from the south of England was only eaten in the north of Scotland. This, however, is practically impossible.⁸⁵³

Printed with permission from Nature, 29 August 1996, pp. 779-788 (left depiction of GB), Anderson, Robert, Transmission dynamics and epidemiology of BSE in British cattle; Lancet, 31 March 2001, pp. 1002-1007 (right depiction of GC), Smith, Peter, Geographical distribution of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Great Britain 1994-2000.

In 1985, a law was passed in England forcing British farmers to apply phosmet to the necks of their cattle (see diagram).⁸⁵⁴ Phosmet is what is known as an organophosphate, and the highly toxic insecticide, which causes severe neural damage, is used against warble flies. Only in Great Britain, Northern Ireland and Switzerland was phosmet used in such high concentrations—the countries where almost all BSE cases have occurred.⁸⁵⁵ A British organic farmer by the name of Mark Purdey noticed that his cows did not come down with BSE, ecologically-kept cows did not come down with BSE, although they had been feed meat and bone meal—but had not been treated with organophosphates.⁸⁵⁶

Diagram 8 No connection:
BSE in the South vs. vCJD in the North of England

Apart from the fact that the few cases of the Creutzfeld-Jakob disease variant hardly provide sufficient material for serious epidemiological analyses, it is generally overlooked that there was a South-North divide in BSE cases in Great Britain, whereas with vCJD it was exactly the other way around; here, a North-South divide existed. This contradicts the assertion that ingesting BSE meat can trigger vCJD.

The British government knew about these connections. And so, at the beginning of the 1990s, the law requiring phosmet application to cattle necks was repealed, since there was a likely connection between the organophosphate and the appearance of BSE. At the same time, from 1993 on, there was also a drastic reduction in BSE cases. The British BSE investigative board also admitted that organophosphate was evidently a co-factor in the onset of BSE. And it has been known for a long time that chronic organophosphate poisoning “leads to a polyneuropathy [severe neural damage],” according to toxicologist Heinz Lüllmann.⁸⁵⁷

This was confirmed by the research results of neuroscientist Stephen Whatley, from the London Institute of Psychiatry. According to this research, financed through private donations,⁸⁵⁸ phosmet could be the trigger for BSE diseases.⁸⁵⁹ Whatley wanted to pursue the subject more thoroughly and requested additional ex- periment funds from govern- mental institutions. But the authorities rejected Whatley’s application—something which seems all the more baffling considering Whatley’s empha- sis that “there is no contradic- tory data,” that is to say there is still no scientific paper that refutes his conclusions.”⁸⁶⁰

In 1985, a law was passed which forced British farmers to apply phosmet to the necks of their cattle (see arrows). Phosmet is an organophosphate, and the highly toxic insecticide, which can cause severe neurological damage, is used against warble flies. The illustration shows the place (neck) where phosmet is applied. The toxin penetrates through the skin into the bloodstream and thus damages the central nervous system. © Günther Zick, MD

In this context, why don’t all cows that are treated with organophosphates come down with BSE? One may think that the dose makes the poison (from the Latin: dosis venenum facit). However, even if all cattle received the same toxin dose, they would not react the same way, since the cattle have individual genetic makeups. Furthermore the amount of phosmet applied by each farmer could also vary significantly. If a toxin can accelerate the outbreak of a disease (as alcohol can liver disease), then it can also be the lone cause.

If, however, it was officially verified that phosmet was a cause of BSE, compensation claims worth billions would be filed, not only against the British government, but also the insecticide manufacturers. This is certainly not a desirable outcome for the powers that be, and, so, clear connections are allowed to disappear into a fog of prions.

Incidentally, the poisoning or intoxication hypotheses are easy to test, and, in contrast to the virus or prion hypotheses, they are confutable, meaning proof that a theory is right or wrong through toxicologic and epidemiologic verification. But unfortunately, these tests have not been carried out.⁸⁶¹

Regrettably, for about ten years, the trend has increasingly been towards the scaling down of toxicological institutes, while pharmaceutical institutes gain ever more significance. Through this, the critical aspects of toxicology (poisonous nature of medications and other chemical substances) increasingly disappear into the background, because the primary focus is researching medications.

Besides phosmet, other poisonous substances could impair the health of the cattle, such as poisoning by the heavy metal manganese. In factory farming, high amounts of manganese are fed to chickens, whereupon, by way of the processing of the chicken droppings, the heavy metal gets into the meat and bone meal and into the cattle.⁸⁶²

Experts also refer to a possible copper deficiency, which could have attacked the cattle’s nerves. Such copper deficiencies can produce severe neurological defects and have been seen for a long time in grazing animal. Among experts, these are described as “endemic ataxia.”863 864

BSE Is Not an Infectious Disease

The assumption that BSE is an epidemic in Great Britain, caused by an infectious agent called a prion in meat and bone meal has not been proven. To prove this, at least a controlled feed experiment with cattle herds would have been necessary. But this wasn’t done. “According to published data on the epidemic’s appearance and spread, a plausible alternative hypothesis could be that a recessive genetic defect had accumulated in a few cattle herds,” states Scholz. “The cause would be the excessive breeding in the pursuit of the best possible efficiency in milk production, in which, as a negative result of breeding, an increased predisposition to contract BSE was coincidentally bred-in without being noticed for a long time.”

But, it’s more likely that the BSE epidemic in England was precipitated by a genetically determined predisposition combined with other stresses (poisoning with insecticides or heavy metals, copper deficiency or autoimmune reaction), to which BSE-prone animals are particularly sensitive and, thus, get sick earlier. Or exposure to toxins like phosmet could be responsible. All of these theories bring us to this conclusion: BSE is not an infectious disease.

If there is no reason to assume that this disease is transmitted from animal to animal and from species to species, it makes no sense to fight it by exterminating healthy animals or entire herds.

The assertion that human health is endangered by BSE derives from the unproven “prions in meat and bone meal” hypothesis. This claim based on a conjecture is nothing but pure speculation.

vCJD (the new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) is not a new disease, but rather a once-rare diagnosis that has recently become more common (even if 1 in 5 million is still very rare). The risk of contracting vCJD through the ingestion of beef products (including the brain, declared to be the risk material) is minimal in comparison to the numerous risks of everyday life.⁸⁶⁵

Chapter 6

SARS: Hysteria on the Heels of AIDS and BSE

“A universal human problem is: if after a long search and painful uncertainty, we finally believe we can explain a certain issue. The emotional commitment that we have made can be so large that we prefer to declare undeniable facts that contradict our explanation to be untrue or insubstantial, instead of adapting our explanation to these facts. That such retouching of reality could have considerable consequences for our adaptation to reality goes without saying.”⁸⁶⁶

PAUL WATZLAWICK (FROM HIS BOOK HOW REAL IS REAL?)

“What I believe and what I can prove, those are two different pairs of boots”

COLUMBO
TV SERIES, COLUMBO (EPISODE “MURDER AMONG BROTHERS,“ 1995)

First 9/11, Next the War in Iraq—and then SARS?

If one believes the media, the world has repeatedly been devastated by large new epidemics over the last two decades. At the beginning of the 1980s, AIDS appeared, a few years later came hepatitis C, followed by BSE in the 1990s and by 2003, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). But these new epidemics differ from epidemics of the past on one decisive point: while whole populations have been decimated in the wake of the plague, cholera and typhoid fever (although it has not been proven at all that a virus has raged here), the number of those actually affected by the new epidemics is comparatively small.

According to the Robert Koch Institute, just a few hundred people die from AIDS each year in Germany. As for hepatitis C, we are still waiting for the liver cirrhosis epidemic. And the BSE epidemic has not presented most countries with a single clinical case, but rather only positively tested animals.

Although death from so-called infectious diseases is increasingly becoming a rarity (here in Germany less than 1 percent of all mortalities), our modern world is plagued by epidemic fear. How else could a few cases of pneumonia—and that is what it was all about with the SARS patients—invoke such fear in Chinese citizens that, en masse, in large cities like Hong Kong and Singapore,⁸⁶⁷ they put surgical masks over their mouths? Such masks could be found on every desk in the Chinese province of Ningbo?⁸⁶⁸ The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the City Commercial Bank of China decided to stash bank notes away for 24 hours before bringing them back into circulation (in the hope that the SARS virus would waste away on the notes during this time?) and even went as far as sterilizing money by exposing it to ultraviolet light for four hours and by treating it with disinfectants.⁸⁶⁹

The German sporting goods manufacturer Adidas, which produces more than half of its worldwide-sold sneakers in China, reacted with emergency response plans; even relocating production to Indonesia was considered. But first, activism on a smaller scale was practiced when a strike force distributed a leaflet of hygiene regulations to factory workers asking if all workers wore protective masks and regularly washed their hands.

German chemical giant BASF reported, meanwhile, that they had experienced an outbreak in their office, when a Chinese secretary became ill over a weekend. But luckily, all 250 employees already knew about this come Monday: after the first reports on SARS, BASF had ordered every employee to carry a card with the telephone numbers of three colleagues in their pockets, so that in case of emergency, everyone was required to call the colleagues immediately. So, over that weekend, the news had gone viral via phone lines and 20 people who worked closely with the ill secretary were ordered to stay at home. Simultaneously, the entire floor where the secretary worked was disinfected for two days, and from that time toilets were scrubbed many times daily. A BASF spokesman expressed his satisfaction: “The crisis management has worked.”

Lufthansa, in contrast, was completely caught off-guard by the crisis. The German airline lost more than €300 million in the first quarter of 2003 after many airplanes were grounded. And then the group announced that another 15 planes had to be quarantined bringing the total number of grounded planes to 70. “First the 11 September [with the terrorist attacks in New York], then the war in Iraq and now SARS—it’s the worst crisis in decades,“ said German newspaper Die Zeit about the Lufthansa situation.⁸⁷⁰

In the hysteria, everyone completely overlooked the fact that people constantly contract pulmonary infections and die. Yet the World Health Organization alleges that there were just less than 800 “probable SARS fatalities,” in the first nine months after the outbreak of the “epidemic” began at the end of 2002—in China, it is worth noting, with its 1.3 billion people,⁸⁷¹ as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan.⁸⁷² These few hundred mortalities are so few that they only make up a fraction of the pneumonia cases constantly at hand.

SARS “counts among the very rare diseases,“ as the Deutsches Ärzteblatt emphasized in April 2003.⁸⁷³ And three years later, in July 2006, they reported that the (presumably existing) SARS-Coronavirus “is clinically irrelevant.”⁸⁷⁴

Why such mass panic? Even the rock band The Rolling Stones felt compelled to avoid Hong Kong and Singapore,⁸⁷⁵ and the head of the University of California at Berkeley forbade hundreds of incoming Asian students from coming to the elite institute.⁸⁷⁶ It was even surmised that Asia’s economy and stock markets stood on the brink of collapse.⁸⁷⁷ And how could the tsunami catastrophe over the New Year 2004-2005 damage the Asian economy less than SARS, even though, according to WHO estimates, the giant tidal wave claimed more than 200,000 victims within a short time (easily a hundred times as many people lost their lives than those who officially died from SARS)?⁸⁷⁸

The “scratched windshield” theory described by philosopher Paul Watzlawick in his book How Real Is Real? offers an explanation for such mass phenomena:

“Around the end of the 1950s, a strange epidemic broke out in the city of Seattle: increasing numbers of car owners observed that their windshields were littered with small crater-like scratches. This phenomenon gained the upper hand so quickly that President Eisenhower, at the request of Washington State Governor Rosollini, sent a group of experts from the American board of standards to clear up the mystery. According to Jackson, who later summarized the process, the committee very quickly found that, two theories about the windshields were circulating among the city’s inhabitants.

“On the basis of one, the so-called ‘Fallout’ theory, recently held Russian nuclear tests had contaminated the atmosphere, and the radioactive deposit caused by this had been transformed into a glass-corrosive dew in Seattle’s damp climate. The ‘asphalt theoreticians,’ on the other hand, were convinced that the long stretches of freshly paved freeways, which Governor Rosollini’s ambitious roadwork program had generated, sprayed acid drops against the previously untouched windshields, also influenced by Seattle’s damp atmosphere. Instead of investigating these theories, the men from the board of standards concentrated on a much more tangible fact and found that in all of Seattle, no increase in scratched windshields could be observed.

“In truth, rather, it had come to a mass phenomenon. When reports of crater-scarred windshields began accumulating, more drivers began investigating their cars. Most of them did this by leaning over the glass outside and checking them up close, instead of doing it from inside and looking through the windshield from the normal angle as usual. From this unusual perspective, pits were found which are usually there (but unnoticed) in a car that is being used. What had arisen in Seattle, then, was an epidemic not of damaged windscreens, but rather of stared-at ones. This simple explanation, however, was so deflating that the whole episode went the way of many sensation-causing reports: which the mass media first dish up as sensations, but the mundane explanations of which are kept quiet, leading to the immortalization of a state of disinformation.”⁸⁷⁹

With SARS, doctors all over the world, likewise, suddenly looked at pulmonary infections from another angle—namely from the perspective of a dangerous new virus and a new laboratory test (SARS antibody test).

Critical Thoughts on SARS Epidemiology:
How Did Carlo Urbani Really Die?

An article in the journal MMW Fortschritte der Medizin (Advances in Medicine) describes SARS’ suspected “route of infection”:

“On 21 February 2003, a doctor from [China’s gigantic industrial province] Guangdong brought the virus by bus to Hong Kong, a city of seven million, where he was to attend a wedding. Already seriously ill, he booked into a hotel and allegedly infected a further seven people there, including the index patients for Canada and Vietnam [index patients are the first patients, through whom an epidemic is said to be triggered]. After his condition had rapidly deteriorated, he was taken to a hospital where he infected more patients and died ten days later. The Vietnamese index patient flew to Hanoi. There, he was treated by an Italian WHO infection specialist, Carlo Urbani, who gave the syndrome its name: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). On 29 March, Urbani himself died from the infection.”⁸⁸⁰

At the end of March 2020, the Italian newspaper Corriere Adriatico recalled the medical doctor Carlos Urbani, who died shortly after he created the term SARS on March 29, 2003. The headline of the article reads: “Carlo Urbani’s wife, the SARS doctor: ‘His lesson is useful for the whole world, but only half understood.’” Indeed, much of the world didn’t understand the lesson, which, of course, is different from what Urbani’s wife meant, because it consists in the fact that one should not blindly trust the prevailing virologists and that no virus tunnel vision should be attached to the research into the causes of diseases. Source: Screenshot von corriereadriatico.it

And yet, every attempt had been made to protect Urbani and the patients from the evil, pathogenic microbes. As the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) reports, “a four-hour discussion led the government to take the extraordinary steps of quarantining the Vietnam French Hospital, introducing new infection-control procedures in other hospitals, and issuing an international appeal for expert assistance. Additional specialists from the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) arrived on the scene, and Médecins sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors without Borders) responded with staff members as well as infection-control suits and kits that were previously stocked for outbreaks of Ebola virus.”

The fear went so deep that, to shield Urbani from viral attacks, an “isolation room” was spontaneously set up, in which the expert “fought SARS for 18 days in a Bangkok hospital.”⁸⁸¹ At the same time, guidelines for dealings with patients were published: patients should be kept in isolation and, if possible, they should lie in “negative pressure rooms,“ rooms where the air allegedly “contaminated” by the virus cannot leak out.⁸⁸²

But none of this helped; the patients died, and so did Urbani on 29 March 2003. A new causative agent—the SARS virus—was allegedly to blame. The New York Times’ leading medical journalist, Lawrence Altman, rushed to the scene immediately. Shortly after Urbani’s passing, he wrote about the dangers of SARS infection: “It can affect anyone who has the bad luck to be in the way of a contaminated sneeze or cough. SARS can be so explosive that scores of family members and health workers can be infected from a cough from one patient.”⁸⁸³

There is, however, no proof of this scenario. And if this were really true, then it should have come to an exponential increase in disease cases, and the number of infected patients should have reached dizzying heights. But this did not happen, and SARS should never have been feared at any point.

A virus should also have attacked all age groups. But “SARS has largely spared children”—for “unknown reasons,“ Altman remarked with surprise (without having given this important central fact any attention). Furthermore, the NEJM stated “no new [SARS] cases in health care workers have been reported.”⁸⁸⁴ In fact, no epidemic took place whatsoever—and certainly not one among health care workers. This also clearly argues against the possibility that a highly contagious virus is at work, since nurses, caregivers and doctors carry a particularly high risk of virus infection.⁸⁸⁵ Yet, contrary to the facts, Altman writes that, “it was the quick spread of SARS to health workers that was the first major clue that a new disease had emerged.”⁸⁸⁶

Instead of triggering epidemic alarm, the WHO should actually have looked into the central question of why a 47-year-old doctor (Carlo Urbani) died as a result of a lung infection; something that is indeed unusual. But WHO officials suffer from virus tunnel vision, so neglected the fact that anyone who comes down with a lung infection typically has weakened immune and detoxification system. This leads to increased numbers of microbes—which consequently can end in an inflammation of the lower airways. And a whole range of substances can damage the immune system, particularly antiviral medications.

Articles on SARS in the Lancet⁸⁸⁷ or the NEJM⁸⁸⁸ show that it’s common to administer all sorts of antiviral and antibiotic medications to SARS patients. So, Urbani was given the full arsenal of medications—the side effects of which can very likely be lethal.

We must also consider that lung infections have never registered as epidemics. If, for example, pneumonia cases accumulate, we should ask whether an unusually high number of immune-deficient people are involved—as was the case in Philadelphia in 1976, when veterans contracted pneumonia at a meeting of the American Legion, and some died.

The United States’ highest virus officials, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), also got wind of this, and immediately sounded the alarm. A “monster killer” had caused the deaths of the ex-soldiers, the media cried out.⁸⁸⁹ The legend of veteran’s pneumonia caused by microbes was born.

The CDC as usual, was caught up in an infectious mania, and didn’t even think it was necessary to set up laboratory experiments so that non-microbial causes could also be traced.⁸⁹⁰ The discovery of a bacterium in a few victims shouldn’t lead to the automatic assumption that the microbe is the primary or sole cause of the illness. Such a bacterium could very well be a secondary invader: a bacterium that multiplies on the foundation of a weakened body. We must also keep in mind that legionella bacteria are ubiquitous in the environment,⁸⁹¹ but large numbers of people (and animals) aren’t getting sick because of them. There never was any danger of an epidemic.

Indeed, “epidemiologic analysis of epidemic and sporadic cases has identified a variety of risk factors for the development of Legionnaires’ disease or for fatal infection,“ writes pathologist Washington Winn in the journal Clinical Microbiology Reviews after closely investigating the event. “Notable among these have been cigarette smoking, advanced age, chronic lung disease and immunosuppression [weakened immune system]. It is likely that a combination of risk factors produces the highest probability of infection.”⁸⁹² Many patients, labeled as Legionnaires’ disease victims, are already seriously ill (with cancer, diabetes, chronic bronchitis, kidney transplants, etc.) and take immunosuppressive medications.893 894

And so the pneumonia that struck down veterans (legionnaires) at their 1976 gathering was a bacterial infection and the veterans were easy targets because they were immunologically weakened after partying day and night (with drugs, alcohol, nicotine, or sleep deprivation, all known to weaken the immune system). Even today, there are still “veteran’s disease outbreaks,“ which amount to nothing more than a few pneumonia cases.

The rest of the “epidemic” victims are “test epidemic” cases that crop up only because healthy people are being tested serologically (by blood test), and this test also comes out positive—which in turn can have various causes (alcohol, drugs, malnutrition, etc.).

Antiviral Therapy: More Pain than Gain

A bacterial pneumonia can be easily determined from the blood count. As a rule, a directed antibiotic treatment is successful (even though resistance to antibiotics can increasingly be observed). Now SARS is supposed to be a viral infection, so a strong immune system will typically allow the body to fight off the virus. Alternately, the weaker the immune system, the more pronounced the viral infection. But, what weapons does mainstream medicine primarily use to fight viral pneumonia or other diseases when a virus is alleged to be the cause? Ultimately, nothing but drugs that weaken the immune system.

A good example is shingles (herpes zoster), which affects one in three people in developed countries over their lifetimes. Mainstream medicine conjectures that dormant and then sometime “reactivated” herpes viruses in the body (or more precisely, chickenpox viruses) are to blame for shingles. And so, for a fairly long time, it has been believed and postulated that antivirals, like bacteria-eliminating antibiotics, are an effective weapon against viruses.

One of the first antivirals, aciclovir (Zovirax), is said to fight herpes viruses and shingles. But clinical proof of this is, once again, missing. Not only do many shingles cases go away without treatment, for which reason people like to claim they react to being “spoken to“ by wonder healers. Basically, the body’s self-healing powers (immune system responses) are at work. Additionally, placebo-controlled studies for the approval of Zovirax—as with flu remedies (Relenza, Tamiflu, etc.)—provided no proof that antivirals significantly shortened the course of disease.

It is claimed that these medications can alleviate the disease symptoms affecting the nerves, but this is a very subjective sort of diagnosis and, since it is so difficult to objectify, the pharmaceutical industry simply makes assumptions that are ultimately tailored to generating profits. Yet, antiviral substances can trigger precisely the same symptoms that they profess to fight: from anemia (iron deficiency), bone marrow damage, oversensitive skin, and breathing difficulties to defective kidney functions and liver damage (hepatitis). All of these adverse effects are noted on package inserts as well.⁸⁹⁵

Additionally, as a rule, these “antiviral” substances are nucleoside analogues or DNA terminators, meaning that they block the genetic material (DNA) and through this are supposed to impede virus replication. But this is not the only concept of antivirals that is tied to a hypothesis with many unproven and even contradictory factors.

The basic requirement, then, for developing active antivirals is to first know the enemy—the virus—exactly, and also knows that it is a pathogenic enemy, working alone (without accomplices like chemical toxin, stress, etc.). But with the SARS virus as well, there are justified doubts that all of these factors have been securely determined.

SARS: Virus Enemy Not Found

As we’ve said before, the most reliable proof would involve of taking blood from a patient and isolating a virus by completely purifying it (separating it from all other cell components) and then imaging it with an electron microscope. Only true virus isolation allows for the development of reliable virus tests, since biochemical determination and identification of the genes and proteins typical of a virus require it to be available in a pure culture.

The presence of foreign particles, as well as the false determination of the particle (which is possibly not even a virus at all) would be fatal, for it distorts the results upon which, ultimately, the development of virus tests are based. The consequences then include misdiagnoses, unnecessary fear of death for thousands of patients, as well as the administration of side effect-laden antiviral medications, anti-fever medicines, etc.⁸⁹⁶ But unfortunately, not one of the publications that have appeared to date, shows any proof of a genuine virus.

Mainstream research has hardly managed to replicate what are termed coronaviruses (the so-called SARS virus is supposed to be one) “in conventional cell cultures,“ as can be gleaned from the German Ärzte Zeitung.⁸⁹⁷ Also, according to orthodox virus theories, the suspected SARS virus should be present in every patient—and it should not be found in healthy individuals. But no studies confirm that this is the case.

On the contrary, only “very few” SARS patients tested positive for the coronavirus introduced as prime suspect right after SARS panic broke out, as reported in April 2003, at the first large global SARS conference in Toronto.898 899 Unfortunately, this information did not prompt orthodox medicine to ponder, even for a second, if the virus concept was really true. They’re just too busy playing with their favorite toys: the molecular biological methods—above all with PCR—and, so, think that coronaviruses could be detected with them.⁹⁰⁰

As always, the medical establishment is confident that SARS is a virus as well. And so, on 15 May in Nature⁹⁰¹ and a month later in the Lancet, researchers in Rotterdam claimed to have delivered conclusive proof of a pathogenic SARS virus.⁹⁰² 436 patients, who fulfilled the case definition of SARS, were tested for the presence of a coronavirus. Then, the supposed coronavirus was injected into some macaque monkeys that responded not by becoming seriously ill, but rather displayed only light symptoms. Regardless, this satisfied the German Tagesspiegel enough to write that the “tests on monkeys at the national influenza center at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University showed that the new coronavirus triggers SARS.”⁹⁰³

The informativeness of patient sample virus tests is, in fact, highly questionable. As the World Health Organization said via a press release on 22 October 2003 (months later), there was still no “gold standard” for detection of the SARS virus. In other words, the tests could not be calibrated for a specific virus.⁹⁰⁴

Moreover, the presence of a coronavirus was said to be confirmed in only 329 of the 436 patients who fulfilled the case definitions for SARS, according to the Lancet study.⁹⁰⁵ This means that even if we assume proof of the existence of the virus that causes SARS symptoms, more than 100 patients were misdiagnosed, and for no reason, suffered fears of death, were exposed to restrictive quarantine measures and were given antiviral and antibiotic medications laden with side effects.⁹⁰⁶

A closer look at the monkey tests reveals another glaring weakness in these experiments. Researchers took a cellular culture which originally came from a SARS patient and further cultivated it with a complicated procedure, and administered it to four macaque monkeys through their throats, noses and under their eyelids.⁹⁰⁷ The animals were examined daily for the appearance of disease. On the second, fourth and sixth days, the monkeys were anaesthetized with ketamine and ten milliliters of blood from veins in the groin, and smears from the nose, mouth, throat and anus were taken.

Three of the monkeys became lethargic after two or three days. On the fourth day, two developed temporary rashes. One monkey had breathing difficulties, while three were plagued by non-advancing alveolar damage to both pulmonary lobes. The lymph nodes near the trachea and the spleen were larger than normal. The other organs in these three macaques, as well as the airway and other organs from monkey number one appeared normal under microscopic examination.⁹⁰⁸

Attributing these symptoms to a specific virus, however, is impossible, since a gold standard (real detection and characterization of the virus) was missing. Apart from that, many different virus-sized particles could be captured such as different viruses or other cellular debris. Then there are the laboratory chemicals, at least traces of which still remain, and which could likewise have an effect.

Additionally, as already mentioned, the monkeys were anaesthetized with ketamine. Possible side effects of this medication in humans include increased blood pressure and heart rate, increased vascular resistance in pulmonary circulation, pulmonary edema, heightened sensory perception and intercranial pressure, increased muscle tension, dehydration, redness of skin, dreams (of the unpleasant sort) and shock conditions. During sedation or after waking up, side effects also include hallucinations, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, motor agitation and even respiratory arrest with too large a dose or too fast an administration.⁹⁰⁹

These recognized human side effects can appear weaker, stronger, or altered in the monkeys, and are exactly the same symptoms observed in the monkeys (lethargy, rash, breathing difficulties, altered pulmonary tissue). But, incomprehensibly, the article doesn’t broach whether these side effects could have been caused by ketamine. It is also amazing that researchers came to their final conclusions on the basis of only four test animals, considering that the monkeys did not even continuously display the same symptoms, far less typical SARS or flu symptoms like fever and coughing. Only one animal had breathing difficulties at all (SARS is, mind you, a pulmonary disease).

Furthermore, in these experiments, there was no control group of animals exposed to exactly the same (and possibly traumatic) conditions, including the physical containment and the treatments themselves, like being anaesthetized with ketamine. Moreover, the control animals should have received the same injections, only without the alleged virus. Only through such a control group could the researchers truly rule out that the symptoms that appeared in the monkeys could have been caused by something other than the alleged coronavirus.⁹¹⁰

Apart from this, with antivirals, it is impossible to target specific viral genetic material (DNA). Rather, the use of antiviral substances is equivalent to a round of machine gun shots. Through this, the genetic material of healthy cells is always affected, meaning that their growth is constantly impeded. Finally, antivirals work like chemotherapy in the treatment of cancer patients, in that they are inescapably damaging to the immune system (immunosuppressive) or even carcinogenic (cancer-causing).

The reality is now that with virtually every little ache and pain, antivirals are too-often prescribed by the doctors and requested by patients. And the money rolls in for pharmaceutical groups and doctors. But for the patients, this means that, in the long term at least, they will have to anticipate severe damage to their health (even including cancer).

Cortisone and Other Steroids: Questionable Effects

Steroids are another group of often-used and potentially problematic medications. Steroids, a family of drugs to which cortisone belongs, are extremely effective anti-inflammatories. With this, unpleasant symptoms like respiratory distress diminish, and doctor and patient are hopeful that the problem has been solved. At the same time, the patient’s immune system is further weakened due to the anti-inflammatory effects of the medication, and the course of the disease, described as a “viral infection,” can in certain circumstances become worse and even have lethal consequences.

The Kiel University Hospital had this unfavorable experience while treating so-called “viral liver inflammations.” At first, laboratory values improved, but then, under cortisone therapy, severe shingles developed.

In May 2003, the Lancet reported that many SARS patients had been treated with high doses of cortisone and the antiviral (DNA terminator) ribavirin. But the case description, which is probably exemplary of most SARS cases, reads like a bad horror movie in which the characters make a serious of unfortunate choices.

The first unfortunate move was the decision to prescribe antibiotics that had no effect, because there was no bacterial infection. Thus a worsening in health occurred. The second unfortunate choice was to carry out an open lung biopsy. This means that a tissue sample was taken from the lungs for test purposes. But after the operation, the patient had to be put on a respirator. This resulted in the third unfortunate decision: high doses of antivirals and cortisone were given intravenously. 20 days after arrival, the patient died. One can well imagine that the patient did not die despite, but rather as a result of the “therapy.”

Admittedly, we could only scientifically draw such a conclusion if so-called placebo-controlled double-blind studies had been, or would be, carried out. These are tests where there are not one, but two groups of patients, from which one receives the preparation while the other gets an inactive pseudo-medication (placebo). At the same time, neither patient nor the doctors treating them knows which subject receives what (active substance or placebo), which is why they are termed “double blind.” Only with such placebo studies can it be said that a medication is more effective than doing nothing—or causes more damage than an inert placebo, something that is not improbable, since most medications have severe side effects.

Adverse therapeutic outcomes can only be prevented through long-term placebo controlled studies. Otherwise, the doctor in charge never knows if the patient recovers, becomes ill, or even dies despite or due to the initiated measures (giving of pills, etc.). And indeed, relevant studies, including ones carried out by the American drug approval authority FDA, argue that such placebo controls (contrary to usual practice) should always be carried out.

With SARS specifically, without these placebo controls, it can by no means be ruled out that SARS patients who are only slightly ill would recover without medications like ribavirin. At the same time, they could also become completely healthy again, even though they are administered ribavirin, because their immune systems are still so sound that they can fight the drugs with toxic and immunosuppressive effects. It is just as possible that SARS patients already severely weakened with compromised immune systems are not aided at all by ribavirin, but that the disease’s course is only accelerated.

A clear indication of how little sense it makes to administer antivirals, is depicted by the second case description in the Lancet study mentioned above. This paper points out that the symptoms gradually improved without treatments of ribavirin and steroids.

The Therapeutic Dilemma of Our Time

We come now to the therapeutic dilemma of our time. It has become noticeably more difficult for doctors to engage in “therapeutic nihilism,” that is, providing a severely ill patient with only life-support measures like oxygen and fluid replacement. Nowadays, in our completely overmedicated society, there is a knee-jerk reaction toward doling out drugs—from doctor and patient alike. Caution is rarely observed from either side.

Likewise, few doctors inform their patients about ways in which they can strengthen their immune systems themselves. For example, the influence of the intestinal flora [as the largest immune organ] upon health is very significant, as intestinal specialist Francisco Guarner says;911 912 it performs essential functions for the nutritional supply, the development of epithelial cells and the strength of immunity.⁹¹³ Numerous factors have an influence upon the intestinal flora’s condition—primarily nutrition.⁹¹⁴

Admittedly, doctors must also consider legal issues. They are seldom prosecuted if they have administered all sorts of medications but much more likely to be sued if they didn’t administer anything. It’s generally assumed that a patient may die even though he has been treated with medical substances (even when deadly side effects are known), but it is practically never assumed that the death is due to the medical treatment. As well-known British pharmacologist Andrew Herxheimer puts it, in reference to the poisoning of AIDS patients through antiviral medications like AZT: “Damage [caused by medical drugs] is usually underrepresented in media coverage.”

Of SARS it remains to say that it is a banal pneumonia from which, if unfavorably treated, large numbers of people will die. Or as Ludwig Weissbecker, former chief of the department of internal medicine at the Kiel University Clinic, expresses it: “Behind an unfortunate therapeutic outcome is often an unfortunate therapist.”

Guangdong: The High-Tech Revolution’s Dirty Secret

With SARS, like the other alleged epidemics, virus panic superimposed everything and even though other more reasonable explanations were right under our noses. It’s interesting that the first patient to trigger SARS panic came from Guangdong province in China.⁹¹⁵ Here, it’s important to emphasize that in nearby Hong Kong, with its 75 million inhabitants and thousands of farms, humans and animals live extremely close together.⁹¹⁶

Yet Die Zeit spun a decidedly horrific tone when depicting living conditions in Guangdong province: “The environment from which the virus presumably [!] sprang is despicable: South China, a classic hotbed for deadly epidemics. Here, anything that has muscles and mucus membrane is eaten. Microbes easily jump from one species to another. This demands adaptation to new hosts. And this is how mutated viruses and new epidemics emerge.”⁹¹⁷ But this—as Die Zeit itself concedes—is pure speculation. The description also begs the question that if this were the case, how can it be that SARS first broke out in 2003, when the Chinese have lived closely together with their animals for thousands of years?

Guiyu (Guangdong), China: A woman is about to smash a cathode ray tube from a computer monitor in order to remove the copper laden yoke at the end of the funnel. The glass is laden with lead, but the most hazardous aspect of such an activity comes from the inhalation of the highly toxic inner phosphor dust coating. Monitor glass is later dumped in irrigation canals and along the river where it leaches lead into the groundwater. The groundwater in Guiyu is completely contaminated to the point that fresh water is trucked in constantly for drinking purposes. © Basel Action Network

Through a microbe-fixated view, another piece of the puzzle is completely suppressed which is at least as characteristic for Guangdong province as the omnipresent chickens and other animals: Guangdong is China’s largest industrial area, acting as a sort of global workshop with its textile, toy and microchip factories. This region is the hub for China’s exponential global economic growth. It’s a paradise for politicians, corporate investors and multinational corporations, but this is exactly why the area is extremely polluted. Garbage lies everywhere; above all high-tech waste.

Computers, mobile phones and the Internet are supposed to help poor countries achieve the kind of prosperity Western nations enjoy. But the age of information has caused many problems for developing countries, including masses of electronic scrap and toxic waste. Up to 80 percent of electronic waste accumulated in the USA (10 million computers per year alone) is not disposed of in the land of boundless possibilities, but rather, through a series of dealers, the high-tech waste is sold to the best-paying customers on the international market. At the end of this chain, as the study “Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia” shows, are the poor in India, Pakistan and China—and there, above all, the people in Guangdong.

For $1.50 a day, locals disassemble computers, monitors and printers with their bare hands, endangering both their own health and the environment. “The export of E-trash is the high-tech revolution’s dirty secret,” says Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network, one of the study’s co-authors.⁹¹⁸ “A short time ago, the import of high-tech junk was officially banned. But the waste makes it to China, be it because the regulatory authorities are simply overwhelmed or because corruption makes import possible.”⁹¹⁹

One of the places where the authors did their research was Guiyu in Guangdong, which developed from a rural spot into a booming centre of e-waste processing since the mid-1990s. There, workers empty toner cartridges from laser printers the whole day long without protective masks, breathing in fine carbon dust. Others, mostly women and girls, dip circuit boards into baths of liquid lead to separate and collect the soldering materials with which the memory chips and processors are attached to the plates.

Unprotected, they are exposed to toxic fumes. While the plastic plates are simply burned up, the chips and processors are put in acid baths, to extract their gold. Here as well, poisonous fumes are generated, and the unusable leftover acids are just dumped into the river. A lot of garbage is simply burned up or dumped onto rice fields, irrigation facilities or into waterways. The bodies of water and groundwater around Guiys have become so contaminated that drinking water has to be brought in daily from other cities.

Many heavy metals and other highly toxic substances are suspected to cause serious health problems, including cancer and neural damage. According to studies, “the high level of contamination [in Guangdong] caused by unsafe electronics disposal is a potentially serious threat to workers and to public health,” said Arnold Schecter, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Texas School of Public Health. “I think we’re fooling ourselves. We think we’re doing the right thing by recycling, but we’re harming people in less developed countries.”⁹²⁰

Chapter 7

H5N1: Avian Flu and Not a Glimmer of Proof

“There is no concrete proof that waterbirds at Qinghai that may have been infected with such a pathogenic strain and have survived, will migrate and be capable of transmitting the virus to other species of birds, animals or humans.”⁹²¹

WETLANDS INTERNATIONAL (ORGANIZATION FOR THE PROTECTION OF NATURE AND PARTNER OF THE UN ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAM)

The Media: Big Pharma’s Megaphone

If one believes the media reports about avian flu, the world will be afflicted by a global epidemic—a so-called pandemic—in the near future, triggered by a mutation of an avian flu virus with the mysterious and ominous-sounding name H5N1. In the weekly newspaper Die Zeit in late summer 2005, we read with shudders this front-page headline: “Death on silent wings—the bird flu is approaching.” And, as if the point was to create the title for the sequel to the Hollywood shocker Outbreak, in which actor Dustin Hoffman is on the hunt for a deadly virus: “H5N1 plays Blitzkrieg [lightning war]”; “impending attack of the killer ducks.”⁹²²

Der Spiegel quoted David Nabarro, named the UN chief coordinator in the battle against avian flu in September 2005: “A new flu pandemic can break out any moment—and it can kill up to 150 million people.”⁹²³ Reinhard Kurth, director of Berlin’s Robert Koch Institute, didn’t want to be outdone by Nabarro and, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung he warned that, “an epidemic potentially threatens all six billion people.”⁹²⁴

A more detailed inspection of media reporting on the subject shows one report or another that actually downplayed the virus panic. The Canadian news magazine Macleans (the country’s equivalent to Time in the USA) printed an article headlined: “Forget SARS, West Nile, Ebola, and Avian Flu [H5N1]—The Real Epidemic Is Fear.”⁹²⁵ Marc Siegel, professor of medicine at New York University and author of the 2005 book False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear, presented his critique of the fear mongering climate in several media simultaneously, including the Ottawa Citizen,⁹²⁶ the Canadian capital’s most significant daily newspaper, the Los Angeles Times,⁹²⁷ and USA Today.⁹²⁸

In German-speaking regions, Freitag,⁹²⁹ Berliner Republik,⁹³⁰ and Journalist⁹³¹ were among the publications, that ventured to be critical; and the Swiss Weltwoche wrote: “Only when the last chicken has laughed itself to death will you see that horror reports are more contagious than BSE, SARS and H5N1.”⁹³²

Sadly, the few levelheaded voices got completely lost in the tidal wave of H5N1 virus-manic reports. Under this apocalyptic cloud, there were few attempts to get to the facts, which should have happened from the beginning. Are the warnings churned out by newspapers, magazines and television stations and sold to a global public as the final conclusions of truth, backed up by scientific proof? Quite evidently not.

The scientists and their lobbyists seem more interested in acting as media celebrities. These mainstream virus experts do their rounds in newspapers and on television, creating a guise of legitimacy. The media repeats exactly what these so-called experts want to hear without asking for evidence. We discovered this after getting in touch with various publications asking the following questions:

Is an independent study available to you, which proves that the so-called H5N1 virus has been proven?

If there’s proof of the virus’ existence, is an independent study available to you, which proves that the H5N1 virus has pathogenic effects on animals?

Does sound evidence exist that rules out other factors (chemical toxins, foreign proteins, stress, etc.) as causes of the avian disease?

Is an independent study available to you, which proves that H5N1 can jump to the human species and can trigger a pandemic with many millions of deaths?

Even opinion leaders like the Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, however, could not name a single study.⁹³³ Die Zeit merely wrote: ”All primary sources [studies] can easily be looked up using [the scientific databanks] DIMDI or Pubmed, and can then be ordered through [the document delivery service] Subito. Experts from the Robert Koch Institute, for example, or the National Research Center for Viral Diseases in Riems [the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute (FLI)] are open to questions from any journalist. And the relevant CDC and WHO publications are freely accessible.”

In response, we told Die Zeit that the research methods they had mentioned were very familiar to us and we were only asking them kindly to name what we had requested: concrete studies. But there was no answer.⁹³⁴

Many people will be bewildered by this information. Can the public really assume that the mainstream media (which pitches itself as a watchdog of political and economic powers-that-be) critically filters the statements of the medical industry and other interest groups—and do not simply function as megaphones, strengthening the industry’s advertising messages?

The H5N1 hysteria made it clear that the media hangs on the words and opinions of the establishment, perhaps most especially regarding medical science. This was also shown by the paper “Bitter Pill,“ which appeared in, arguably, America’s most significant media journal, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) in the summer of 2005. It describes in detail with numerous examples, how the medical industry uses the media to play out their modern marketing script: first by depicting scenarios of horror, creating the desire and demand for a remedy (typically in drug form)—and finally, the miracle substances come to the rescue, providing the pharmaceutical companies and their researchers high profits.

Not only do journalists naively trust the leading medical officials. “The news media too often seem more interested in hype and hope than in critically appraising new drugs on behalf of the public,” as CJR writer Trudy Lieberman outlines. “[And] the problem has grown dramatically in recent years as direct-to-consumer advertising has increased, delivering ever-higher ad revenues to the nation’s media.”

In 1980, Big Pharma spent just $2 million in the USA on marketing and advertisements—but by 2004, this sum had swelled to several billions of dollars per year. And “instead of standing apart from the phenomenon and earning the public’s trust,” writes Lieberman, “the press too often is caught up in the same drug-industry marketing web that also ensnares doctors, academic researchers, even the FDA, leaving the public without a reliable watchdog.”⁹³⁵

H5N1: No Evidence of Virus Existence
and Pathogenic Effect

Like the media, the German Federal Consumer Protection Ministry, government ministries of countries like the USA, Canada and France, and the World Health Organization firmly assume that H5N1 is a “highly contagious” virus. Or as Anthony Fauci (director of the powerful American National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the eminent figures in American viral science who had already contributed decisively to the establishment of the HIV = AIDS dogma) put it: H5N1 is “a time bomb waiting to go off.”⁹³⁶ Later, in September 2006, the World Health Organization and the World Bank did a cost calculation, announcing that an avian flu pandemic could cost the world $2 trillion.⁹³⁷

“On the basis of profound analyses, we venture to offer the following prognoses of avian flu danger…”

These are words with explosive force, which begs the question: Can these authorities, upon whom the media relies in its H5N1 reports, back up their statements about an avian flu pandemic linked to such wide-reaching consequences with hard facts?

We sent the German National Consumer Protection Ministry (BMVEL) our four central questions, whereupon we received the following answer: “You are asking about very specific issues, which, at present, the Ministry—we ask for your understanding—cannot answer as quickly as would be necessary for your research.” We wrote back that we had plenty of time, and would only like to know when we could expect an answer.

At the same time, we pointed out that the Ministry should actually have been compelled to have evidence at hand. Otherwise, it could hardly be justified for the Ministry to appear before the public with statements expressing no doubt that H5N1 exists, is highly contagious, pathogenic (disease causing) and so on.938 939 Nor, without evidence at hand, should they have been spending millions of tax dollars on the battle against H5N1. But the Ministry could not name any studies and simply insisted: “Your requests for evidence of the pathogenicity and pandemic potential of the H5N1 virus and the studies that prove this can only be answered by the experts at the Robert Koch Institute and the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute.”⁹⁴⁰

We then turned to the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute (FLI), which, according to the Consumer Protection Ministry, was in possession of “pure H5N1 viral cultures.”⁹⁴¹ As a response, the FLI sent four studies, published in the well-known American scientific journals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,⁹⁴² Science,⁹⁴³ Journal of Virology,⁹⁴⁴ and Emerging Infectious Diseases.⁹⁴⁵ But neither these papers, nor the paper by Subbarao et al (which appeared in Science in 1998)⁹⁴⁶ cited in the Emerging Infectious Diseases paper claiming that H5N1 had been found in a human for the first time in 1997, yield actual proof of H5N1 (and these papers did not contain evidence for our other three questions either).

For avian flu, like the other alleged superviruses, biomedical research simply pulled its magic wand—the biochemical replication technique PCR (polymerase chain reaction)— out of its bag of tricks. Through PCR they claimed that the H5N1 virus’ genetic material is replicated, and through this the virus had been detected. But in fact, PCR, as Terence Brown maintains in his standard work Genomes, cannot be used to detect viruses that have not been decoded (“sequenced”) beforehand. And a complete decoding of H5N1’s genetic material, which is necessary in order to know what exactly is being replicated using PCR, has never taken place. In any case, nobody could send us such a study (details on this topic can be read in: Engelbrecht, Torsten; Crowe, David, Avian Flu Virus H5N1: No Proof for Existence, Pathogenicity, or Pandemic Potential; Non-“H5N1“ Causation Omitted, Medical Hypotheses, 4/2006; pp. 855-857).⁹⁴⁷

So, once again, there is evidently no electron micrograph of a pure and fully characterized H5N1 virus, either. There were pictures of alleged H5N1 viruses printed in media sources, but these were computer animations or completely normal cellular components that had been artificially produced in a test-tube (which is easily recognizable to any molecular biologist). The layperson can verify this by requesting a specialist peer reviewed publication in which H5N1 is illustrated and described in all the glory of its genetic information from the authorities in question, like the American CDC or the FLI. If anyone receives such a paper, please forward it on to us.⁹⁴⁸

Since H5N1 has never been seen, avian flu antibody tests—like SARS, hepatitis C, HIV and modern viral science in general—attempt to prove the existence of the deadly enemy in an indirect way. The claim is that an infected individual has very special antibodies directed against this particular H5N1 virus. But such highly specialized antibody tests could only be constructed if it were clear exactly what the tests reacted to when they came out positive or negative. But here we’ve come full circle, for this would only be possible if tests were calibrated for an H5N1 virus, but there is no proof that such a thing exists.

Because of this, it is impossible to say that H5N1 can cause disease. Orthodox researchers say that the pathogenicity of viruses like H5N1 can be proven in the laboratory by “inoculating” it into fertilized eggs or animals that have already seen the light of day (the neon light of the test laboratory).⁹⁴⁹ But, a look at the publications in which the experiments are described shows no proof of pathogenicity.

In the laboratory experiment which the FLI presented as evidence of H5N1’s pathogenicity, large amounts of the test extract (which may have contained all sorts of cellular components and other potentially damaging material) was injected into ducks’ windpipes, nasal cavities, eyes and throats for days. All the damage and destruction this extract caused was then passed off as the result of an H5N1 virus.950 951

Such details do not interest the mainstream media. They keep playing their game of blown up horror stories and simultaneously credit scientists for their reports. In mid-January 2006, Spiegel Online jumped on the mega-story that H5N1 was said to have swooped in and killed three Turkish children; the headline read: “H5N1 virus adapts to humans.” In the story, writers referred to WHO scientists who claimed to have discovered a genetic alteration into a virus that could also become dangerous for humans during their analysis of the young victims.

But that this mutation had already adapted to humans, as the headline suggests, is not provable, as the Spiegel admits in the body of the article: “It is still too early to estimate decisively whether the mutations are dangerous [for humans] as the WHO declared.”⁹⁵² The WHO experiments were not published in any peer reviewed medical journals, so we inquired repeatedly at the WHO, requesting they send us papers on these experiments or simply tell us their titles so we could examine them for ourselves. But the World Health Organization did not respond.⁹⁵³

(Not Only) Factory Farming Makes Birds Sick

As with SARS, BSE, hepatitis C and HIV, it is necessary with H5N1 to move away from the fixation on viruses. For decades, we have been able to observe how animals in industrial poultry farming become sick: their combs turn blue, their egg production is reduced, or their feathers become dull.

The FLI, Germany’s national institute of animal health and national avian flu reference laboratory, describes the symptoms that appear in birds in its information pamphlet “Classical avian influenza—a highly pathogenic form of avian influenza [highly contagious form of bird flu]”: “Animals are apathetic, have dull, ruffled feather coats, and high fevers and reject feed and water. Many exhibit breathing difficulties, sneezing, and have discharge from eyes and beak. They develop watery-slimy, greenish diarrhea and sometimes exhibit disruptions to the central nervous system (abnormal posture of the head). Water deposits (edemas) can appear on the head, wattle, comb and feet can turn purple through congestion or internal bleeding. Egg production is interrupted, and eggs that are produced have thin and deformed shells, or no hard shells at all (wind eggs). In chickens and turkeys, mortality rates are very high. Ducks and geese don’t get sick as easily, and the disease does not always lead to death. Sometimes they suffer from an intestinal infection, which is outwardly almost unnoticeable, or else display central nervous disruptions.”⁹⁵⁴

For years, a virus has been claimed as the sole cause of these disease phenomena, something which the FLI also takes for granted, writing in its information flyer on “Classical Avian Influenza”: “How is avian influenza transmitted and spread? Diseased animals eliminate masses of the infectious agent with feces and mucous or fluid from the beak and eyes. Other animals become infected through direct contact—by breathing in or pecking at material containing the virus.”⁹⁵⁵

By presenting as irrefutable fact something that has not been scientifically proven (no proof of virus existence, no proof of the transmittable or infectious mechanism),⁹⁵⁶ viral research commits a most basic error. It neglects its highest duty, namely, to investigate if factors other than microbes cause or at least are contributing causes of the disease in birds. In fact, these factors are characteristic of factory farming:

Heavy psychological stress resulting from extremely close crowding in the cages and mass stabling with no natural sunlight

Denatured industrial feed, including already spoiled feed

Distortion of animal bodies’ as a result of overbreeding for certain desired physical characteristics

Preventive administration of all sorts of side effects-inducing medications (antibiotics, vaccines, etc.), even to chicks

You don’t have to be a scientist to suspect that animals exposed to these unnatural conditions for a lifetime can become ill. A major offender, as studies show, is high-performance breeding, which pumps the animals up, while simultaneously degenerating them in many physical areas, so that the livestock become ill almost independent of the husbandry system. This breeding is so extreme that many species would not be able to manage in natural husbandry conditions.

Imagine trying to keep a high-performance cow with a super-sized udder that produces 8,000 liters of milk per year in a meadow without giving her concentrated feed? It wouldn’t work at all. No less degenerate is the situation with poultry. “Eight-week-old chickens today are equipped with seven times the chest musculature as nine-week-old chickens 25 years ago,” as John Robbins describes the gruesome reality of factory farming in his book The Food Revolution.⁹⁵⁷

Numerous animals also suffer from skin diseases, chemical burns (“hock burns“), skeletal problems and paralysis. In the European Union alone, many tens of millions of hens in the mass pens are affected by lameness, which can be associated with severe pain caused by abnormal skeletal development and bone diseases958 959 (in many large facilities, half of the animals are affected by skeletal growth problems).960 961 These lame animals spend up to 86 percent of their time lying down, so that they sometimes cannot reach the drinking water container for days at a time.

Countless hens are also tormented by heart problems; many animals die of sudden cardiac arrest (“sudden death syndrome“). Experts estimate that in the EU, around 90 million chickens per year die as a result of heart defects, which can primarily be linked back to overbreeding—the heart simply cannot keep up with the extremely stimulated body growth.⁹⁶² Additionally, the air in the gigantic halls where the chickens are kept can be so full of dust and biting ammonia that the animals’ eyes, throats or lungs begin to burn, resulting in diseases, collapsed lungs and a weakened immune system.963 964 965

Even assuming that a virus with pathogenic potential is somehow a culprit, it is science’s duty to clarify the roles played by other possible disease-causing factors (like factory farming itself). And indeed, the FLI admits that the clinical pictures that the flu virus produces in the birds are similar to other clinical pictures.

Altogether, the FLI lists eight similar clinical pictures—so-called “differential diagnoses.” But unfortunately, they only take these into consideration when they can’t nab an influenza virus as culprit.⁹⁶⁶ Furthermore, the first seven spots on this eight-point list are diseases which mainstream medicine firmly assumes are caused by microbes (like so-called “pneumoviruses” or microbes believed to be the primary/single cause of “infectious bronchitis”)—and only at the very end, in eighth place, are “poisonings” mentioned, with no further detailed explanation.⁹⁶⁷

Thus, before checking if the animals’ disease symptoms have been caused by poisoning with medications, spoiled feed, chemicals like ammonia and so on, examiners first look to see if seven different infectious agents triggered disease. And if they think they have apprehended such a microorganism, they simply stop searching for other potential toxins. Poultry farm inspectors fall in step with this virus fixation. In 2003, when avian flu panic broke out in Holland, samples from diseased animals were sent in, but no samples of feed, water, litter or indoor air.⁹⁶⁸ The study could hardly have been more single-mindedly directed at microbes.

The Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute did tell us that it had investigated if factors other than the alleged H5N1 virus could have led to the illnesses among Chinese wild birds (believed to trigger the 2005 avian flu and eventually exterminated). But none of the studies we received from the FLI look at any causes beyond H5N1—not even from the paper that is explicitly said to support the FLI’s statements: “Role of domestic ducks in the propagation and biological evolution of highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza viruses in Asia,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 26 July 2005.

Obviously no further research was done after they thought they had discovered a virus with the assistance of indirect detection procedures (PCR and antibody tests). But, as already mentioned, these indirect “proof” procedures do not confirm the existence of a certain virus. And they certainly don’t deliver evidence that this is a disease-causing virus.

Many experts like veterinarians and also small poultry breeders, meanwhile, continue calling attention to the fact that the so-called avian flu is by no means solely a phenomenon of factory farming, or that keeping laying hens in cages actually makes them less susceptible to disease than if they were kept in free range husbandry. But under closer observation, these clues do not add up.

The caged animals must battle substantial health problems and death rates. Even in the so-called enhanced cages, walking, running, fluttering and flying are just as impossible as in conventional cages, which are the size of a standard sheet of paper. “And a consequence of lack of movement is a reduced bone stability, osteoporosis, from which skeletal anomalies and painful broken bones can result,” states Ute Knierim, professor of Applied Farm Animal Ethology and Animal-Fair Husbandry in the Department of Ecological Agricultural Science at the University of Kassel.⁹⁶⁹

Here, disease is all too hastily equated with microbial or viral infection. But whether, for instance, free-range animals have also really become sick because of a virus or because of other factors must first be closely investigated in detail. In any case, when requests are made for concrete studies, no studies are named. The typical response is, “Oh, everybody knows that,“ or that the conclusion was made through personal experience.

Personal experience is certainly useful and here there is evidence to show that modern production methods make animals sick. We learn from our elders, who grew up on chicken farms in the 1920s and 1930s, a time when the birds could run around and peck away in a much more natural environment and were generally fed very natural food (corn, fresh vegetables, etc.). These birds never had a bluish comb discoloration or dull feathers. So, it’s reasonable to conclude that the type of a husbandry is important, and perhaps even the deciding factor in the animals’ health.

At first glance, modern free-range husbandry might sound like a good thing, but it is all too many times anything but— rather it also constitutes a sort of factory farming. Often, many thousand of chickens share a limited grass surface; up to ten chickens per square meter. Typically, “larger problems occur in larger flocks,“ according to Ute Knierim.⁹⁷⁰ We must remember, though, that these conditions don’t necessarily cause viruses. For example, an investigation by the Research Institute for Organic Farming (FiBL) shows that with the increase in flock sizes, feather picking, which compromises health, also increased. “Feather-picking is a serious problem that still has to be solved in order to establish whether it’s fair to keep laying hens in larger flocks,“ says Helen Hirt, animal breeding and husbandry expert at the FiBL.

It’s no coincidence that various livestock husbandry facilities have introduced an upper limit on flock sizes. Particularly as studies show that laying hens from large flocks use the important green space less than hens in small flocks. Why this is the case is not absolutely clear, but it has been observed that the green surface is unevenly used by the animals, which in turn leads to an overuse of the grass close to the coop, and in many cases to the turf’s destruction and consequent overfertilization of the soil in this area. For animals constantly pecking at the ground, this can present a large problem. According to Hirt, “the question of how turf can be kept intact is one of the most important for laying hens with pasture.”

One possible way to make chickens spread out is to erect a shelter where the animals can take their dust baths. Our domestic chickens are descended from Bankiva chickens that lived in forests offering shade and places for retreat. “And the need to be in an environment offering covered areas continues with our domestic chickens,“ says Hirt. Indeed, investigations show that chickens do spread out better over the green surface when sand-bath shelters are made available to them.⁹⁷¹

These short explanations clearly show that poultry breeding appropriate to each species that encourages robust health is a difficult undertaking. But the primary goals of many livestock owners are not maximum profits but also the animals’ health. Unfortunately, all too often, they do not have sufficient professional knowledge to guarantee that their birds stay healthy. So, just like in human medicine, the animals are hastily and frivolously administered highly toxic medications, and are fed all sorts of things, from artificial industrial feed to human favorites like popcorn or chocolate—things to which the animals are certainly not genetically adapted. All of this is really worth bearing in mind, as is the practice of regularly giving young chicks numerous vaccines.

“Besides general know-how, the smaller rural structures, in which owners take care of the animals themselves and thus may have better training and more interest in the animals’ well-being, probably also play a part in the realization of considerably better results,“ summarizes Knierim. “But individual factors, like access to a cold scratching shed and the origin of the hens, evidently have strong influence upon the success of an alternative way of keeping laying hens.”⁹⁷²

Moreover, studies have shown that an artificially triggered laying interruption has benefits. This usually occurs through substantial light reduction and feed restriction. At first, it can put considerable strain on the animals. But at the end of the laying pause it was shown that both the strength of the eggshells and the quality of the proteins had significantly improved. The weight of the eggs had also sharply increased and markedly less feather damage was observed in the animals at the end of the laying pause.⁹⁷³

“Chickens—like all animals used in agriculture—are natural beings,” reminds Hans-Ulrich Huber from the Swiss animal protection organization STS. “For this reason, they should not spend their lives exclusively in coops, but should also experience sun, earth, plants, air and light. This corresponds to their inherent needs and boosts their health! For wherever the sun doesn’t reach, comes the vet.”⁹⁷⁴

Guesswork on Rügen

The H5N1 scare, which affected Germany via the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea, is also no more than an artificially produced test epidemic, in which dead birds are searched for, found, and collected by the German armed forces and tested by so-called epidemic experts. That the occasional bird reacts positively to the tests is no reason to panic, since nobody can precisely say what causes a positive or negative reaction to the tests. In any case, that it is an evil H5N1 virus is, as outlined, anything but proven.

Another striking fact these scientists chose to overlook is that only a fraction of dead birds discovered react positively to the H5N1 tests. At this point, health officials should have asked what had caused the death of all the H5N1 negative birds. And did more birds die that year than the previous year? Or did they search more for dead birds? These are self-evident questions that the scientists, the politicians and the media chose not to ask. A rare exception appeared is the Tageszeitung, which quoted ornithologist Wolfgang Fiedler of the Max-Planck-Institute: “Despite bird flu, avian mortality rates on Rügen have not to date been higher than in other years.”

An even more difficult question to answer is why the assembled experts chose not to carry out proper research. They certainly didn’t look for the source of the (purported) avian flu infection on Rügen. “How on earth could Rügen’s swans become infected with the dangerous H5N1 virus?” asks The Spiegel, referring to reports from the Associated Press and the German Press Agency (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, dpa). “Researchers have a mystery before them. For the birds had wintered in Germany—and as a result didn’t come from the [alleged!] epidemic areas.”⁹⁷⁵ The bird population on Rügen, as ornithologists reported, is basically isolated in winter, something which clearly speaks against the possibility that the swans somewhere became infected with an H5N1 virus.

But scientific and political powers ignore every doubt, pass over every inconsistency and simply stick to this: H5N1 is the deadly enemy. They’re not interested in proof—speculation is enough. And so the allegations continue to pose as truths: that H5N1 came out of the Far East, where, since late 2003, it is said to have caused several outbreaks of avian influenza in various Southeast Asian countries, including Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, China (including Hong Kong), Laos and Malaysia—and by mid-2005, more than 100 million animals had died.⁹⁷⁶ Mind you, even according to official statements, only a fraction of the deaths are accounted for by H5N1. By far the largest proportion of the birds died as a result of the mass-exterminations prompted by the virus-panicked authorities.

The prevailing practice is as follows: a chicken (or another bird) is singled out because it lays fewer eggs or gets a blue comb; it’s then sent to virus hunters and tests positive for H5N1; and an epidemic of panic breaks out among humans! Consequently, all chickens in close proximity are gassed to death. And ultimately, statistics show that these 100 million chickens were killed by the avian flu virus H5N1, further fanning the flames of panic.

The Dutch Bird Flu Panic, 2003:
Caught in Virus Tunnel Vision

It would be a mistake to assume that these gassings are the product of some cruel Third World practice. In early 2003, Dutch officials on the border to the German state of North Rhine-Westfalia (NRW) reported that “health problems” with a “very high” death rate had been observed on six poultry farms.

This immediately triggered epidemic hysteria. The next day (a Saturday), no-go zones within a radius of 10 kilometers of the affected farms were erected and poultry shows were prohibited. Additionally, the Netherlands banned exports of poultry and eggs. On the same day, the government of NRW issued an import and export ban on poultry products coming from their EU neighbor. Dozens of operations that had delivered chickens or feed from the Netherlands in the days before were put under official observation. Immediately, the search for a virus began using indirect test procedures—and look at that! The very next day, came the announcement that a highly pathogenic virus of the type H7N7 had been found.

“Over the following four months, 26 million chickens in the Netherlands, around 2.5 million in Belgium, and approximately 100,000 in NRW were gassed with carbon dioxide, poisoned by lethal injection, electrocuted or manually slaughtered,“ according to Hans Tolzin, editor of the German vaccination publication Impf-Report, who did extensive analysis of the event.⁹⁷⁷

Yet the media jumped on the virus bandwagon. German Stern magazine falsely reported, “approximately 30 million animals perished from the bird flu in the Netherlands.”⁹⁷⁸ And the weekly newspaper Die Zeit said that, “The impending attack of the killer ducks could destroy the existence of German chicken breeders. A bird flu like in 2003 is imminent. Then, millions of chickens lost their lives in the Netherlands and in the town of Viersen on the lower Rhine”⁹⁷⁹—which likewise suggests that a virus had wiped out the birds. But these media claims are ridiculous because the virus was only found in single animals (or more precisely, a H7N7 virus was said to be identified in individual animals). In the end, 30 million birds died from another all-too human strain of virus mania.

Zeit and Stern rode the waves of public virus panic—in this case, giant killer waves. The killings ultimately swelled to such a size that the capacity of extermination and cremation facilities was no longer sufficient. A state of emergency was imposed on Dutch communities, and they were barricaded off by the military. When a few diseased chickens were found on a farm, the farm’s complete chicken stock was “preventively” exterminated, along with the stocks of surrounding farms. The economic damage in the Netherlands alone cost more than €100 million.

But the existence—or even the dangerousness—of this so-called H7N7 virus was likewise never proven. And while there was, once again, reason enough to look for other causes (the effects of factory farming on the animals’ health, for example), the authorities declared H7N7 the enemy—and eureka!—another epidemic was born. “The epidemic was announced on 23 February 2003, and since then, I have collected and evaluated all accessible press releases and official reports,” says Tolzin. “But there was only a single report with researchable details, from which it emerged that other causes besides the avian influenza had been taken into consideration. But even this report, which was penned by the Dutch Agriculture Minister Veerman on 3 March, was never mentioned again.”⁹⁸⁰

Everyone was clucking about a virus in the Canadian province of British Columbia, when, in November 2005, a single duck was found and using modern indirect molecular biological “proof” procedures, the avian flu virus H7N3 was allegedly detected. The animal, as was officially reported, had only a “mild form” of this virus type, which produces no or only “mild disease” symptoms. That is to say, the duck was not sick.⁹⁸¹

According to Canadian authorities, it was “not the virus circulating in Asia [H5N1]. There is no new threat to human health.”⁹⁸² However, preventively, the authorities not only killed the single duck, they immediately slaughtered a further 56,000 healthy duck and geese. Yet international statutes certainly do not necessitate taking such drastic measures of killing entire flocks of birds, if, as was presumed in this case, that only a “low pathogenic” virus is in the game.

“There’s paranoia, there’s politics and there are perceptions that come into play here that cause people to do things for other reasons than what you would call true science,“ says David Halvorson, an avian flu expert at the University of Minnesota. “I tend to look at it from the scientific perspective that [the killings are] a waste of animals’ lives.”⁹⁸³

Rat Poisons Carry off Birds

The haste, with which authorities and media hit the virus panic button by exclusively suspecting a virus instead of considering a wide spectrum of possible causes from the beginning, is also shown by the incident of the geese deaths in the German province of Rhineland-Palatinate in October 2005. A boy had found the dead greylag geese and informed the police. “The dead geese were floating in the pond,” described a police spokesman in Koblenz. “And some animals perished from severe cramps before the eyes of the action force.”

In response, the dead birds were collected in cases by firemen wearing special protective suits, and brought into the state investigations office, which immediately prompted the media to stir up the H5N1 panic. “Avian flu suspicion: mysterious deaths of geese near Koblenz and Göttingen have strengthened fears of an avian flu outbreak in Germany,” reported the news channel N24.⁹⁸⁴ In turn, this prompted Jürgen Trittin, then German Minister of the Environment, to announce that he would initiate resolute counter measures, in case the dangerous H5N1 virus was detected in these birds.

It turned out that the birds had been poisoned, as the regional inspection office reported. Its president, Stefan Bent, said that a rat poison had been detected in the stomachs of twelve of the 22 cadavers. The toxin phosphide had clearly caused the deaths of the wild geese. And even if the presence of the rodent poison phosphide had only been proven in twelve stomachs, Bent said it could be assumed that all the animals died from it. The toxic caused abnormal alterations in the inner organs of the animals, like round hemorrhages on gastric mucous membrane and increased fluid in the lungs.⁹⁸⁵

Rodent poison, mind you, is not only used in Germany. In a comprehensive 2003 report, the Japanese Agriculture Ministry tried to trace the progressive routes of flu virus outbreaks in birds in factory farms: “Poison bait type rodent poison was used during the summer and was applied continually [against mice and other wild animals] replenished when required.”⁹⁸⁶

On the Duty to Avoid Seeing
What Is Right under Our Noses

These incidents show how important it is to look at the full picture when researching possible causes. Such a broad-spectrum viewpoint would also have been most advisable in the case of the many thousand wild birds found dead near China’s largest salt-water lake, the Qinghai Hu, between May and July 2005. It reignited global panic over avian flu, because epidemic hunters, politicians and the media immediately, and with rock-solid conviction, put their bets on an H5N1 outbreak.

Once again, many other causes come into question. Pollution, for instance, presents a huge problem in China, as in most developing countries, not least because of the chemical industry, one of the country’s fastest-growing economic industries. In the first half of 2005, production value rose by 27 percent compared to the previous year. Recently, many new chemical factories have sprung from the ground. These facilities also produce products for developed countries, in which dangerous chemical factories are not welcome, as Greenpeace expert Kevin May explains. Factories are often built on rivers, since water is needed for the production process. “And of course, this is dangerous for inhabitants who drink the water,” says May. Even without major accidents, factories in China present a danger to peoples’ health and the health of the environment—including wild animals.

70 percent of all Chinese rivers are polluted, because the industry directs its waste into the waterways, according to official statements.⁹⁸⁷

There is also “no concrete proof that waterbirds at Qinghai that may have been infected with such a pathogenic strain and have survived, will migrate and be capable of transmitting the virus to other species of birds, animals or humans,“ according to Wetlands International, a global nature protection organization linked with many institutions.⁹⁸⁸ One of its partners is the UN Environmental Program (UNEP), a group that deployed an expert task force composed of representatives from nine different organizations in late 2005, as it was held to be urgently necessary to get to the bottom of the avian flu hype. The knowledge concerning central aspects of the birds’ deaths, it was said—including the question of how the virus is transmitted from wild birds to domestic animals—could by no means be considered certain.

The UNEP warned of growing hysteria. Additionally, they criticized the “one-eyed approach in the media which grossly oversimplifies the causes and the methods needed to counter-act in the interests of human and animal health.” The media, so it was said, should provide more balanced reports “focusing on the facts.” Simultaneously, “the Task Force calls for much greater emphasis by governments and local authorities on combating the role of factory farming,” writes William Karesh, member of the task force and director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Field Veterinary Program.⁹⁸⁹

Most striking is that even the medically very orthodox WHO⁹⁹⁰ admits, “the role of migratory birds in the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza is not fully understood. Wild waterfowl are considered the natural reservoir of all influenza A viruses. They have probably carried influenza viruses, with no apparent harm, for centuries.”⁹⁹¹ But, if even from mainstream science’s perspective, wild birds rarely or never become ill or die from avian flu viruses, this must have prompted even more curiosity to research other non-viral causes. Why would the wild animals get sick or even die from viruses at the beginning of the 21st century when they have lived in peaceful coexistence for millennia?

More than 150 Dead People— What Really Caused Their Deaths?

According to official statements, H5N1 caused the deaths of 153 people from the end of 2003 until November 2006 (most of them in Asia; see diagram).⁹⁹² But if we study the reports on the deceased closely, there is no evidence for the theory that H5N1 was the killer. At the same time, the reports also allow completely different possibilities appear as plausible explanations. For example, that some of the victims were suffering from cold symptoms of an unknown source and then simply had the bad luck to fall into the hands of medical professionals who turned out to be H5N1 hunters.

Immediately, doctors prescribed prodigious amounts of medications in order to wipe out an imaginary virus—but in truth, it was never shown that these medications could combat the alleged virus. On the contrary, it is a fact that the medications are highly toxic, for which reason it is completely possible that the doctors only helped snuff out the weakened patients’ lives.

The Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute sent us a paper that claims to show that H5N1 has pathogenic effects in humans (Uiprasertkul et al: “H5N1 Replication Sites in Humans” published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases in July 2005). The report features just one six-year-old boy. The child was suffering from a lung infection, and an aspergillus infection was also diagnosed. Whereupon the little patient was treated with antimicrobial medications that can seriously damage the immune system, as well as with the antiviral medication Tamiflu (oseltamivir), that has even been connected with fatalities (more on Tamiflu below). The boy’s fate? “The patients died during the late phase of the disease after intensive treatment with antiviral drugs.”

How many people, according to the WHO, have become infected with and died from H5N1, and where did they live? (from 16 October 2006) Methylprednisolone had also been prescribed to the boy a few days before he died, 17 days after initial diagnosis. The steroid is known to weaken the immune system and should not be used in the presence of a severe bacterial, viral or fungal infection (as was the case with the boy).⁹⁹³ Additionally, the report admits that, “The multiorgan dysfunction observed in human H5N1 disease, despite the apparent confinement of infection to the lungs, has remained an enigma.” That is to say, what is termed H5N1 could not be detected in various diseased organs at all, which researchers simply shrugged off as an “enigma” instead of calling it what it clearly was and is: evidence that the established H5N1 theories make no sense.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that by May 16, 2006, H5N1 had infected approximately 200 people and killed 100. But there is no proof of this. Instead, much speaksfor the possibility that other causes like the administration of highly toxic medications led to the patients’ deaths. © www.who.org

In the 1998 Science paper by Subbarao et al,⁹⁹⁴ (also cited in the article in Emerging Infectious Diseases), a three-year-old boy was described who was healthy until, on 9 May 1997, when airway problems appeared, indicating a cold. Doctors responded by giving him Aspirin and a “broad antibiotic coverage,“ whereupon the child developed Reye’s syndrome. This is a severe disease associated with nausea, personality disorders and comas that can seriously damage organs like the brain and the liver—and in many cases ends in death.995 996 Just like the other boy, he died on 21 May. An H5N1 virus was cited as his cause of death, but here as well, evidence of H5N1 was not provided.

The medical authorities didn’t even confirm if the boy had ever been in contact with birds. Apart from this, studies suggest that Aspirin can trigger the Reye’s syndrome that was also diagnosed in the boy.⁹⁹⁷ The National Reye’s Syndrome Foundation even explicitly says: “Do not give your child Aspirin.”⁹⁹⁸ But even this information did not prompt the study’s authors to investigate the role Aspirin or other substances might have played in the three-year-old’s demise. They spared no trouble, on the other hand, back in 1997 to warn of a “rapid and explosive spread of a pandemic virus.”⁹⁹⁹

No Reason for Pandemic Panic

H5N1 fear mongers continue to predict impending horror for Germany. “A pandemic will come over us in several waves,“ Bernhard Ruf, director of the Leipzig Competence Centre for Highly Contagious Diseases and top warrior against avian flu at the WHO, asserts confidently.¹⁰⁰⁰ “And we would be lucky to survive the year 2015 without a pandemic. In Germany alone, up to 40 million will become infected and 150,000 will die. The economy will collapse. The world will be paralyzed.”¹⁰⁰¹

But there are no justifications for such warnings if H5N1 cannot be isolated as a pure virus, and thus cannot scientifically be proven to exist. And if there’s no proof that H5N1 can be highly contagious in animals, by jumping from wild birds to domestic animals and mutating into an infectious mini-monster. And if it cannot be shown that this so-called H5N1 can also jump to humans and cause disease, as a deadly avian flu virus and a human influenza virus come into contact in a human organism, exchange genes, and as evil “parent viruses,” as they’re called, give birth to an even more horrible “daughter virus.” And furthermore, if other factors like factory farming, pesticides, rodent poisons, stress and natural death are overlooked as potential contributing factors.

The FLI even admits this to us: “Concerning your inquiry about the pandemic properties of H5N1, it can only be said that there are currently no scientific methods with forecasting effects which could evaluate the possibility of an influenza virus triggering a new pandemic.”¹⁰⁰² And in late October 2005, the British Medical Journal stated that, “the lack of sustained human-to-human transmission suggests that this H5N1 avian virus does not currently have the capacity to cause a human pandemic.”¹⁰⁰³

Here it’s worth noting the comments of Julie Gerbering, director of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. In mid-April 2006, at a conference on avian flu pandemic in Tacoma, Washington, with 1200 experts from all over the country in the audience, she said, “There is no evidence [H5N1] will be the next pandemic.” Further, “[there is] no evidence it is evolving in a direction that is becoming more transmissible to people,” and there is “no reason to think it ever will” pass easily between people. These statements are in complete contrast to the continued panic reports by CDC officials. After the conference, The News Tribune reported that, “given those facts, bird flu, like SARS, swine flu and other once widely publicized health threats, might never become a significant human illness.”¹⁰⁰⁴

It is scandalous then that, as a result of unfounded pandemic warnings, more than 200 million birds had been killed by April 2006. Additionally, as a UNO report continued, costs totaling $20 billion had been incurred by the affected countries by this time and a million farmers had already slid into poverty.¹⁰⁰⁵ In Germany, the government ordered that poultry be kept indoors even led to suicide among some breeders. As the Westfalian newspaper Westfalen-Blatt reported “the breeders did not see any way out.” Indeed, at the very least, ordering small poultry breeders to keep their birds inside is tantamount to banning them from their profession.¹⁰⁰⁶

Teacher: „Stop! His reaction equation is wrong!!“ Magic Formula

Tamiflu: From Shelf-Warmer to Big Seller— to Death Bringer?

There is no foundation for vehement demands for antiviral medications. Nevertheless, mainstream media like Die Zeit insist it is “high time that Germany buys vaccines and enough medicine.”¹⁰⁰⁷ But just how dangerous are such hasty demands for a quick-fix becomes clear by tracking the rise of Tamiflu, a flu remedy that became a hot-seller only after the virus mania machine cranked up.

“Tamiflu, conceived as a remedy for common flu, did not sell well because it was too expensive and had too little effect,“ according to a rare industry critique by the Swiss news magazine Rundschau on 19 October 2005. “The pharmaceutical groups promised a lot, but in practice it was shown that doctors could hardly prescribe the medicine to anyone.”

So, the virus hunters and their media sidekicks released terrifying pictures of infection experts in white spacesuits and remote factory farms with piles of dead birds. These images were beamed around the globe, accompanied by sensationalized tales of people who had already allegedly become infected with or died from the horrible H5N1 virus. In 2004, the WHO office in Manila promptly recommended oseltamivir (Tamiflu) for “endangered individuals.” The substance was produced by the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, under the brand name Tamiflu.

Roche took advantage of the moment and quickly issued a press release saying, “Tamiflu may be effective against avian flu.” But the media didn’t seem to take notice of the phrase “may be” and crafted their headlines to tout a miracle remedy for avian flu. For Roche, this was the best kind of advertising: free and with an incredible effect. Some pharmacies soon sold out of the medication. “In the media and television, they always say that Tamiflu works against the avian flu virus,” said a pharmacist from Istanbul in an interview with the Rundschau. “Now, they all come and want Tamiflu.”¹⁰⁰⁸ Reuters news agency reported on 20 July 2005, that the “global flu precautions had granted [Tamiflu manufacturer] Roche a leap in profits.” Worldwide, “Tamiflu sales increased by 363 percent to 580 million franks [€380 million] in the first half of 2005, in comparison to the same period in the previous year.”¹⁰⁰⁹ Ultimately, in 2005, Roche increased its Tamiflu profits by 370 percent to around €1 billion”¹⁰¹⁰—primarily thanks to massive government purchases (financed by tax dollars). As the Zeit relates, the German province of North Rhine-Westfalia “announced that they would put €30 million worth of medications into storage.”¹⁰¹¹ In the first nine months of 2006, worldwide Tamiflu sales rose to $1.3 billion, Roche reported, an increase of 88 percent over the year prior.¹⁰¹² To keep up with demand, Roche factories in Europe, North America and Japan worked full throttle. By the end of 2006, capacity has doubled once again, to an annual production of 300 million packages of Tamiflu.¹⁰¹³

But what scientific basis is there for this Tamiflu hype? Franz Humer, Chairman of Roche’s Board of Directors, assures that Tamiflu “is a very important product for our patients, above all in case of an influenza pandemic.” But this statement doesn’t hold up, since Tamiflu has never been tested as a remedy for avian flu in humans, as even stated by a press release from Roche. In this, it says that there is no clinical data on the effectiveness of Tamiflu against H5N1.

This is also why Robert Dietz at the World Health Organization in Manila, which jumpstarted Tamiflu’s sales-explosion with its promotion of the flu remedy, could not avoid admitting to the Swiss news program Rundschau: “We had no specific medical foundation for our decision to recommend Tamiflu as a remedy for avian flu.”¹⁰¹⁴

In fact, in early December 2005, the Vietnamese doctor Nguyen Tuong Van, director of the Intensive Care unit at Hanoi’s Institute for Clinical Research into Tropical Diseases (who had followed WHO guidelines for patient treatment), came to the conclusion that “Tamiflu is useless; [for this reason,] we place no importance on using this drug on our patients.”¹⁰¹⁵ And just prior to this statement, appeared the first reports on deaths connected to the intake of Tamiflu.

First came a report from Japan. The pharmaceutical company Chugai, a Roche subsidiary, had notified the Health Ministry that after Tamiflu intake, two boys aged 14 and 17 became disoriented, showed abnormal behavior and ultimately died (one was thought to have jumped from his apartment; the other had thrown himself in front of a truck).¹⁰¹⁶ Only a few days later, news made the rounds that the influenza medication was connected to the deaths of twelve children in Japan. And the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) called it “unsettling” that “after Tamiflu intake, children in 32 cases had had hallucinations or shown abnormal behavior.”¹⁰¹⁷

Of course, these cases are not restricted to Japan. For example, near the end of 2006, Canadian officials at Health Canada warned of hallucinations among Tamiflu users. As of November 11, there had been seven cases of psychiatric side effects linked to Tamiflu in Canada and 84 reports of side effects occurring in Canadians taking the medication, including 10 deaths.¹⁰¹⁸

But the media doesn’t push reports of Tamiflu’s side effects nearly as much as the earlier completely unfounded declarations that Tamiflu was the best protection from avian flu (H5N1). This is certainly due to the fact that, in connection with the reported fatalities, the medical establishment immediately warned people not to panic just because a few people had died after taking Tamiflu—and in the typical manner, the media followed the medical establishment’s placations. The FDA stressed that they wanted to investigate why people had died, but they implied that it was extremely difficult to establish the exact causes.

As early as the 1990s, Tamiflu was found to cause inflammations in the brain (encephalitis). But the medical establishment twisted these findings by saying that neural symptoms were also often triggered by influenza infections, so they said that it was difficult to tell whether Tamiflu could be responsible for the neurological complications.¹⁰¹⁹ This was made even more difficult because many victims had been taking not just Tamiflu, but also other medications.¹⁰²⁰ Basically, the issue could only be clarified if controlled studies (one group/patient receives the active substance, the other a placebo) were available. But, they weren’t available.¹⁰²¹

Why was this medication never tested through the necessary clinical trials before being released to the public? The information provokes disbelief, particularly since the medical establishment and the politicians actively participates in virus mania, celebrates medications like Tamiflu and only calls for caution and restraint when news of medication-related deaths start to circulate. At which point, they rush to the side of the pharmaceutical companies whose bottom lines might be negatively affected.

Should the Tamiflu data situation become so bad at some point that it has to go out of the market, this could turn into a financial disaster for Roche. But, until clarity prevails, there is no reason to buy or take Tamiflu, neither prophylactically nor as a remedy for flu symptoms. Tamiflu is connected with numerous side effects, including vomiting, diarrhea, bronchitis, stomach and headaches, dizziness, hallucinations and hepatitis.1022 1023

This is confirmed by a comprehensive study evaluation of the Cochrane Collaboration on Tamiflu published in 2014. Result: Tamiflu is not suitable to prevent the spread of flu or to reduce the occurrence of dangerous complications. The media acknowledged this with headlines such as “The Great Tamiflu Disaster”. And three years earlier, a paper appeared that concluded: “Taking Tamiflu can lead to a sudden deterioration in health and subsequent death.”¹⁰²⁴

A patient who had taken Tamiflu for just two days reports: “I couldn’t sleep for three days and I hallucinated. My family was very worried about me. I will never take this horrible medicine again and would not advise anyone to. I completely lost my personality, I felt as if I was a different person. It was four weeks before I started feeling myself again.”¹⁰²⁵

Tamiflu Studies and the Problem of Independence

There must also be studies that show Tamiflu works against flu, right? Of course, such studies would be worthless without placebo controls, along with a guarantee that the scientists involved were free from conflicts of interest. Has the media ever taken the trouble to double check if the Tamiflu trials were sound? We do know one thing for certain: fraud is well established in biomedicine, and conflicts of interest are widespread. Making it urgently necessary to sort fact from fiction.

It doesn’t take much research to find out if Roche has financed Tamiflu (oseltamivir) studies. You only need to google, for example, “Roche funded pubmed oseltamivir”—and many hits come up.¹⁰²⁶ Let’s click on just one paper: for instance: Effectiveness of neuraminidase inhibitors in treatment and prevention of influenza A and B: systematic review and meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials, published in the British Medical Journal in 2003. It includes the following information:

“Competing interests: KGN [Karl G. Nicholson, one of the study’s authors] has received travel sponsorship and honorariums from GlaxoSmithKline, the manufacturer of zanamivir, and Roche, which makes oseltamivir, for consultancy and speaking at international respiratory and infectious diseases symposiums. His research group has received research funding from GlaxoSmithKline and Roche to participate in multicenter trials of neuraminidase inhibitors.”¹⁰²⁷

Unfortunately, such conflicts of interest are common practice, something to which the public is rarely made aware. But as the British Parliament observed in a comprehensive investigation in 2005, three-quarters of clinical studies that appear in the leading scientific journals, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), are funded by pharmaceutical companies.¹⁰²⁸ And if the industry is paying, they will use all sorts of tricks to attain the desired results,¹⁰²⁹ by omitting the critical questions or negative results and exclusively publishing positive results.¹⁰³⁰

Nonetheless, the NEJM explicitly modified its policy for writers in 2002, so that review articles and editorials could also be written by experts who receive fees of up to $10,000 a year from pharmaceutical companies. The fees can also come from companies whose products are plugged by the author in his or her NEJM articles. This presents a classic conflict of interest. What was the key reason for the alterations to their writers’ policy? The NEJM said that they were simply no longer in a position to find enough experts without any financial connections to the pharmaceutical industry.¹⁰³¹

For an allegedly independent scientific journal, this explanation seems ludicrous, but it depicts the stark reality of modern medical science. Arnold Relman, Harvard professor and former Editor in Chief of the NEJM says that, “The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice, but also in terms of teaching and research.”¹⁰³²

Precisely these financial interconnections threaten to undercut the independence of medical research. The issue only recently reached top circles in the USA after it was revealed that hundreds of scientists employed by the National Institutes of Health had received millions of dollars in commissions and big stock packages from the pharmaceutical industry. The story was researched by the Los Angeles Times and triggered a broad discussion on the independence of NIH researchers.

US Congress members accused NIH leaders and their predecessors with supporting the “option of corruption” among its employees. In response, Elias Zerhouni, the health authority’s director, announced the introduction of new rules which banned higher NIH managers from signing paid consulting contracts, and prohibited all NIH employees from holding stocks and stock options. But it turned out that many thousand NIH employees were exempt from the obligation to disclose their acquisitions. Through this loophole they could continue to be paid in secret by pharmaceutical companies without fear of punishment.1033 1034

Donald Rumsfeld Makes Giant Profits

With Tamiflu specifically, doctors and other experts have begun to ask critical questions regarding the US government’s vehement commitment to the purchase of stockpiles of the Roche medication. Death by avian flu, according to President George W. Bush, threatens two million Americans.¹⁰³⁵ This statement, based on nothing more than wild speculation, seemed to justify the massive purchase of 20 million bottles of Tamiflu at $100 each. For a total cost of $2 billion.¹⁰³⁶

Particularly alarming is the fact that, at taxpayers’ expense, enormous sums are spent on a medication whose efficacy against avian flu has never been proven and will never be proven either. For, even assuming that H5N1 does exist and causes disease in humans, nobody can predict what the mutated form of the H5N1 virus, which is supposed to first trigger the pandemic, will look like. This means that no medication, not even Tamiflu, can be conceived against such an alleged mutant virus.

And this is exactly why the UK government’s decision to order 14.6 million doses of oseltamivir for use in the event of a flu epidemic has been questioned even by orthodox experts. Among them Joe Collier, professor of medicines policy at St George’s Hospital Medical School, London, and former editor of the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin who has been quoted in the British Medical Journal with the words: “I would like to know what evidence there is that Tamiflu actually alters mortality. And if it doesn’t then what are we doing?”

On the other side of the Atlantic Canada’s federal health minister, Ujjal Dosanjh, told listeners to an interview on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio program (The Current, 27 October 2005) that oseltamivir did not prevent infection with the flu virus.¹⁰³⁷

This is why it many were upset that Donald Rumsfeld, a leading member of the George W. Bush administration, was making money thanks to massive state Tamiflu purchases. As a once-leading member of the Bush administration, he makes a tidy sum of cash from massive state Tamiflu purchases. From 1997 until 2001, before taking office, Rumsfeld chaired the Board of Directors of the American biotechnology corporation Gilead. And after 2001, according to his own statements, Rumsfeld continued to hold huge share packages in Gilead valued at $5-25 million.¹⁰³⁸ Gilead had originally developed Tamiflu, and in 1997, the Nasdaq-listed corporation sold an exclusive license to Roche for the production of Tamiflu, though Gilead kept the substance’s patent.

Gilead has since cashed in license fees from Roche (as is reported, between 10 percent and 19 percent of net price, or 10 percent of profits).1039 1040 In the three (hot) autumn months of 2005, Tamiflu licensing brought in $12 million for Gilead; up from $1.7 million in the third quarter of 2004.¹⁰⁴¹ Simultaneously, Gilead market values climbed from $37 to $47 within just a few months, something that made Rumsfeld—one of the richest men in the Bush cabinet—at least $1 million richer.

Rumsfeld isn’t the only political heavyweight in the USA, who is said to have very close connections to Gilead. George P. Shultz, US Secretary of State from 1982 to 1989, is on Gilead’s Board of Directors. In 2005, Shultz sold stocks of the Californian biotech company at a value of more than $7 million. Another member of Gilead’s board is the wife of former California governor Pete Wilson. “I don’t know of any biotech company that’s so politically well-connected [as Gilead],“ Andrew McDonald, of the analyst firm Think Equity Partners, told Fortune.¹⁰⁴²

A Saar-Echo article, published under the title “Bush Makes Panic and Rumsfeld Profit,” hits the nail on the head:

“Bush and his vice-president, ‘Dick’ Cheney, the ‘human embodiment of the combination of oil and military interests’ had developed the pattern of this capitalistic escapade for the good of the American billionaire’s oligarchy in connection with the Iraq War, when they explained their invasion of the oil-rich Middle Eastern country with the shameless lie that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. After the defeat of Saddam Hussein, one of the main profiteers from the Iraq invasion was the American company Halliburton, whose core business is trade and conveyance of crude oil. The CEO of Halliburton, until his leap to the seat of the American vice-president, was Richard Cheney, who in turn is a close friend of Tamiflu profiteer Donald Rumsfeld. Together, they founded the neoconservative think tank ‘Project for the New American Century’ in 1997. Since they have held office, the billion-dollar side projects of these and other US politicians have run like clockwork.”1043 1044

Although massive accusations of fraud are levied against Halliburton, because, for example, the group charges exorbitant prices for many services (for the cleaning of just 7 kilograms of laundry, more than $100 was charged), the US Army placed a new order in 2005 to support the troops in Iraq. The price tag: $5 billion.1045 1046 In 2004 and 2003, the oil and gas subcontractor based in Texas, George W. Bush’s home state, had already pocketed $10 billion.1047 1048

In his farewell speech in 1961, outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the increasing entanglement of military and industry, and of the growing influence of this “military-industrial complex” on American politics. This enlightened warning was repeated in the award-winning documentary Why We Fight, a focus on today’s billion-dollar war machine. 40 years later, history seems to be proving Eisenhower right.¹⁰⁴⁹

One of the many parallels between the military-industrial complex and the medical-industrial complex is huge funding by tax dollars. In 2005, the Bush administration announced that they were introducing a $7.1 billion program to protect the USA from a possible avian flu epidemic. Just a few weeks before, Bush had been heavily criticized around crisis management in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Ironic as it may seem, the government saw an excellent opportunity to polish up Bush’s battered public image in the announcement of an (incredibly expensive taxpayer funded) avian flu package.

According to Bush, they wanted to buy enough vaccine against the avian virus to protect 20 million Americans. For this, they would attempt to get the US Congress to approve $1.2 billion. Additionally, they hoped to get approval of nearly $3 billion for the development of new flu vaccines, as well as $1 billion for the storage of antiviral medications. And a further $600 million was allocated for local authorities, so that they could create emergency plans for containment of an epidemic.¹⁰⁵⁰

Bush also demanded that Congress ease liability regulations for vaccine manufacturers. Only this way, it was said, could production capacity grow, since pharmaceutical firms refused to manufacture vaccines without protection from damage lawsuits. Of course, from a consumer perspective, if such a scheme were to become reality, Americans who suffered vaccine-related damages would be denied the basic right to claim damage or other compensation by way of the law.

This plan is part of a legal initiative—the “Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005“—which would allow no more lawsuits, even if vaccinations or medications are administered by force.¹⁰⁵¹ “A drug company stockholder’s dream and a consumer’s worst nightmare,” according to the National Vaccine Information Center.¹⁰⁵²

Not to be swayed by scientific interest groups, Bush countered back with, “No country can afford to ignore the threat of avian flu.” He did admit that nobody knew if the H5N1 flu virus could lead to a deadly human epidemic, but he warned that history dictates we must once again anticipate a terrible large epidemic.¹⁰⁵³ Bush was referring to the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, to which many millions of people fell victim. This “Spanish flu” was so named because the Spanish media were the only ones to report about the virus while most other nations decreed an information ban on the pandemic, allegedly in order to avoid fear among World War I troops. But is it really a suitable virus model for any sort of pandemic predictions nowadays?

Pandemic 1918: Result of a Virus or the First World War?

“Within a few months, the Spanish flu achieved what all the epidemics in history have not managed,” wrote Spiegel Online. “In 1918, the pandemic killed between 20 and 50 million people, more than any other disease before. In the USA alone, there were 550,000 deaths. Infected patients suffered from high fever and their lungs became inflamed. Within a few days, victims drowned in their own fluids.”¹⁰⁵⁴

It sounds dramatic—and it was dramatic. But it’s much too hasty to assume that a virus triggered mass mortality. There are certainly no facts to support such a theory. These mass deaths occurred at the end of the First World War (July 1914 to November 1918), at a time when countless people were undernourished and under incredible stress after four years of war.

Additionally, the medications and vaccines applied in masses at that time contained highly toxic substances like heavy metals, arsenic, formaldehyde and chloroform, all of which could very likely trigger severe flu symptoms. Numerous chemicals intended for military use also moved unregulated into the public sector (agriculture, medicine).¹⁰⁵⁵

In 1997, a paper by Jeffery Taubenberger’s research team appeared in Science, claiming to have isolated an influenza virus (H1N1) from a victim of the 1918 pandemic.¹⁰⁵⁶ “But before one can be certain that a pandemic virus had in fact been detected, some important questions must be asked,“ writes Canadian biologist David Crowe, who analyzed the paper.

The researchers had taken genetic material from the preserved lung tissue of a victim—a soldier, who died in 1918. Lung diseases were extremely typical of the Spanish flu, but it is a big leap to conclude that the many other million victims also died from the same cause. And particularly “the same virus“ as Crowe points out. “We simply do not know if the majority of victims died for exactly the same reason. We also do not know if a virus can be held responsible for all mortalities, because viruses, as they’re now be described, were unknown at this time. Even if one does accept that an influenza virus was present in the soldier’s lungs, this hardly means that this virus was the killer.”

Taubenberger’s group admits that the soldier was an atypical case, since most of the so-called influenza victims (“influenza” suggests a viral cause) actually died from bacterial lung inflammations (for example, tuberculosis). These bacteria, it is conjectured, ultimately gained the upper hand and supplanted the viruses. But this speculation doesn’t necessarily make any sense.

The genetic analysis of pulmonary tissue form the single soldier was based on the assumption that certain genetic sequences (RNA sequences) are characteristic of all flu viruses. That is, it is theorized that there are certain proteins in flu virus shells, the RNA sequences of which were ultimately claimed to have been discovered using PCR. These proteins are hemagglutinins (this is where the “H” in H1N1 or H5N1 comes from: “H1” and “H5” stand for certain hemagglutinin types) and neuraminidases (the “N”). But in biochemistry, many different substances are termed hemagglutinins, not just proteins that cause red blood cells to clot together.

Nevertheless, it is said that proof of a virus can be exhibited by mixing red blood cells in the laboratory with samples, in which the alleged virus is said to be found. This was done by taking tissue samples from organs in which the virus is presumed to lurk (in this case from a lung) in placing them (in vitro) into a petri dish filled with red blood cells. If clots then form, the theory goes that a hemagglutinins in a flu virus must have been the cause of the coagulation.

But a complete virus had never been isolated from this sample. This method is also weak since it cannot differentiate between the RNA of an external virus and human RNA. “This cannot be normal human RNA, otherwise everyone would react positively to the method,“ says Crowe. “But it would certainly be possible that the RNA ‘collected’ by the PCR does not come from a virus protein, but is rather produced by the body itself, for instance in connection with a disease process.”

The enzyme neuraminidase, for instance, which is held to be specific to a flu virus, is actually produced naturally by the body and performs significant metabolic functions. If there is a deficiency of this enzyme—because of an innate metabolism disorder, for example—orthodox medicine has long called this Mucolipidosis I¹⁰⁵⁷ or Sialidosis which causes serious dysfunctions such as impaired vision, disorders of the nervous system and the skeleton, myasthenia (muscle weakness), seizures, disturbances of equilibrium, or cerebral development disorders. Anyone who takes flu remedies and neuraminidase inhibitors like Tamiflu should keep this in mind.

We can then conclude that Taubenberger et al, have not verifiably shown that a flu virus was present in the soldier. Their experiment cannot prove that this soldier died from a flu virus, let alone that the other umpteen million victims lost their lives because of a specific virus.

The same is true of the papers published in the scientific journals Nature and Science¹⁰⁵⁸ in October 2005. The media reports spun the information into a global sensation with news that “US researchers revive old killer virus” and “American scientists have reconstructed the extremely dangerous Spanish flu pathogen in a military laboratory.”¹⁰⁵⁹ But even if headlines suggest this, the fact is that here as well, a virus with complete genetic material (genome) had never been discovered. Lung tissue samples were simply taken from several corpses from that time, including an Inuit woman buried in Alaska’s permafrost layer in 1918. Then, the scientists conducted practically the same procedure as in 1997. Researchers had not proven that the genetic material they found really belongs to a pathogenic “old killer virus.” With many samples, the tests even came out negative. The whole thing, then, is pure speculation.

Pandemic of 1918: Mysterious Spread

According to traditional conceptions, an infectious disease begins in one place and spreads out from there, depending on the environmental conditions, in certain directions. Such a development didn’t occur with the Spanish flu.

In 1918, there were two different disease waves: a lighter one in spring and a much more severe wave, which claimed many lives, in late summer and autumn. Here, experts can’t even agree whether the disease was introduced to the United States from Europe, or the other way around.

According to one source, the epidemic began in February 1918 in the Spanish town of San Sebastian, close to the French border on the Atlantic coast.¹⁰⁶⁰ But another source names the same outbreak date, but a completely different place thousands of kilometers away from San Sebastian, on the other side of the Atlantic: New York City. That these outbreaks happened at the same time cannot be explained by either ship route or migrating bird patterns.

December 1918: Police in Seattle with protective masks from the Red Cross, thought to protect against flu viruses. © National Archives at College Park, MD

New York City, 16 October 1918: Even typists wore protective masks against the alleged flu viruses. © National Archives at College Park, MD

16 October 1918: A New York postman with a mask to protect from influenza viruses. © National Archives at College Park, MD

Seattle, 29 October 1918: A tram conductor turns away a citizen who is not wearing a protective mask. © National Archives at College Park, MD

Then in March 1918, there were reports of cases in two army camps in Kansas, hundreds of kilometers away from New York. In April, the Spanish flu appeared in Paris for the first time, in May in Madrid, until it reached its peak in Spain at the end of May. In June, cases first began accumulating in war-torn Germany, but simultaneously in China, Japan, England and Norway as well. On 1 July, Leipzig had its first case. And over the course of that month, approximately half a million Germans were affected.

The second serious wave began almost at the same time in Boston’s Harbor, on the Indian subcontinent, in Southeast Asia, in the Caribbean and Central America. In September, various army camps in the western USA along with the states of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia were affected. In October Brazil was hit, and in November Alaska.

But even if we factor in the fastest ships of the time, railway routes and migrating birds, there’s no sound epidemiological basis to construct a virus-caused influenza. Unless one assumes that the virus mutated into a deadly infectious agent on all continents simultaneously—which is probably less likely than winning the lottery ten times in a row.¹⁰⁶¹

Failed Infection Attempts

In order to be able to better assess the puzzling mass disease, an attempt to simulate infection was undertaken with volunteers in Boston in November 1918. These were 62 healthy sailors charged with delinquency and sent to prison. They had been promised a pardon under the condition that they take part in an experiment. 39 of them had not had influenza, so the theory was that they would be particularly susceptible to infection and illness.¹⁰⁶² But the results proved nothing of the sort, as American scientific journalist Gina Kolata describes in her book Influenza:

“Navy doctors collected the mucus from men who were desperately ill from the flu, gathering thick viscous secretions from their noses and throats. They sprayed mucus from flu patients into the noses and throats of some men and dropped it into other men’s eyes. In one attempt, they swabbed mucus from the back of the nose of a man with the flu and then directly swabbed one patient’s nasal septum and rubbed it directly onto the nasal septum of one of the volunteers.

“Trying to simulate what happens naturally when people are exposed to flu victims, the doctors took ten of the volunteers onto the hospital ward where men were dying of the disease. The sick men lay huddled on their narrow beds, burning with fever, drifting in and out of sleep in a delirium. The ten healthy men were given their instructions: each was to walk up to the bed of a sick man and draw near him, lean into his face, breathe in his fetid breath, and chat with him for five minutes. To be sure that the healthy man had had a full exposure to the sick man’s disease, the sick man was to exhale deeply while the healthy man drew the sick man’s breath directly into his own lungs. Finally, the flu victim coughed five times in the volunteer’s face.

“Each healthy volunteer repeated these actions with ten different flu patients. Each flu patient had been seriously ill for no more than three days—a period when the virus or whatever it was that was causing the flu should still be around in his mucus, in his nose, in his lungs.

“But not a single healthy man got sick.”¹⁰⁶³

A comparable experiment, carried out under much stricter conditions, took place in San Francisco, with 50 imprisoned sailors. But, once again, the results did not correspond with what the doctors had expected:

On April 6, 2020, the news website Axios published an article that was opened with a photo showing baseball players wearing protective masks during the 1918 so-called Spanish flu epidemic. While many mainstream media claimed that records from back then “ fatally remind of the corona crisis” in 2020 (Süddeutsche Zeitung),¹⁰⁶⁴ Axios reported a bit more differentiated and wrote: “In some respects, the coronavirus and Spanish flu aren’t all that comparable. After all, the war provided a vastly different backdrop, little was known about viruses at the time (imagine having no idea what you were suffering from) and medicine was far less advanced. In 1918, the basic treatments that were offered were enemas, whiskey and bloodletting. Hospitals as we know them today were quite different. There were no intensive care doctors [and] no antibiotics to treat any secondary infection. So it was a very different time and a very different way of practicing medicine,’ [said] Dr. Jeremy Brown, National Institutes of Health, per CBS.” Source: screenshot from axios.com

“Scientists were stunned. If these healthy volunteers did not get infected with influenza despite doctors’ best efforts to make them ill, then what was causing this disease? How, exactly, did people get the flu?”¹⁰⁶⁵

Pandemic 1918:
Overmedication and Massive Vaccination Campaigns

A look at history books and statistics shows that epidemics always developed where human immune systems had been weakened, primarily because of lack of food and clean water. This was also the case with the pandemic of 1918. A panoply of causes, which naturally could also have worked in combination, comes into consideration:1066 1067 1068 1069 1070

Psychological stress, evoked by fears of war

Over-treatment with chemical preparations, which can seriously compromise the immune system, including painkillers like Aspirin or chloroform. Chloroform, which was used as a preservative in medications, and transformed into phosgene in the body [liver],¹⁰⁷¹ which was used as poison gas in the First World War. In the late 19th century, manufacturers of medicinal products also increasingly began selling products that contained highly toxic substances like morphine, codeine, quinine and strychnine as medicines; at that time there were no regulations for such manufacturers. From 1898, the German inventor of Aspirin, Bayer, sold heroin, for example, as an allegedly non-addictive morphine substitute, and also as a cough remedy in many different forms, ranging from syrup—in noble-looking flacons –to plugs, powders, liquids, and tampons soaked in it for gynecological treatments¹⁰⁷²

Damage to airway organs resulting from “preventive” measures, like rubbing the throat with antiseptic preparations or inhaling antibacterial substances. Many of the substances used at that time also contained silver and have long been prohibited (for example, Formalin/formaldehyde has strong corrosive and irritating effects on skin, eyes, and airway, and can cause kidney, liver and lung damage; a carcinogenic potential is also attributed to it)¹⁰⁷³

No effective antibiotics: many peoples were afflicted by bacterial and fungal infections, but the first really effective means of killing bacteria and fungi was penicillin, which was discovered much later, in 1928, and became a medication during the Second World War

Vaccines often contained toxic heavy metals and were produced out of poorly filtered mucus or other fluids from infected patients

November 1918: Preventive treatment against influenza with a throat spray; American Red Cross, Love Field, Texas. © With permission of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C., Reeve33986

A frequently observed symptom of the Spanish flu was internal bleeding in the lungs (typical of tuberculosis patients, for example)—a phenomenon that was also described as a result of smallpox vaccinations.¹⁰⁷⁴ In fact, numerous sources report that mass vaccinations (up to 24 vaccinations per person) decisively contributed to the pandemic. American author Eleanora McBean relates her own experiences:

“All the doctors and people who were living at the time of the 1918 Spanish Influenza epidemic say it was the most terrible disease the world has ever had. Strong men, hale and hearty, one day would be dead the next. The disease had the characteristics of the Black Death added to typhus, diphtheria, pneumonia, smallpox, paralysis and all the diseases the people had been vaccinated with immediately following World War 1. Practically the entire population had been injected/‘seeded’ with a dozen or more diseases—or toxic serums. When all those doctor-made diseases started breaking out all at once it was tragic.

“That pandemic dragged on for two years, kept alive with the addition of more poison drugs administered by the doctors who tried to suppress the symptoms. As far as I could find out, the flu hit only the vaccinated. Those who had refused the shots escaped the flu. My family had refused all the vaccinations so we remained well all the time. We knew from the health teachings of Graham, Trail, Tilden and others, that people cannot contaminate the body with poisons without causing disease.

“When the flu was at its peak, all the stores were closed as well as the schools, businesses—even the hospital, as the doctors and nurses had been vaccinated too and were down with the flu. No one was on the streets. It was like a ghost town. We seemed to be the only family [that] didn’t get the flu; so my parents went from house to house doing what they could to look after the sick, as it was impossible to get a doctor then. If it were possible for germs, bacteria, virus, or bacilli to cause disease, they had plenty of opportunity to attack my parents when they were spending many hours a day in the sick rooms. But they didn’t get the flu and they didn’t bring any germs home to attack us children and cause anything. None of our family had the flu—not even a sniffle—and it was in the winter with deep snow on the ground.

On 20 March 2020, the US newspaper The Bemidji Pioneer published an article about the COVID-19 lockdown, picturing it with a 1918 cover story from its own publication. In the 2020 article it says: “Gov. Tim Walz closed Minnesota’s restaurants and bars to dine-in and drink-in customers this week. A similar thing happened a century ago, when a headline in the Oct. 12, 1918 edition of the Bemidji Daily Pioneer blared this message in all capital letters: PUBLIC PLACES ARE ORDERED CLOSED.” Unfortunately, the newspaper did not tell its readers that the parallel drawn here is completely wrong. Because back then, the roughly 675,000 Americans, who were said to have been victims of the so-called Spanish flu, did not die of a virus, but of the turmoil of war, i.e. malnutrition, psychostress, treatment with chemical poisons or highly toxic vaccines (why COVID-19 is not a viral disease, see Chapter 12).
Source: bemidjipioneer.com

“When I see people cringe when someone near them sneezes or coughs, I wonder how long it will take them to find out that they can’t catch it — whatever it is. The only way they can get a disease is to develop it themselves by wrong eating, drinking, smoking or doing some other things which cause internal poisoning and lowered vitality. All diseases are preventable and most of them are curable with the right methods, not known to medical doctors, and not all drugless doctors know them either.

“It has been said that the 1918 flu epidemic killed 20 million people throughout the world. But, actually, the doctors killed them with their crude and deadly treatments and drugs. This is a harsh accusation but it is nevertheless true, judging by the success of the drugless doctors in comparison with that of the medical doctors.

“While the medical men and medical hospitals were losing 33 percent of their flu cases, the non-medical hospitals such as Battle Creek, Kellogg and MacFadden’s Health-Restorium were getting almost 100 percent healings with their water cure, baths, enemas, etc., fasting and certain other simple healing methods, followed by carefully worked out diets of natural foods. One health doctor didn’t lose a patient in eight years.

“If the medical doctors had been as advanced as the drugless doctors, there would not have been those 20 million deaths from the medical flu treatment.

“There was seven times more disease among the vaccinated soldiers than among the unvaccinated civilians, and the diseases were those they had been vaccinated against. One soldier who had returned from overseas in 1912 told me that the army hospitals were filled with cases of infantile paralysis [polio] and he wondered why grown men should have an infant disease. Now, we know that paralysis is a common after-effect of vaccine poisoning. Those at home didn’t get the paralysis until after the worldwide vaccination campaign in 1918.”¹⁰⁷⁵

Spanish flu 1918: entrainment camp, Genicart, France; Administration of vaccines against flu and lung infections. © With permission of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C., Reeve015663

Author Anne Riley Hale alludes to all of the above factors in her 1935 book Medical Voodoo: “As every one knows, the world has never witnessed such an orgy of vaccination and inoculation of every description as was inflicted by army-camp doctors upon the soldiers of the [First] World War.” Hale also observed that the “amazing disease and death toll among them occurred among ‘the picked men of the nation’—supposedly the most robust, resistant class of all, who presumably brought to the service each a good pair of lungs, since they must have passed a rigid physical examination by competent medical men.”¹⁰⁷⁶ And yet, precisely these supermen with super-lungs were the ones who were dropping like flies from pulmonary tuberculosis.

In this context, a report in the Idaho Observer (July 2003) is also worth noting. It mentions a contemporary vaccination trial by one Dr. Rose-now, published in the Mayo Collected Papers of the world-renowned Mayo Clinic. According to this paper, the vaccinated guinea pigs primarily suffered severe damage in their lungs—a typical symptom of tuberculosis and other diseases of the Spanish flu.¹⁰⁷⁷

Doctors Respond to the Catastrophe
with Overwhelming Silence

Meanwhile, medical historians are amazed that doctors and the media have remained silent about the catastrophes that resulted from Spanish flu. As Kolata writes in her book, Victor Vaughan, at that time, America’s top military doctor, dealt with the mega-catastrophe in just one paragraph of his 464 page long memoirs. And yet, Vaughan must have recollected everything very well, as his book appeared in 1926, not long after the war’s end (and he probably would never forget the horrific events). “If anyone might be expected to write about the epidemic it was Vaughan,” writes Kolata. Like Vaughn, other army doctors remained steadfastly silent.¹⁰⁷⁸

The pandemic, one of the worse to ever afflict the earth, was simply virtually erased from newspapers, magazines, books and society’s collective memory, says Kolata.¹⁰⁷⁹ This could be psychologically explained in two ways. The catastrophe presented a very personal catastrophe for physicians, because, although they were basically given all the money and material resources in their world to fight the alleged flu, they were unsuccessful in preventing the disaster. In a brutally clear way, doctors and pharmacologists were shown the limits of their power. It is clear that mainstream medicine prefers not to dwell on such a total defeat, let alone expand upon it in memoirs or newspapers.

Perhaps the occasional scientist, doctor or politician began to mull over the lost campaign against an imaginary virus and entertained the thought that the mass administration of highly toxic vaccines and medications could have been at least partially responsible for the pandemic. Clues for this were by all means visible. But who likes to take responsible for the deaths of millions of people—even unintentionally—and admit failure to fulfill the duty to investigate all factors that come into question?

“Spanish flu”: interior view of influenza ward, US Army Field Hospital No. 29, Hollerich, Luxembourg, 1918. Look at the men’s faces: they’re covered to try and check the alleged airborne spread of the disease. © With permission of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C., Reeve015183

Chapter 8

Cervical Cancer and Other Vaccinations:
Policy vs. Evidence

“There has been a great concentration of research on the viruses which can produce cancer, but there is no convincing evidence that any human tumour is virus-induced. Considering the extreme rarity of cancer in wild animals I can see no way by which an ability to induce cancer could favour the survival of a virus species. Neither can I see anything in human biology which could have power to evolve human cancer viruses; except by deliberate human effort directed to such an end. I believe we can forget about the possibility of any of the common forms of cancer being of virus origin.”¹⁰⁸⁰

SIR FRANK MACFARLANE BURNET NOBEL LAUREATE FOR MEDICINE

“[Looking not only at vaccine research one must conclude that] our public health policies are not even remotely evidence-based. Rather, our public health policies are faith-based decrees by government ‘authorities’—no better than voodoo medicine.”¹⁰⁸¹

VERA SHARAV ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION (AHRP)

Flu Vaccines: Do They Make Sense?

Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and their heirs have inoculated us with a monocausal theory of disease. The picture is alluring and comforting because it completely shifts the blame away from ourselves to microbes, and suggests that if we simply throw enough money at pharmaceutical research—presto!— we’re safe from all sorts of diseases, including flu. But we’re still waiting for side effect-free miracle pills that will liberate us from flu symptoms.309

Mainstream medicine holds that flu medications and vaccines have worked wonders. But a glance in history books and statistics reveals, as mentioned, proves that these so-called epidemics only developed when people’s immune systems had been weakened, starting with lack of food or clean water and compounded by chemical toxins like medications, warfare agents and pesticides. The diseases, held to be caused primarily by viruses, had long begun their retreat when vaccine campaigns were finally introduced (as with diphtheria; see diagram 9). For example, population statistics in the USA show that the death rates in senior citizens were quite stable from 1980 onwards, although the vaccination rate had climbed steeply from 1980 to 2001 (from 15 to 65 percent)—and parallel to this, the number of flu victims had also climbed.1082 1083

Diagram 9 Diphtheria cases in Germany (1920-1995)

Source: Buchwald, Gerhard, Impfen—Das Geschäft mit der Angst (Vaccinations—Business with Fear), emu-Verlag, 1994 p. 81

Greed, Negligence and Deception in the Vaccine Industry

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In early May 2019, the magazine Politico published an article written by three of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s relatives, criticizing my advocacy for safe vaccines.¹⁰⁸⁴ After numerous requests, the magazine has refused to publish my response. Here is my answer:

Three of my Kennedy relatives recently published an article criticizing my advocacy for safe vaccines. Our contentious family dispute highlights the fierce national donnybrook over vaccinations that has divided communities and raised doubts about the Democratic Party’s commitment to some of its defining values: abhorrence of censorship, wariness toward excessive corporate power, support for free speech, religious freedom, and personal sovereignty over our bodies, and the rights of citizens (codified in the Nuremberg Code and other treaties to which we are signatories) to decline unwanted government-mandated medical interventions.

The debate has also raised questions about the independence of our press and its role as a champion of free speech, and First Amendment rights as a bulwark against overreaching by government and corporations.

I love my family and sympathize with their anxieties when I call out government officials for corruption. The Kennedys have a long, close, and continuing relationship with public health agencies so it is understandably difficult for us to believe that powerful regulators would lie about vaccines. “All issues are simple,” the saw goes, “until you study them.” Those conflicts motivate them to recommend ever more vaccines with minimal support from evidence-based science.

The reason for my skepticism: Whether CDC, FDA or WHO— the influence of the pharmaceutical companies is omnipresent, and they have a long history of operating recklessly and dishonestly

I’ve arrived at my skepticism after 15 years spent researching and litigating this issue. I have watched financial conflicts and institutional self-interest transform key sectors of our public health bureaucracies into appendages of the very pharmaceutical companies that Congress charged them to regulate.

Multiple investigations by Congress and the HHS Inspector General have consistently found that an overwhelming majority of the FDA officials directly charged with licensing vaccines, and the CDC officials who effectively mandate them for children, have personal financial entanglements with vaccine manufacturers. These public servants are often shareholders in, grant recipients from, and paid consultants to vaccine manufacturers, and, occasionally, patent holders of the very vaccines they vote to approve. Those conflicts motivate them to recommend ever more vaccines with minimal support from evidence-based science.

The pharmaceutical industry also enforces policy discipline through agency budgets. FDA receives 45% of its annual budget from industry. The World Health Organization (WHO) gets roughly half its budget from private sources, including Pharma and its allied foundations. And CDC, frankly, is a vaccine company; it owns 56 vaccine patents and buys and distributes $4.6 billion in vaccines annually through the Vaccines for Children program, which is over 40 percent of its total budget. Further, Pharma directly funds, populates and controls dozens of CDC programs through the CDC foundation. A British Medical Journal editorial excoriates CDC’s sweetheart relationship with pharma quotes UCLA Professor of Medicine Jerome R. Hoffman “most of us were shocked to learn the CDC takes funding from industry… It is outrageous that industry is apparently allowed to punish the CDC if the agency conducts research that has potential to cut into profits.”

HHS partners with vaccine makers to develop, approve, recommend, and pass mandates for new products and then shares profits from vaccine sales. HHS employees can personally collect up to $150,000 annually in royalties for products they work on. For example, key HHS officials collect money on every sale of Merck’s controversial HPV vaccine Gardasil, which also yields tens of millions annually for the agency in patent royalties. Furthermore, under the 1986 Act that created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, HHS is the defendant in Vaccine Court and is legally obligated to defend against any claim that a vaccine causes injury. Despite high hurdles for recovery, HHS pays out hundreds of millions of dollars annually (over $4 billion total) to Americans injured by vaccines. Hence, if HHS publishes any study acknowledging that a vaccine causes a harm, claimants can use that study against HHS in Vaccine Court. In June 2009, a high-level HHS official, Tom Insel, killed a $16 million-dollar budget item to study the relationship between vaccines and autism by the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. Insel argued that petitioners would use these studies against HHS in vaccine court.

Such conflicts are a formula for “agency capture” on steroids. “Instead of a regulator and a regulated industry, we now have a partnership,” says Dr. Michael Carome, a former HHS employee who is now the director of the advocacy group Public Citizen. Carome says that these financial entanglements have tilted HHS “away from a public health perspective to an industry-friendly perspective.”

In 1986, Congress—awash in Pharma money (the pharmaceutical industry is number one for both political contributions and lobbying spending over the past 20 years) enacted a law granting vaccine makers blanket immunity from liability for injuries caused by vaccines. If vaccines were as safe as my family members claim, would we need to give pharmaceutical companies immunity for the injuries they cause? The subsequent gold rush by pharmaceutical companies boosted the number of recommended inoculations from twelve shots of five vaccines in 1986 to 54 shots of 13 vaccines today. A billion-dollar sideline grew into the $50 billion vaccine industry behemoth.

Since vaccines are liability-free—and effectively compulsory to a captive market of 76 million children—there is meager market incentive for companies to make them safe. The public must rely on the moral scruples of Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, and Pfizer. But these companies have a long history of operating recklessly and dishonestly, even with products that they must market to the public and for which they can be sued for injuries. The four companies that make virtually all of the recommended vaccines are all convicted felons. Collectively they have paid over $35 billion since 2009 for defrauding regulators, lying to and bribing government officials and physicians, falsifying science, and leaving a trail of injuries and deaths from products they knew to be dangerous and sold under pretense of safety and efficacy.

Doesn’t it require a kind of cognitive dissonance to believe that vaccines are untainted by the greed, negligence, and corruption that bedevil every other pharmaceutical product?

No safety testing, missing placebo trials

Such concerns only deepen when one considers that, besides freedom from liability, vaccine makers enjoy another little-known lucrative loophole; vaccines are the only pharmaceutical or medical products that do not need to be rigorously safety tested. To win an FDA license, companies must safety test virtually every other drug for years in randomized comparisons against an inert placebo. Yet, not a single vaccine currently on the CDC’s childhood schedule was tested against an inert placebo before licensing. Without placebo testing, regulators have no capacity to assess a medicine’s risks.

During a January 2018 deposition, Dr. Stanley Plotkin, the world’s most influential vaccinologist, acknowledged that researches who try to ascertain vaccine safety without a placebo are in “La La land.” According to Dr. Drummond Rennie, Deputy Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, “It is the marketing department, not the science, that is driving the research.” It seems plain wrong to me that Democratic-controlled legislatures across the country are frantically passing coercive mandates for pharmaceutical products for which no one knows the risks.

Furthermore, safety testing, which typically requires five or more years for other medical products, often lasts only a few days with vaccines—not nearly long enough to spot cancers or chronic conditions like autoimmune disease (e.g., juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis), allergic illnesses (e.g., food allergies, allergic rhinitis, eczema, asthma), or neurological and neurodevelopmental injuries (e.g., ADD, ADHD, narcolepsy, epilepsy, seizure disorders, and autism). Manufacturers’ inserts accompanying every vial of mandated vaccines include warnings about these and over 400 other injuries including many serious immune, neurological, and chronic illnesses for which FDA suspects that vaccines may be the cause. Federal law requires that the package insert for each vaccine include “only those adverse events for which there is some basis to believe that there is a causal relationship between the drug and the occurrence of the adverse event.”

Many of these illnesses became epidemic in American children after 1986, coterminous with the exploding vaccine schedule. For American kids born in 1986, only 12.8 percent had chronic diseases. That number has grown to 54 percent among the vaccine generation (those born after 1986) in lockstep with the expanding schedule. Evidence including HHS’s own surveillance reports, manufacturers’ inserts, and peer-reviewed studies link all of these injuries to vaccines. However, the associations are not definitive because CDC has failed to conduct the necessary randomized studies to prove or disprove causation.

HHS has directed the Institute of Medicine (IOM, now the National Academy of Medicine) to oversee the CDC’s vaccine safety science. IOM has repeatedly rebuked the agency for failing to study whether vaccines are causing these epidemics. In my experience, vaccine proponents rarely cite specific peer-reviewed studies to support their assertions that all vaccines are safe, relying instead on appeals to authority; CDC, FDA, WHO, or the AAP. My relatives, for example, argue that vaccines are safe because WHO, HHS, CDC, and FDA say so. But HHS designated the IOM as the ultimate arbiter of vaccine safety. And IOM says that the existing scientific literature does not support these claims. Despite requests by the IOM, CDC has steadfastly refused to perform safety studies.

In total, three IOM reports (1991, 1994, and 2011/2012) investigated 231 adverse events associated with vaccines. For 34 conditions, IOM found that the evidence supported a causal connection between the vaccine and the adverse event. But for 184 adverse events, fully 80 percent of the conditions reviewed, the IOM found that HHS’s evidence was inadequate to accept or reject vaccine causation. How can our public health officials claim safety when there is no follow-up research on reported adverse events?

Autism and vaccines

Let’s drill down on bedrock dogma that science has thoroughly debunked any links between autism and vaccines. That assumption is so engrained that media ridicules anyone who questions this orthodoxy as a dangerous heretic. But, look for a moment, at the facts. In 1986, Congress specifically ordered CDC to determine if pertussis-containing vaccines (DTP, later DTaP) were causing autism. Then, as today, many parents with autistic children were claiming that vaccines were a cause of their child’s autism and DTP/DTaP vaccines were/are a popular suspect.

On its website, CDC declares that, “Vaccines don’t cause autism,” citing IOM’s comprehensive 2011/2012 literature review of vaccination safety science. However, the IOM study and the follow-up HHS study in 2014 both say that CDC has never performed a study to support CDC’s claim that DTaP does not cause autism. The same is true for Hep B, Hib, PCV 13, and IPV. The only vaccine actually studied with regard to autism is MMR, and a senior CDC scientist claims the CDC did find an increased rate of autism after MMR in the only MMR/autism study ever conducted by the CDC with American children. Moreover, HHS’s primary autism expert recently provided an affidavit to the DOJ explaining that vaccines can cause autism in some children.

Autism has grown from about 1 in 2,500 prior to 1986 to one in 36 among vaccine generation children today. Why are we content with the CDC’s claim that the exponential explosion of autism is a mystery? CDC spares no expense systematically tracking the source of 800 measles cases. But when asked about the cataclysmic epidemic of upwards of 68,000 new autism cases annually, CDC shrugs. Why are we not demanding answers? “CDC is paralyzed right now when it comes to anything to do with autism,” explains former senior vaccine safety scientist Dr. William Thompson, who is still a CDC employee. Thompson told Congressman Bill Posey under oath that CDC bigwigs ordered him to destroy data that showed a link between autism and vaccines and to publish a fraudulent study dismissing the link. Today, he is remorseful, “When I see a family with a child with autism, I feel great shame because I have been part of the problem.”

We are killing children

HHS has also ignored its statutory obligations to study vaccine injuries and improve vaccine safety. In 1986, Congress—recognizing that drug companies no longer had any incentive to make vaccines safe—ordered HHS to study vaccine injuries, work to improve vaccine safety, and report to Congress on its progress every two years. A year ago, I brought a lawsuit that forced HHS to admit that in 36 years it had never performed any of those critical studies.

Post-licensure vaccine safety surveillance is also in shambles. The CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), to which doctors and patients may voluntarily report adverse vaccine events, received 58,381 reports in 2018, including 412 deaths, 1,237 permanent disabilities, and 4,217 hospitalizations. An HHS-funded review of VAERS concluded that “fewer than 1 percent of vaccine adverse events are reported” to VAERS. This suggests that there are a hundredfold more adverse vaccine events than are reported. The CDC has nonetheless refused to mandate or automate VAERS reporting.

On March 9, 2019, Dr. Peter Aaby issued a scathing rebuke to the world’s public health agencies for continuing to allow pharmaceutical companies to sell vaccines without proper safety testing. Dr. Aaby, who has authored over 300 peer-reviewed studies, is one of world’s foremost authorities on WHO’s African vaccine program and the winner of Denmark’s highest honor for health care research. Dr. Aaby was one of five co-authors of a 2017 study of the diphtheria tetanus, and pertussis (DTP) vaccine, the most widely used vaccine on earth, which found that children who received DTP had ten times the risk of dying compared to DTP-unvaccinated children.

For thirty years, doctors, including Aaby, never noticed the danger because vaccinated children were succumbing to illnesses and infections apparently unrelated to the vaccine. It turns out that while the vaccine protected children from diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, it so badly weakened their immune systems that they were dying in droves from unrelated infections. The researchers concluded: “The DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.” In March, an alarmed Aaby plead for a policy change, “Most of you think we know what our vaccines are doing. But we don’t…. We are killing children.”

The world’s most aggressive vaccine schedule has not given our country the world’s healthiest children. We now rank 35th in overall health outcomes—just behind Costa Rica, making the U.S., by most measures, including infant mortality, the sickest in the developed world. In addition to those 400 chronic diseases and injuries that FDA suspects may be vaccine related, the vaccine generation suffers unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression and behavioral disorders running the gamut from aggression to anorexia. Peer-reviewed animal and human studies have linked all these symptoms to vaccines. The present generation is the first in a century to lose I.Q., having suffered an extraordinary drop of seven points. Researchers concluded that some environmental cause is the trigger. In the U.S., SAT and, more recently, bar exam scores are plummeting. Could these declines be the outcome of injecting virtually every child with multiple doses of two of the world’s most potent neurotoxins—mercury and aluminum—in bolus doses beginning on the day of birth? Shouldn’t we be doing the research to reject this hypothesis? The logical approach to doing so would be to compare health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. For years, public health officials, including the IOM, have urged CDC to conduct such studies.

In 2013, the IOM found that, “No studies have compared the differences in health outcomes… between entirely unimmunized populations of children and fully immunized children…. Furthermore, studies designed to examine the long-term effects of the cumulative number of vaccines or other aspects of the immunization schedule have not been conducted.” In a 2008 interview, former NIH Director Bernadette Healy explained that HHS refuses to perform safety studies out of fear that they will expose dangers, “that would scare the public away” from vaccines. Healy continued, “First of all, I think the public is smarter than that… I don’t think you should ever turn your back on any scientific hypothesis because you’re afraid of what it might show.”

Media malpractice

The suppression of critical safety science documented by the IOM would not be possible without a mass epidemic of media malpractice. Mainstream and social media outlets which collectively received $9.6 billion in revenues from pharmaceutical companies in 2016 have convinced themselves they are protecting public health by aggressively censoring criticism of these coercively mandated, zero liability, and untested pharmaceutical products. But, the absence of press scrutiny leaves industry no incentive to improve vaccine safety. Muzzling discussions of government corruption and deficient safety science and abolishing vaccine injuries by fiat is not a strategy that will solve the growing chronic disease epidemic.

The children who comprise this badly injured generation are now aging out of schools that needed to build quiet rooms and autism wings, install wobble chairs, hire security guards and hike special ed spending to 25 percent to accommodate them. They are landing on the social safety net which they threaten to sink. As Democratic lawmakers vote to mandate more vaccines and call for censorship of safety concerns, Democratic Presidential candidates argue about how to fix America’s straining health care system. If we don’t address the chronic disease epidemic, such proposals are like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The good news for Pharma is that many of these children have lifelong dependencies on blockbuster products like Adderall, Epi-Pens, asthma inhalers, and diabetes, arthritis, and anti-seizure meds made by the same companies that made the vaccines.

My belief that all or some of these injuries might be vaccine related has been the catalyst that wrenched so much of my focus away from the environmental and energy work that I love, and prompted me to become an advocate for vaccine safety. I have sacrificed friendships, income, credibility, and family relationships in an often-lonely campaign to force these companies to perform the tests that will definitively answer these questions.

People will vaccinate when they have confidence in regulators and industry. When public confidence fails, coercion and censorship became the final options. Silencing critics and deploying police powers to force untested medicines upon an unwilling public is not an optimal strategy in a democracy.

My uncle and my father argued that in a free and open society, the response to difficult questions should never be to shut down debate. What we need is science, not censorship. I am not anti-vax. I am pro-safety and pro-science. I want robust, transparent safety studies and independent regulators. These do not seem like the kind of radical demands that should divide our party or our families. As Americans and Kennedys, we ought to be able to have a civil, science-based debate about these legitimate concerns.

***

Fraud, Waste, Bribery—Corruption in the Health Service

Even if the perfect vaccine did exist, without any side effects, it would still be a far cry from a “magic bullet.” People tend to overlook the fact that flu vaccines are manufactured before those viruses (virus stems) they are supposed to work against even exist.

Even mainstream studies have shown that during flu “peak season,” only 10 percent of infections that form in the upper airway can be traced back to influenza viruses.¹⁰⁸⁵ The statistic sounds reassuring and would make for great news if it weren’t for the epidemic hunters from the CDC, RKI or WHO, who speak every year about another 10,000 flu deaths and urgently warn that only vaccinated people are protected from influenza.

Upon close examination of the data upon which their warnings are based, the question crops up: “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” This is precisely the title of a study published in late 2005 in the British Medical Journal. Author Peter Doshi, of Harvard University (in 2006, Doshi switched to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT), provides a resoundingly decisive answer: “US data on influenza deaths are a mess.”¹⁰⁸⁶

Doshi’s main criticism is that the CDC works under the assumption that 36,000 Americans die from viral flu each year—but they still owe us proof that an influenza virus really kills these people. Doshi’s conclusion: The CDC’s communication strategy is equivalent to “marketing of fear.”

Several astute observers of the flu and vaccines critiqued the government’s promotional campaign urging the public to vaccinate against the flu by challenging the 36,000 annual death count the CDC attributes to the flu. Especially worth mentioning is the meta-analysis of the published flu vaccine reports by Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Center, replicated in the British Medical Journal¹⁰⁸⁷ as well as a column in Red Flags by Edward Yazbak, a pediatrician.¹⁰⁸⁸ The findings of these 2006 articles are sobering: a major gap exists between evidence and public health policy.

The summary points of the BMJ’s meta-analysis are clearly alarming:

Because non-randomized studies predominate, systematic reviews of large data sets from several decades (meta-analyses) provide the best information on vaccine performance.

Evidence from systematic reviews shows that inactivated vaccines have little or no effect on the effects measured.

Most studies are of poor methodological quality and the impact of confounders is high.

Little comparative evidence exists on the safety of these vaccines.

The lead author Tom Jefferson concludes: “The optimistic and confident tone of some predictions of viral circulation and of the impact of inactivated vaccines, which are at odds with the evidence, is striking. The reasons are probably complex and may involve a messy blend of truth conflicts and conflicts of interest making it difficult to separate factual disputes from value disputes or a manifestation of optimism bias, that is to say an unwarranted belief in the efficacy of interventions.”

In fact, the bottom line is that the CDC has not provided data to back up its claim about the number of deaths it attributes to the flu. The CDC appears to be acting on behalf of flu vaccine manufacturers, even as the evidence shows the vaccine to be worthless at best—or to be fatal at worst. A Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) search performed on 10 October 2005 yielded three reports in the past two years of children younger than 23 months of age who died shortly after receiving a dose of influenza vaccine. No other vaccines were administered at the same time and all three children had underlying diseases.

“We can only conclude that we are in the era of post-evidence-based medicine,” states Vera Sharav from the Alliance for Human Research Protection in New York. “Our public health policies are not even remotely evidence-based. Rather, our public health policies are faith-based decrees by government ‘authorities’—no better than voodoo medicine.”¹⁰⁸⁹ Underlying this collapse of Western medicine is the collusion between science and business. Our public health policies are currently shaped by corporate interests.

The CDC’s German counterpart, the Robert Koch Institute plays similar games with the statistics. They allege that in the winter of 2004-2005, 15,000 to 20,000 people died from viral flu in the country.¹⁰⁹⁰ But there is no proof to back up these statements. Rather, examining the data of Germany’s national office of statistics (Statistisches Bundesamt), just nine people died of influenza viruses in 2004 (2003: 25; 2002: 10; 2001: 9). The picture painted by hospital statistics is just as undramatic: 12 deaths¹⁰⁹¹—a mere speck in comparison to the RKI’s claim of 20,000 mortalities.

Ask RKI to explain this extreme discrepancy and the institute answers that “official statistic on ‘influenza deaths’ underestimates the true influence [of flu viruses], because very many [influenza] deaths are ‘hidden’ in other diseases.” For this reason, according to RKI, “even the Statisches Bundesamt’s data hardly reflects the true number of influenza deaths.”¹⁰⁹² But where’s the study showing concrete evidence that a virus was really at play, or was the single or primary cause in the cases where the RKI suspects a “hidden” flu virus? The RKI had no answer to this, even after repeated inquiries (see: Can We Trust Blindly The Figures of CDC, RKI, etc.?, Rapid Responses to Peter Doshi’s article in the British Medical Journal “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?”, British Medical Journal (Website), December2005/January 2006).

Neither did we receive concrete studies from Berlin’s virus hunters to prove that 1) the flu virus declared a killer has been completely detected (purification and electron micrographs); 2) the virus, insofar as it does exist, has lethal properties; and 3) all other factors (nutrition, toxins, etc.) can be ruled out as primary or major causes of the so-called “flu victim’s” death.¹⁰⁹³

The RKI says it arrived at the 15,000 to 20,000 flu deaths by applying an “internationally recognized” and “peer reviewed” calculative method. But whether a calculation makes sense cannot be determined by the fact that it is “recognized“ and has been verified by other researchers, but only by being verified by independent technical experts. We wanted to do this, but so far it has not been possible. In December 2005, the RKI did agree to send us their detailed calculations by the end of January 2006 at the latest; we have yet to receive them.¹⁰⁹⁴ Yet the RKI should actually have the calculation at hand.

The RKI also claims “it is often the case,” that influenza death figures are estimated values.1095 1096 And in this regard as well, they agreed to send us the documents that support this by the end of January 2006. But unfortunately, we have not yet received a single document from the RKI. One thing is certain: contrary to what the RKI told us, in its database of significant papers and statistics, the RKI does not explicitly say that only estimated values are available. This is true on their website, for instance, where influenza mortality figures are listed,¹⁰⁹⁷ and in a press release from late 2004.¹⁰⁹⁸

The RKI identifies the influenza work-group (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Influenza, AGI) as the source of their influenza data. The AGI was founded by the pharmaceutical industry in 1991, and receives financial support from four vaccine manufacturers.¹⁰⁹⁹ So, if the RKI relies on an organization funded by the pharmaceutical industry, how can the institute make sure that published data is absolutely sound?¹¹⁰⁰

It would be wise to ask the same question of the German vaccine committee STIKO (Ständige Impfkommission), a part of the RKI system. STIKO Chair, medical professor Heinz-J. Schmitt, is also on the Board of Directors of Stiftung Präventative Pädiatrie (Foundation for Preventive Pediatrics),¹¹⁰¹ a children’s health foundation which in turn works closely with and is funded by pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Chiron-Behring.¹¹⁰² Schmitt additionally functions as consultant to the GlaxoSmithKline project “Gesundes Kind” (“Healthy Child”), which plugs protective vaccinations.¹¹⁰³

To be able to evaluate whether RKI can still act independently of the pharmaceutical industry, we requested that the institute disclose all the ways their scientists are remunerated (lecture fees, research grants, etc.). By their scientists, we mean the ones working for the RKI or for other institutions directly subordinate or integrated into the RKI.¹¹⁰⁴

Table 3: Members of the Ständige Impfkommission (STIKO), which belongs to the Robert Koch Institute, and their connections to the pharmaceutical industry (excerpts), as of 2008

For current information about the STIKO members, see www.rki.de

But to date, we have not received a response to any of these questions.

In any case, it is certain that several STIKO members cultivate close relationships with Big Pharma or are active for pharmaceutical companies, including the major ones like GlaxoSmithKline (see table 3). It is also telling that the RKI, as Focus magazine reported in a rare critical article on epidemic authorities, were confronted with the revelation of a corruption case in early 2006, which cast a very negative light on the highly esteemed institution.

Social researcher Friedrich T. [full surname not mentioned], who had worked as a top official at the RKI, was sentenced by the district court Berlin-Tiergarten to six months in prison and a fine of €3,000. In late 1998, T. had internally proposed awarding the contract for a reputedly extremely important AIDS study (“RKI Sentinel“) to a private polling institute by the name of Images. And indeed Images’ bid for the study worth 396,000 German marks (approximately $200,000) was accepted. Two months later, an Images employee turned over 10,000 marks in cash to T. The presiding judge saw the elements of corruption here, as she explicitly declared this a “not unserious case.” During the trial, the judge had declared that there were evidently a few alarming “interconnections“ at the RKI. She was “convinced” that more was known at the institute “than came out in the trial.” The final verdict also stated that “the court cannot resist the impression that here on a large scale, the RKI has been used as a good source of money.”

The company Images functioned namely only as a dummy firm for the identically staffed and located Intersofia GmbH (Ltd.), whose founder and sole shareholder is none other than RKI official T. Two Intersofia employees had founded Images expressly for the purpose of landing the AIDS study contract, since T. couldn’t directly hand the contract to his own company Intersofia. T. penned not only the “service description” for the RKI Sentinel but also Images’ offer. On 3 November 1998, T. proposed the dummy company as contractual partner, but Images was not founded until 15 November, and five days later, the then RKI director Reinhard Kurth personally signed the contract.

Focus magazine is completely correct in writing that T.’s corruption case had turned into a worst-case scenario for Reinhard Kurth as well. Kurth had evidently also lied to the public. The RKI’s press office and even the RKI president declared to know nothing of any possible conflicts of interests for T. at the time the contract was awarded. But this claim is impossible. In her verdict, the judge cited the testimony of a certain Wolfgang Kurtz, who was Director of Central Administration at the RKI during the time in question (first half of November). According to Kurtz, the epidemic authority’s “Research Council,” which was responsible for awarding the contract, were fully aware that T. was doing the AIDS study “with his old mates.”

Additionally, the researcher’s financial sleights of hand had been a constant gossip topic at the institute for years. By the end of 2000, top management had detailed information on the Intersofia/Images scam. An employee of T.’s private company had filed a disciplinary complaint against her boss with the RKI, revealing details about the scheme. A whole year later, Kurth declared that internal clarification of the accusations was proving to be “difficult and time-consuming.” But in T.’s trial, the district attorneys simplified this allegedly complex issue. The accused had seen the RKI simply as a sort of “self-service shop.” Perhaps he thought he was invulnerable. Not only did T. have good contacts at the top of the Federal Health Ministry, he also collaborated very closely with his superior, no less than Bärbel-Maria Kurth, RKI department head, and the president’s wife.

T. also took care of a particularly awkward assignment for his boss. Mrs. Kurth had tried to safeguard GDR scientist Michael Radoschewski’s career for many years, after it had gone into a tailspin post-reunification. Because of his former Stasi (East German secret police) activity, he could not get a steady job in unified Germany’s health administration. Mrs. Kurth, herself a former GDR student, helped with labor contracts, and ultimately accommodated him in the firm Images, T.’s dummy company. Radoschewski even worked on the AIDS study. In this way, the RKI continued paying his salary indirectly.

The AIDS study, financed to the tune of approximately $200,000 worth of tax dollars, was incidentally not published. T. and his Images troupe had sunk the project.

Images’ former Managing Director, Liane S. appeared as a witness in the trial. The judge dismissed her attempts at exoneration, calling them “lies.” But why would Mrs. S. have said anything bad about T. and his insider dealings? S. now works at the RKI—in Mrs. Kurth’s department.¹¹⁰⁵

As has repeatedly been portrayed in this book, there is certainly no reason to assume that such conflicts of interest and corrupt activities are the exception, and to suppose that, on the whole, everything is just fine. Transparency International’s “Corruption Annual Report 2006” is worth another mention. The report was presented to the public in May of the same year, and unequivocally says that waste, fraud and corruption have eaten into the local public health service and annual damages are at least €24 billion.

This rarely publicly addressed mismanagement can only be fixed with great difficulty because the industry in question is run by powerful corporations and its allies—including decrepit government organizations that lack transparency and federal oversight. Transparency International clearly awards chief responsibility for this mess to the pharmaceutical industry, which forges studies, influences authorities, suppresses risks and undermines alternative health and self-help groups. 40 percent of medical studies from 2005 were demonstrably faked or manipulated by sponsors.

Governments and pharmaceutical industry work hand in hand: On 24 March 2006, pharmaceutical manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) informed German Health Minister Ulla Schmidt about their latest development of a vaccine against a flu epidemic. With GSK director Thomas Werner, she visited the GSK factory in Dresden. And the German government made no less than €20 million available to fund the development of a “broadband vaccine” against avian flu infections. With this, they would be in the position to vaccinate the population before the virus mutates, as Schmidt announced.¹¹⁰⁶ And if it were up to GlaxoSmithKline, vaccination of the public would not wait until a pandemic breaks out¹¹⁰⁷ But that is the pinnacle of absurdity, because if vaccinations were to make any sense in the first place, the genetic structure of whatever (virus) is being vaccinated against would have to first be known. But as mentioned, this is not the case (not only for H5N1)¹¹⁰⁸ Source: www.presseportal.de/pm/39763/802530

Politics has yielded to health lobbyists for too long, says the watchdog organization. Health service bodies governed by public law at the Federal State level have been left to their own devices for too long. It is time to look for a means of compulsory accountability for everything. This includes, above all, the best possible transparency for contributors and taxpayers. Often though, nothing happens, because doctors, researchers or pharmaceutical lobbyists have strong connections to politics. Corruption fighters also demand a “radical professionalization” among the health care system players, especially the insurance companies, the panel doctor’s associations and government institutions in order to make their decision-making processes more transparent. There must also be a stronger enforcement of the law, in order to ban bad doctors from the profession.

Transparency International also recommended requiring disclosure of financing and relationships to sponsors, as well as the registration of all clinical trials. To avoid deadly mistakes, the health care field should not be allowed to purchase medical experts for their pharmaceutical studies and consequent marketing. Additionally, there needs to be legal regulations for health insurance companies to maintain accountability and public safety. The establishment of specialized district attorneys would also be sensible.

But “structural corruption” cannot be tackled simply with new laws, reforms and better law enforcement, according to the anti-corruption organization. A culture has to be generated that outlaws fraud in medicine. “It is immoral and indecent to make money from a system that is putting an increasing strain on people with low incomes, and allow increasing gaps in a comprehensive complete medical care, through faulty calculations.”¹¹⁰⁹

It would be extremely helpful if the media—the State’s (self-declared) “fourth power”—would turn itself again to its true task and consistently try to bring the “structural corruption” in the health service to light, instead of playing henchman to Big Pharma.

HPV Vaccination against Cervical Cancer:
Not Proven Safe and Effective

Today, jubilation is expressed by both orthodox science and the mass media about the recently developed vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV) assumed to cause cervical cancer. The HPV vaccine is being marketed heavily, especially for use in girls 9-15 years of age. In the literature, we read that the vaccination has been proven to be the most efficient and logistically feasible preventive intervention against cervical cancer. And the vaccine makers “promise an almost 100 percent protection,” according to a lead story in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung written by the head science editor himself, headlined: “Vaccinating Against Cancer—In the Drugstore a Dream Comes True.”

According to one of Germany’s most important daily newspapers, “we now see the start of a new epoch. Heading the march into a new golden age is pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur MSD, with a new vaccine called Gardasil. The announcements by the manufacturer could be dismissed as typical pharmaceutical industry pursuit of giant markets, profits, power and prestige. Yet, en masse, physicians and scientists have joined the chorus, which speaks to a paradigm shift. All are gushing about the potential to abruptly stanch one of the worst villains for women with only three harmless injections. The results of the [vaccine’s] approval studies are so convincing that by now there is no limit to euphoria.”¹¹¹⁰

Again, the news sounds more than good. But, before we uncork the champagne, should we really believe the promises of this pharmaceutical giant, brush aside all the conflicts of interests today’s biomedical science and forget all the previous empty promises made by even the most prestigious researchers?

In order to clarify this, we approached one of the relevant institutions from which all these predictions, assertions, and claims stem from: The German Cancer Research Centre (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ). What we asked for was:¹¹¹¹

A solid study proving the existence of a human papillomavirus, in short HPV (including a description of the purification and isolation of the particle as well as the characterization of the full genome and the mantle, plus an image done by electron microscopy).

A solid study proving beyond doubt that HPV causes cervical cancer.

A solid study showing that non-viral factors such as nutrition or chemical toxins alone or in combination can be excluded as possible (primary) causes for cervical cancer.

A solid study demonstrating conclusively that the vaccinations entering the market are safe and effective.

Indeed, as response we received a “wonderful literature list,” as the DKFZ declared,¹¹¹² on which are several studies being mentioned addressing at least items 1, 2, and 4. Unfortunately, missing from the list was a study proving item 3, that non-viral factors such as nutrition, pesticides, stress, etc. alone or in combination can be excluded as possible (primary) causes for cervical cancer. Interestingly, even the medical establishment itself identified non-viral factors such as smoking or the use of oral contraceptives which are “viewed as relevant co-factors” in the development of cervical cancer.¹¹¹³ And there is no proof that these factors could not act as primary factors.

In this context it is also worth mentioning that in the search for the causes of cervical cancer the fact is being disregarded that up to 80 percent of all woman at least temporarily shall contract this so-called papillomavirus during her life, but in 80 percent of these women the virus just disappears after a while. That is to say that only in 20 percent of the cases the doctors register (with their test methods) a continuing infection that according to orthodox researchers shall carry the risk of causing cervical cancer.

And according to Lutz Gissmann from the DKFZ in Heidelberg as a matter of fact much less than 1 percent of these “infected” women come down with cancer. “We just don’t know why most women are able to cope with the virus,” Gissmann concedes.¹¹¹⁴ That means—assuming that we can believe the methods of virus detection—in most cases of cervical cancer there is a positive HPV test, but in only a tiny minority of cases is cervical cancer found.

There must be other factors responsible for the development of cervical cancer. And there is obviously no proof that these non-viral factors cannot play the major or primary role. And so it is not really surprising to hear from one of the leading established cervical cancer researcher, Matthias Dürst from the University of Jena, that “the infection with the papillomavirus alone still does not cause cancer.”¹¹¹⁵ The tumor is said to grow not until there are genetic changes on the chromosomes causing this accretion. But here we have the same problem: there is not a single study proving that a (papilloma)virus initiates these genetic changes or chromosomal alterations.

But let’s step backwards again and ask: can we really believe the methods of virus detection? As mentioned before, the DKFZ sent us this “wonderful literature list” in which there are two studies both conducted by zur Hausen et al that they claim serve as proofs for the “first isolation of specific HPV from cervical cancer tissue.”1116 1117 “But a closer look into these trials reveals that actually there is no such kind of proof,” says Canadian biologist David Crowe. For example, the first of these two papers published in 1983 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: A Papillomavirus DNA from a Cervical Carcinoma and Its Prevalence in Cancer Biopsy Samples from Different Geographic Regions, lacks the following critical issues:

It is not clear where the cloned DNA of the presumed virus comes from. But without knowing the origin of the DNA it is impossible to prove that a virus is there.

A large number of tumors were screened without success, increasing the possibility that this discovery of one tumor with this DNA is just a coincidence. The cancer establishment is always talking about the “high correlation” between HPV-screening of people suffering from cervical cancer. But it should be noted that particles called HPV are quite common, so to say that HPV is usually found in people with cervical cancer might not mean much.

The authors use the term “nonstringent” conditions which probably means that hybridization (formation of base pairs between complementary regions of two strands of DNA that were not originally paired) occurred with less than a perfect match. That is to say, the two DNAs they were using were not identical. “Of course, they will just say that viruses mutate rapidly,” Crowe points out. “But this is pure speculation.”

They extracted DNA and hybridized that with “known” HPV samples— but they got less than a 0.1 percent match. Because of this they declared that it was a new species, as opposed to declaring that they had pulled out DNA that had nothing to do with HPV at all.

So now with this new DNA, with little relation with other HPV DNA, they declare that because it matches 11 out of 18 cervical cancers, it proves that the cervical cancers contain this new HPV. Yet they haven’t proved that this is a virus at all!

We approached the DKFZ twice with our points of criticism asking for clarification.¹¹¹⁸ But we didn’t gat any response.

That rises the important question: Why should a woman undergo a PAP smear or an HPV test supposed to detect papillomavirus-DNA (not even for the detection of the virus itself!) if (1) there is no scientific proof of this virus and (2) even the cancer establishment admits that the papillomavirus does not cause cancer on its own?

Apart from this, critics of the cancer orthodoxy emphasize that the PAP smear test developed in 1928 by the Greek medical doctor George Papan-icolaou is practically meaningless. The test just rests on the evaluation of cell changes found in smears taken from the uterine orifices that are said to cause cancer. But this is pure theory, and the test just classifies too many women as being at risk of getting cervical cancer.

Established cancer scientists such as Dürst don’t agree and counter that a negative PAP smear test result would suggest unerringly in 99.6 percent of the cases that a woman did not come down with a precancerosis (tissue alteration that is associated with a higher risk of becoming a malignant degeneration) or cervical cancer.¹¹¹⁹

Sounds very good, but this magnificent promise is qualified if we take a look at the statistics. In Germany, for example, every year around 7,000 women fall ill from cervical cancer, that is to say 0.017 percent of the 40 million women living in Germany. This means, 99.983 percent of these women do not develop cervical cancer. In other words, cervical cancer is a very rare disease, and it is very easy to achieve 99.6 percent-safety, not from the PAP smear test, but from the statistic alone.

Furthermore, the PAP smear test has a high error rate. It happens, for example, very often that sick cells are overlooked because simple inflammations canvas the sight at mutated cells. In one examination at the University of Hanover, the screening-tests yielded 86 suspected cases, but posterior control tests could confirm only 46 of the suspected cancer diagnoses. This is an error rate of almost 50 percent. Karl Ulrich Petry, gynecologist and one of the leading researchers of the study: “Cervical cancer screening sometimes is like trying to nail ‘jello” onto the wall. The collected data is not really reliable.”¹¹²⁰

Nevertheless, in the USA alone, every year around 200,000 women have their uterus removed, many of them to prevent cervical cancer. But in fact only 14,000 American women come down with cervical cancer each year. That is to say, tens of thousand of women in the United States are being operated—or shall we say: garbled—unnecessarily or at least hastily. The reason is that the PAP smear test is not searching for early forms of cervical cancer cells, but for pre-forms which very often degenerate by themselves or stay innocuous.

In 2003 the British Medical Journal published a study about the outcomes of screening to prevent cervical cancer. And the results are not encouraging: around 1,000 women need to be screened for 35 years to prevent one death; 150 of these women will receive a stress-causing test result, and 50 women will go through cancer treatment with all its highly toxic side effects. “For each death prevented many women have to be screened and many are treated who would not have developed a problem,” writes Angela Raffle, the leading author of the trial.¹¹²¹ In other words: There is just no scientific proof for the effectiveness of the screening tests,¹¹²² and their collateral side effects (stress, operation, medication) are more than worrying.

The same holds for the HPV tests, introduced in Europe some years ago. They are considered and promoted to leading to much more reliable and exact cancer check-ups. But the lack of an HP-virus proof alone makes these tests worthless. In addition to this these tests entail the big risk of classifying even more women, who will most likely never get a tumor in their uterus during life, as “endangered” of getting cervical cancer—leading to even more needless operations and medications. In this context let’s not forget the fact that only around 0.1 percent of the women said to be infected with HPV fall ill with cervical cancer—so in consideration of this extremely low “frequency” it remains an enigma how established cancer authorities can speak at all of a high of a connexion between cancer and an HPV.

Nobel laureate for Medicine Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet warned us against jumping to any conclusions about a potential link between cancer and viruses back in 1971, in the book Genes, Dreams and Realities :

“In the last dozen years there has been a great concentration of research on the viruses which can produce cancer or leukaemia of mice, hamsters, and chickens. There is no doubt at all about the genuinely malignant character of the tumours which are produced but so far there is no convincing evidence that any human tumour is virus-induced. One must be definite that despite ten years’ intensive study the virus theory has established itself as nothing further than speculation. There may be almost a majority of younger cancer research men who think it likely that eventually cancer will be shown to be due to the action of ‘slow viruses’ which in the great majority of people persist without any visible effect. To me this is an unjustifiable and unscientific act of faith based on a failure to understand the significance of the work on viruses of laboratory animals.

“My great objection to the hypothesis that any human cancer is a direct result of virus infection is my inability to conceive of a selective process in nature that could be equivalent to the laboratory procedure. Considering the extreme rarity of cancer in wild animals I can see no way by which an ability to induce cancer could favour the survival of a virus species. Neither can I see anything in human biology which could have power to evolve human cancer viruses; except by deliberate human effort directed to such an end. I believe we can forget about the possibility of any of the common forms of cancer being of virus origin.”¹¹²³

HPV Vaccine: A Possible Disaster
for the Next Generation

If we visualize the facts about HPV—no proof for virus detection; no proof for HPV’s pathogenicity or for HPV being the primary, let alone single cause of cervical cancer; non-HPV causation omitted; only 0.1 percent of the so-called HPV-infected women coming down with cervical cancer— one must conclude that the vaccinations entering the market cannot be safe and effective.

All the worse that the US drug approval agency FDA appears to have learned nothing from recent catastrophic disasters due to the agency’s approval of unsafe drugs—such as Merck’s anti-inflammatory drug, Vioxx. The FDA hastily approved Merck’s HPV vaccine “Gardasil” which is designed to prevent cervical cancer and genital warts in sexually active women. However, the vaccine has not been proven safe and effective in clinical trials, either. The trials are being criticized for using a placebo containing aluminum adjuvant (whose adverse reaction profile makes the vaccine appear safer than it is), rather than using a non-reactive saline solution placebo.

Here’s how: the vaccine triggered adverse event reports in 90 percent of the test subjects within 15 days—hardly an indication of safety. However, the controversial placebo formula triggered 85 percent adverse event reports. How does the FDA know what long-term adverse effects the vaccine might produce?¹¹²⁴ The more so as Gardasil comes along with heavy side effects ranging from reddening and swellings around the injection spot, fever, hives, arthritis,¹¹²⁵ and even death.¹¹²⁶

It seems as if the medical establishment learned nothing from the disastrous DES (diethylstilbestrol) effects on the daughters of women who took the hormone during pregnancy triggering cancer and genital deformities.¹¹²⁷ This is a particular concern because the HPV vaccine is being promoted for use in girls between 9 and 15 years of age. But the vaccine has never been tested for girls in this age group who are in a most sensitive phase of their development. Vaccinating these girls and young women has to be called negligent. Not least because not even the minimum protecting antibody concentration is known, nor the duration of the protection of the vaccination nor the necessity of booster inoculations.¹¹²⁸ Sure, the DKFZ and other established cancer institutions never tire of saying that the vaccine’s protective effect is 4 to 5 years,¹¹²⁹ but this is nothing more than pure and unfounded speculation that benefits the marketing of a medical substance that is promising very high profits for the pharmaceutical giants making it.

National Vaccine Information Center president, Barbara Loe Fisher, says “Merck’s pre and post-licensure marketing strategy has positioned mass use of this vaccine by pre-teens as a morality play in order to avoid talking about the flawed science they used to get it licensed. This is not just about teenagers having sex, it is also about whether Gardasil has been proven safe and effective for little girls.”¹¹³⁰

Let’s not forget that the idea of immune therapy for cancer is 100 years old. Paul Ehrlich already postulated that one can use immunity to fight against cancer. In the April 2005 issue of Nature Medicine a trial vaccine is described that for the first time ever is supposed to be able to extend the life expectancy of patients with prostate cancer.¹¹³¹ But Erhlich’s trial and all other attempts to make a virus-disease out of whatever type of cancer was, are and always will be hopeless ventures.

The reason is as simple as it is evident: “The cancer cell does not contain new genetic material—but the immune system still only recognizes foreign material,” as cancer researcher Peter Duesberg points out. “If mutated genes could activate the immune system, then we all would be long dead, because the immune system would kill cells daily en masse. In actuality, ordinary gene mutations are channeled through the body under the ‘radar screen’ of the immune system. The topic is often revived, but always it turns out to be a false alarm.”¹¹³²

If HPV were the cause of cervical cancer, then it must be transferred also from the female partner to the male partner. But even if we assume that the HPV tests indeed measure HPV, it is still fact that HPV is practically not detectable in men, nor does it induce health problems in males. “This speaks strongly against an infectious cause of cervical cancer,” says gynecologist Christian Fiala. “Furthermore, a PAP smear test being conducted badly in many cases results in a resection of uterine orifice tissue exactly where the tissue degenerations are. After the tissue is cut out, further degenerations are rarely observed. But if all this is caused by an infection, it couldn’t be treated surgically.”¹¹³³

When the science becomes politicized—whether from the conservative right or from the liberal left—we cannot trust anything that’s being said. Absent scientific evidence demonstrating the safety of the HPV vaccine, there is no guarantee that this will not prove to be a disaster for the next generation. “We can only conclude that we are in the era of post-evidence-based medicine,” states Vera Sharav from the Alliance for Human Research Protection in New York. “Our public health policies are not even remotely evidence-based. Rather, our public health policies are faith-based decrees by government ‘authorities’—no better than voodoo medicine.”¹¹³⁴

Chapter 9

The Big Swine Flu Hoax

„The boards of health have been taken in by a campaign of the pharmaceutical companies that simply wanted to earn money with the supposed threat.“¹¹³⁵

WOLF-DIETER LUDWIG, MEDICAL PROFESSOR AND CHAIRMAN OF THE DRUG COMMISSION OF THE GERMAN MEDICAL PROFESSION

„Early on the official sources declared that pregnant women were at a special risk as compared to the seasonal flu. As we shall see later, this was a grand lie. The Minister of Fear, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was working overtime peddling doom and gloom, knowing that frightened people do not make rational decisions. Nothing sells vaccines like panic.”¹¹³⁶

RUSSELL BLAYLOCK, US NEUROSURGEON

„What experience and history teach us is that people and governments have never learned from history and never acted on lessons they should have learned from the past.“¹¹³⁷

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL, PHILOSOPHER (1770-1831)

The Facts About Swine Flu

The topic of swine flu is complex. In order to make it easier to understand the details, here are the essentials in compact form about the great panic that spread in the world in summer 2009:¹¹³⁸

The so-called swine flu is a “normal” flu

Even according to official sources, the so-called swine flu is more harmless than normal virus flu that we experience every year. Severe courses usually only occur where hunger and misery reign or people already suffer from pre-existing conditions.

Arbitrary diagnoses

The diagnosis of the “swine flu” is based solely on laboratory tests that do not detect viruses, but rather certain protein and gene molecules, which are found in droves in every human being. That these molecules belong to viruses that cause illness is a—not proven—claim of the US epidemic authority CDC. With the help of these questionable laboratory tests, people with cold symptoms are arbitrarily labelled as swine flu death candidates and healthy people as “virus carriers.”

Where one tests a lot, one also finds a lot

The epidemic hysteria was basically unavoidable, as it is the direct result of a “laboratory test epidemic” that is rampant worldwide: there is more testing going on than ever before.

“Letters of Indulgence” for the clueless people

The virologists behave like high priests who lead a campaign against imaginary demons and sell ineffective letters of indulgence in the form of Tamiflu and vaccines to the clueless people for a lavish fee (billions of taxpayers’ money). Research results that do not serve the purpose of virus scaremongering are generally ignored, because that would harm careers, research funds and Nobel prizes—and of course the almost unbelievable turnovers of their financial backers.

(Alleged) pandemics are even more lucrative today than wars

The impact of the real beneficiaries of the pandemic panic-mongering— the pharmaceutical companies—on the world’s leading US health authorities is grave. The manufacturers of antiviral drugs, vaccines and laboratory tests can expect additional global sales of tens of billions of euros. So the benefitting major shareholders can live quite well with a little pseudo-science and panic mongering—and without a conscience...

Vaccines: Effectiveness not proven

The approval studies of the new vaccines are designed from the outset in such a way that they do not allow any statements to be made about an actual protective effectiveness (i.e. no statement that vaccinated persons are demonstrably healthier than unvaccinated persons). The German admission board the Paul-Ehrlich-Institute (PEI) act like a marketing branch of the manufacturers.

Warning for pregnant women: Miscarriages are to be expected

The pandemic vaccines stimulate antibody formation as well as the so-called “cellular immunity”. This can have fatal consequences, because the “cellular immunity” is normally shut down by the immune system during pregnancy in order not to endanger the unborn life.

Secrecy without end

At the beginning of May 2009, the WHO leadership decided, in camera, that a wave of influenza with a “severe course” was no longer necessary to declare the highest pandemic level. In other words, the overwhelming majority of patients suffered only mild symptoms and the number of deaths was low worldwide—hence, there was no sign of a pandemic, yet the highest pandemic level was declared. A contradiction in terms. But the sense of this decision becomes clear when you consider that this trick created the legal basis for the use of the pandemic sample vaccines. No one also knows exactly which substances are contained in the vaccines and in what quantities.

Virus Proof Is Also Lacking in Swine Flu

It is hard to believe, but for decades one virus panic after another is run through roost of the world—from HIV/AIDS to hepatitis C and SARS to avian flu (H5N1)—and the global community has been taken in by the virus hunters again and again. In 2009, the so-called swine flu virus was345 turned into a monster threatening humanity—and the mainstream media that dictates the public debate again largely parroted whatever the corrupted medical authorities told them to, although the evidence on swine flu was also extremely thin—and the greed of the pharmaceutical companies for profit once again enormous. Reason enough, therefore, to become sceptical from the bottom up.

The very first question that should also have been asked in the case of swine flu is: Is the detection of the swine flu virus plausible and scientifically comprehensible? If the journalists had addressed this question, they would have quickly realized that considerable doubts are justified that this had actually happened (just like with HIV or also with the so-called bird flu virus H5N1, for instance).

It is true that the information flyers of the German Federal Government “What you need to know about the new flu (‘swine flu’)” and “Vaccination against the new flu (‘swine flu’)” show photos in which an “electron microscope image of the new influenza virus A (H1N1)” is supposed to be shown. However, the photo does not name a source—and even the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) is not able to find out who took the photo and from which scientific publication the photo showing particles, that are supposed to represent swine flu viruses, was taken. In this respect, the claim of the RKI that the photographs depict an “evil” swine flu virus¹¹³⁹ is scientifically extremely questionable, not to say groundless.

So what are these particles if they are not externally invading and disease-causing influenza viruses? In 2007, for example, the Biochemical Journal described how these particles are artificially produced.¹¹⁴⁰ Chicken embryos or cell cultures are simply killed. In other words, there are cells that are killed in order to extract proteins that clump together red blood cells. They will therefore be called hemagglutinin to then claim—without having scientific proof at hand—that there must be a virus behind it.

In addition, all human and animal cells contain enzymes—so-called neuraminidases—which are important for metabolism and the maintenance of body tension and metabolize for example aspirin as wells as keep the blood stream fluid. These enzymes are produced and released in greater quantities by destroying cells (e.g. by means of adjuvants in vaccines or other stress factors such as pesticides or heavy metals). Their activity is passed off as the activity of fictitious viruses that allegedly use these enzymes to multiply.

These hemagglutinins and neuraminidases also give the viruses their names. The “H” always stands for hemagglutinin, the “N” for neuraminidase, whereby, for example, the “H1” of H1N1 or the “H5” of H5N1 always stands for a particular type of hemagglutinin. But once again: It is not scientifically proven and also unlikely that these hemagglutinins and neuraminidases can be assigned to viruses that cause disease.

Nevertheless, the particles are simply called an evil virus, and then it is proclaimed that it is absolutely necessary to block these enzymes to prevent the virus from spreading in the body. To do this, people are offered drugs such as Tamiflu (which has become ingloriously famous in connection with the bird flu panic) or Relenza, which inhibit neuraminidases. The fatal aspect is that the neuraminidase inhibitors thicken the blood. As a result, vital oxygen can be transported less easily. This can lead to what is known as sepsis and blood poisoning—with the possible consequence that entire organs fail. The dead are then referred to as the victims of the alleged virus...

Big Business Swine Flu:
How the US „Pandemic Agency“ Fooled the World

That this could go so far was mainly due to the omnipotence of the American Disease Control Center, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC for short. The agency has already been threatened twice to become superfluous in its history: after the World War II and at the end of the 1970s. But both times it managed to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. Especially after the agency was able to overcome the crisis at the end of the 1970s by staging the topic of HIV/AIDS on the world stage, it seems to be able to do what it wants—its word is always considered to be a kind of word of God, which is not critically questioned in any way by any other major power institution.

The World Health Organization (WHO) apparently- also trusts in the holy word of the CDC. At the end of April 2009, the WHO made its first statement and, quite surprisingly, announced that the CDC had completely decoded the genome of the swine flu virus. Such a statement is delicate not least because it goes against scientific etiquette to publish such momentous statements without there having been a proper publication in a renowned journal. Only through such a “peer reviewed” publication would other scientists, journalists, institutes, etc. have had the opportunity to really verify the statement that the swine flu virus had been fully proven.

It should be noted that in other scientific fields, careful examination and confirmation by other institutes is a common procedure. For example, the official recognition of the new element “Coopernicium” discovered in 1996 at an institute in Darmstadt took a proud 13 years.¹¹⁴¹ Scientific confirmation of newly discovered viruses, however, is obviously not considered necessary by the WHO as the highest health authority on our planet. The word of the CDC is enough.

The American Disease Control Center, the CDC, seems to enjoy complete privilege of fools—and even the WHO is dancing to its piping. Yet the CDC in reality is anything but a trustworthy source, as has been pointed out several times in this book. And the swine flu panic-mongering is an eloquent testimony to the fact that one should by no means blindly trust what the U.S. Disease Control Center says if one wants to get to the facts.

For example, on the 18th of October 2009, in one of the rare at least somewhat critical media reports on swine flu, the American television magazine 60 Minutes led the CDC to say that the swine flu vaccine was similar to other flu vaccines and therefore “safe.” But such a statement is outrageous on the one hand because the swine flu vaccine was only tested for a few weeks—which is definitely too short to conclude that the vaccine is “safe.”

In addition, CDC officials warned elsewhere that the swine flu virus is so dangerous precisely because it is so different from other influenza viruses. To be immune from an impending deadly pandemic, the CDC said it was imperative that the world has to be vaccinated. But if the swine flu virus is so different from other influenza viruses, then the swine flu vaccine must also be different from other vaccines. So please, dear CDC: Is the swine flu virus very similar to other flu viruses or not? You can’t have it both ways.

But that is not all, another central statement of the US Disease Control Center is scientifically simply not tenable, not to say a lie. For example, in the fall of 2009, the CDC announced on its website that the flu was becoming increasingly widespread and that “so far most flu viruses are of the H1N1 type (sometimes also called swine flu virus).”¹¹⁴² But this statement is not true even if one does not want to give up the belief that a pathogenic so-called swine flu virus actually exists.

For example, the American TV station CBS News researched the news for months and then reported in another rare critical media report on swine flu that H1N1 was in reality not nearly as widespread as institutions like the CDC claim. “If you’ve been diagnosed ‘probable’ or ‘presumed’ 2009 H1N1 or ‘swine flu’ in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn’t have H1N1 flu,” reported CBS News journalist Sharyl Attkisson. “In fact, you probably didn’t have flu at all.”¹¹⁴³

CBS News found out that in July 2009, the CDC advised the states to stop testing for H1N1. They also stopped counting patients who tested positive for H1N1 from that date. The reason for the instruction of the CDC was, according to CBS News, that the authorities felt it was a waste of resources to continue testing for H1N1 and counting the cases, allegedly because it was already proven that swine flu was an epidemic.

But this was an outright lie, because in fact the predicted major epidemic (pandemic) did not break out even many months later. The death rate of those counted as swine flu victims by the authorities rose from just 1,274 to 3,406 cases in the USA between August and October 2009. In Europe, the number of people officially dying of swine flu even rose from just 53 to only 207 cases. And on a global scale, the number of cases only rose from 1,462 to 4,735 between August and October 2009. This means that by October 2009, less than 0.2 percent of those affected had died worldwide.

In Germany, only two deaths had even been reported by that time. It should be noted that these were persons suffering from serious underlying diseases. This means that in this country, too, far fewer people had died than predicted (because with assumed mortality rates of 0.1 to 0.6 of the suspected cases, not only two, but between 23 and 138 people should have died).¹¹⁴⁴

Even if every single death is a tragic fate in itself, with such a low number of cases, it is certainly not possible to speak of an epidemic, let alone a pandemic.¹¹⁴⁵

In any case, the consequence of the instruction of the CD to stop testing for H1N1 was that the diagnosis of swine flu could and was made completely arbitrarily. Virtually every person who came into a doctor’s office with flu-like symptoms was now assumed to have swine flu. This opened the door to manipulation.

Conflicts of Interest and Greed for Profit
Also Dominate Swine Flu Research

How striking the conflicts of interest in medicine are, we have already said a lot about in this book. Nevertheless, we would like to briefly go into this subject again, because it is of central importance, especially for the swine flu insanity.

The term “insanity” may sound forceful to some people, but when you bring to mind that the people who manufacture and distribute the vaccines are ultimately the same people who test the vaccines for safety and efficacy, then one can only speak of insanity.

For example, Paul A. Offit, chief physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is said to have earned at least $29 million when the hospital sold its license participation of therotavirus vaccine Rotateq of Merck for $182 million. Furthermore Offit sat on an advisory committee of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (in the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices ACIP) to help build a market for Rotateq¹¹⁴⁶ (regarding Paul A. Offit, see also chapter 8).

In August 1999, the U.S. government reviewed its vaccine policy. The review revealed that many people were active in committees that discussed vaccine approval and recommendation, while also having financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that produced vaccines. In fact, the law requires that such conflicts of interest be disclosed and that people with such close ties to the vaccine industry are not allowed to participate in such discussions and decisions.

It also came to light that three out of five members of the FDA panel that approved the rotavirus vaccine in 1997 were financially linked to the companies that produced different versions of the vaccine. Just one year after approval, the rotavirus vaccine was withdrawn from the market after it had been found to have caused serious side effects.¹¹⁴⁷

The independence of the authorities in other countries was just as pitiful. In Germany, for example, at the Permanent Vaccination Commission STIKO, which is affiliated to the Robert Koch Institute, “the existing mechanisms to ensure their independence are obviously not sufficient”, as Angela Spelsberg, physician, epidemiologist and at the time board member of the anti-corruption organization Transparency International, wrote in the German journal Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik at the end of 2009. This applies in particular to the conflicts of interest of STIKO members. “In order to change this, the minutes of the meetings and the decisions taken, but above all their reasons, must be published as a matter of principle,” said Spelsberg.

After all, since August 2008 the members of STIKO have been disclosing their potential conflicts of interest on the STIKO website after years of pressure from Transparency International Germany. “The information from March 2009 shows that the majority of the 16 members have more or less intensive contacts with the most important vaccine manufacturers.” as Spelsberg noted. “Individual members also conduct vaccination studies or work in close cooperation with vaccine manufacturers.” It can also be read there that some of the STIKO members are committed to the “Forum Impfen” (vaccination forum), which in turn enjoys financial support from the company Sanofi-Pasteur-MSD, among others. “The website of the ‘Forum Impfen’ unfortunately gives no indication of the financial amount of this support”, complained Spelsberg.¹¹⁴⁸

At the end of 2009, it also came forth that Walter Haas, coordinator of the influenza expert group at the state-run Robert Koch Institute (RKI), is a scientific advisor to the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI). ESWI is an association financed exclusively by the pharmaceutical industry. A total of ten pharmaceutical companies supported the ESWI. Among them were GlaxoSmithKline, manufacturer of the German swine flu vaccine Pandemrix, and the Swiss Roche Group, which produces the antiviral drug Tamiflu.

The ESWI website also featured a promotional film by Tamiflu producer Roche. An ESWI spokesperson told the magazine Spiegel that they were proud to have won a “top-class institution” such as the RKI and Walter Haas as a free consultant. Angela Spelsberg, on the other hand, complained that the RKI was operating in a grey area, both ethically and legally: “It is unacceptable that an office holder who is supposed to serve the welfare of the population alone is so closely connected to a lobbying association.”¹¹⁴⁹

Professor of medicine Reinhard Kurth, who headed the RKI from 1996 to 2008 and immediately afterward was appointed chairman of the Schering Foundation’s board, also casts a dark shadow on the RKI. At first glance, Kurth’s move to the Ernst Schering Foundation may look at least slightly better than, for example, the move of Kurth’s former colleague Heinz-J. Schmitt. After his retirement as chairman of STIKO in 2007, Schmitt switched to Novartis, one of the world’s largest vaccine companies, to take on a leading position in the vaccine field. But Kurth’s move to the Ernst Schering Foundation is also piquant when one considers that this foundation, too, when promoting young scientists, is likely to have above all the welfare of the pharmaceutical company Schering and its investors in mind—rather than the welfare of the general public.

This is also supported by the fact that the Schering pharmaceutical group has been part of the Bayer Group since the end of 2006. And the latter acts remarkably unscrupulously on the world market when it comes to its own interests.¹¹⁵⁰ Incidentally, a look at the history of the RKI is not very refreshing. Not only was Robert Koch himself, as outlined before, a science fraud (see beginning of chapter 2). According to a comprehensive investigation report published in 2008, the RKI was heavily involved in the National Socialist policy of violence. It had a central position in the state health administration and was also part of the Reich Health Office between 1935 and 1942. Yet just three months after the National Socialists seized power in January 1933, there had been a wave of redundancies at the RKI, during which the entire central plane of the institute had been replaced. Later, the director of the RKI and almost all department heads were in the NSDAP.

Particularly sad for nowadays researchers is also the lack of moral courage of their predecessors. No evidence of protest was found in the files, as it states. Nor were it only individual scientists who had crossed moral boundaries. This thesis could still be read in the 1991 commemorative publication on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the institute, but this assessment must be revised, as the RKI conceded. And that is not all: It is said that it proceeded much worse at the RKI than at many other institutions—among other things because, according to historians, physicians had a disproportionately high affinity to National Socialism than other professional groups.¹¹⁵¹

Whoever looks back onto such a dark history should actually do everything possible today to be a refuge of sincerity. From a scientific point of view, however, this cannot be said in regard to the behavior of the RKI with regard to topics such as the so-called swine flu.

In the case of the swine flu, the approval of the vaccine was ultimately granted by the European approval authority EMEA, whose work Transparency International Germany also observed extremely critically. It is highly problematic that the EMEA reports to the Directorate-General for Economic Affairs of the European Commission and not to the Directorate-General for Health and Consumer Protection. It is equally alarming that almost two thirds of its work is financed by the pharmaceutical industry—and that the review of the approval documents by external scientists is only possible after the vaccine has been approved.

There has also been a blatant case of conflict of interest in the UK. As early as the 1st of May 2009, Sir Professor Roy Anderson declared: “Now we have a swine flu pandemic.” When Anderson told this outright lie, he was not only a British government advisor, rector of Imperial College London and member of the British Scientific Advisory Council for Emergencies (SAGE), which developed the pandemic plan for the British—Anderson was also a highly paid board member of the vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline.¹¹⁵²

The swine flu hysteria brought the British pharmaceutical company a gigantic shower of money—mainly thanks to the active support of the state authorities. The German government alone ordered 50 million doses of the swine flu vaccine Pandemrix from GlaxoSmithKline in Dresden. Value of the deal: €700 million. Worldwide, the pharmaceutical giant has sold as many as 440 million doses within a short time and thus billions in turnover.¹¹⁵³

Shortly after the announcement of the (never occurred) “swine flu pandemic,” the value of Glaxo shares rose by an impressive 10 percent, while quarterly profits swelled to €2.4 billion in the third quarter of 2009. A further €2.3 billion profit was expected in the fourth quarter, when the “swine flu vaccine” was delivered.¹¹⁵⁴

Despite the extent of the contract that the German government awarded to GlaxoSmithKline, the associated terms and conditions were not publicly available. This obscured the conflicts of interest of those who negotiated the conditions.¹¹⁵⁵ The obvious assumption that the authorities355 were “bought” by the pharmaceutical company is further substantiated by the fact that “the federal states jointly and severally dispensed GlaxoSmithKline from claims for damages,” as reported by the pharma critical journal arzneitelegramm.1156 1157

Such a far-reaching concession can no longer be plausibly explained by common sense, but only by a policy which, as a kind of puppet of the pharmaceutical industry, puts on an act for the public.

The price of €18 per double vaccination (plus twice €5 for vaccination) was even higher than the price of seasonal vaccination, which is about €14 per vaccination based on the selling price of the manufacturer. “Withal the large-scale order is extremely cost-saving for the supplier,” as Angela Spelsberg remarks. Not least because the state purchase guarantee eliminates the otherwise usual costs for sales promotion.

The new alleged “pandemics” can thus be described as a safe business for the manufacturers—and it seems to become more and more lucrative. While the development pipelines of the corporations are threateningly empty, new blockbuster drugs are hardly in sight, and at the same time the patent protection of many preparations, with which huge sales were made, was expiring, thus forcing cheap imitation preparations (generics) onto the market, vaccines have long since ceased to be a niche business and represent a kind of savior for threatened balance sheets.

No wonder that more and more pharmaceutical companies are seeking their salvation here in the vaccine market. At the beginning of 2009, the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer absorbed the vaccine producer Wyeth. A few months later, three other pharmaceutical giants—Abbott Laboratories, Johnson & Johnson and Merck—announced their intention to buy shares or rights in vaccine manufacturers. At the end of 2009, analysts predicted an annual growth rate of 18 percent for the vaccine industry, compared to 4.4 percent for the pharmaceutical industry as a whole.¹¹⁵⁸

The times in which it was not possible to earn more than “a few tired marks” with a vaccination are apparently finally over. Proof of this is also the cervical cancer vaccination, which is to be seen just as critically as the swine flu vaccination¹¹⁵⁹—and also devours vast amounts of tax money. In Germany, one dose initially cost more than a whopping €150.¹¹⁶⁰ This can only mean: what threatens humanity is a recurring panic-mongering in the irrational style of HIV/AIDS, BSE, SARS, bird flu and swine flu (on cervical cancer, see chapter 8).

“This could happen again every year unless stop-rules are introduced as soon as possible to give the all-clear for suspected but harmless pandemics—and unless public decision-making processes are controlled and contractual agreements between vaccine manufacturers and the government are disclosed”, said Spelsberg. “Health resources of such a magnitude, which are urgently needed elsewhere, must not simply be distributed behind closed doors in the future. Non-transparency and potential conflicts of interest undermine the credibility of the responsible recommending and regulatory authorities. Furthermore, in the current case, they are feeding the suspicion that the H1N1 flu wave, as a swine flu pandemic, was deliberately used by the pharmaceutical industry for marketing purposes. A thorough investigation of the events by an investigation committee is therefore urgently indicated.”¹¹⁶¹

Unfortunately, however, no such investigation was carried out—and so in 2020, with the worldwide “lockdown” in the course of the Corona/ COVID-19 panic campaign, it happened on a gigantic scale what not only Spelsberg had feared (on corona, see chapter 12).

What happens instead of a complete reappraisal of the scandalous events? The authorities come up with the most abstruse proposals, which can only be explained by the fact that the people responsible are totally blinded or act with the absolute will to deceive. For example, the children in the pre-schools and primary schools in Le Guilvinec in French Brittany were

in all seriousness no longer allowed to greet each other with the traditional kiss. This was a decree issued by the mayor. Shaking hands was also forbidden. Instead, the little ones should rise “like Native Americans” to greet.

According to islacanaria.net, doctors in Madrid, the capital of neighbouring Spain, have put up a banner with advice like “No kissing, no handshakes—just say hola!” And also in Germany they thought about a ban on kissing. For example, Minister Karl-Josef Laumann, then Minister of Health in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, sent a written declaration to all school principals at the begining of school in late summer 2009. This stated: “Since the new flu is highly contagious, welcoming rituals such as shaking hands, hugs or kisses should be avoided.”¹¹⁶²

Even the carnival revellers were supposed to start the carnival on the 11th of November at 11.11 a.m. according to the motto “Bützen* ja—Knutschen nicht!” (“Bützen yes, but not smooching!”; “bützen” means to kiss with a pointed mouth). “Nobody has to skip carnival. But whoever goes out to celebrate must know that he can come very close to swine flu—especially if he behaves accordingly”, warned Klaus-Peter Brenner from the Cologne health authority in all seriousness . “For example, if I kiss all the people there, I open the door to the virus.”

And the director of the Institute of Virology at the University Hospital of Cologne, Herbert Pfister, added in all seriousness that one “would actually be well advised to avoid such mass events [like carnival] in these times.” At least risk groups such as chronically ill people or pregnant women should not throw themselves into the thick of the hustle and bustle, he advised.¹¹⁶³

One can only say the following about this: Virus research and what doctors, officials and journalists pass on to the public without criticism has degenerated into an evil foolishness.

Also in the course of the “swine flu” panic-mongering there were warnings that remind of the contact bans that have been issued in 2020 in connection with Corona/COVID-19. Various media warned that men and women should not kiss at the carnival at the end of 2009, but at best should “bützen” (kissing with a pointed mouth). At the time, Düsseldorf carnival revellers were able to reply mischievously that the fear of bad weather was greater than that of swine flu. Source: aachener-zeitung.de

How the Media Simply Disregards Lifestyle Factors
and the Pre-Existing Illnesses of the So-Called
Swine Flu Victims

Also in the case of swine flu the vast majority of the media acted as a voice for the vaccine manufacturers and readily conveyed their messages to their millions of readers. Epecially the tabloid media such as the German newspaper Bild-Zeitung did not consider themselves too good for spreading any kind of abtruse news in a sensationalistic manner and thus adding a lot of fuel to the swine flu fire of panic (see two Bild headlines).

On 3rd November 2009, the German Bild came up with the headline “Swine flu: Infections explode!... even tennis star Thommy Haas falls ill” that could make you afraid if you did not know how absurd the headline is. It cannot be repeated often enough: It has never been proven that even a single person who has been staged as a victim of the so-called swine flu died from the so-called swine flu virus.

On the 21st of October 2009, Germany’s leading tabloid newspaper Bild throws the horror headline at its readers. Soon there could be 35,000 swine flu deaths in Germany—an outrageous claim, just considering that until then there had officially been just two fatalities. Moreover, there is no proof that these poor people really died of the swine flu virus. Not only did those who died have serious pre-existing conditions, but what is named as the swine flu virus has never been proven as a disease-causing virus.

However, it was not only the sensationalism that was once again deplorable—as it was previously the case with HIV/AIDS, BSE, SARS or bird flu—but also the fact that important aspects were simply ignored. The discussion of these aspects could have made a decisive contribution to obtaining a much more realistic picture of what really happened to the poor people who were labelled swine flu victims.

Let us recall once again: Even if one assumes that there was a pathogenic swine flu virus, around 99.9 percent of the people who have been diagnosed with an H1N1 infection by means of (questionable) tests still do not suffer any complications as a result.¹¹⁶⁴ Meanwhile, this is not surprising, no matter how critical or uncritical one looks at virus research. For example, even Luc Montagnier, who is celebrated as the discoverer of HIV, stated in an interview with the Canadian filmmaker Brent Leung that the immune system strengthened by a healthy lifestyle with a nutrient-rich diet one can easily cope with HIV.¹¹⁶⁵

And HIV is pretty much considered to be the deadliest virus in human history—so it should be easy for a person with a robust immune system to eliminate the evilly depicted swine flu virus.

Among the simple measures that you can take to strengthen your immune system are:

Ensure an adequate supply of vitamin D—preferably by exposing yourself to natural sunlight a lot. If this is not possible (which is the case in sunless regions, especially in the winter months), you should also consider using vitamin D drops to correct a vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D is a widely underestimated substance that plays a crucial role in maintaining our health or strengthening our immune system.1166 1167

Ensure a diet rich in fiber, bases and vital substances with many alive enzymes, vitamins, minerals, trace elements—and if possible without toxins (pesticides).

Eliminate highly processed and nutrient-poor “foods” such as white sugar from your diet. They are vital substance robbers and thus only burden your immune system.

Try as far as possible to avoid negative stress and at the same time have many fulfilling experiences. Exercise or sport is essential for this. Sauna sessions, massages and evening basic baths also provide deep relaxation and promote detoxification.

If you are already ill, you can also take measures that provide extra support for the immune system. These include, for example, glutathione administration or intravenously administered nutrient and base infusions.

However, there is practically no word about all these things in the media in connection with swine flu. This is a serious omission. An eloquent example of the tunnel vision and blindness with which the media looks at the alleged victims of swine flu is the report in the newspaper Bild of the 16th of October 2009 on 20-year-old Sascha P., who, the tabloid is certain, “almost died of swine flu” (see screenshot from the website of the Bild newspaper).¹¹⁶⁸

On the 16th of October 2009 Bild.de headlined the (groundless) claim of 20-year-old Sascha P. from Cologne: “I almost died of swine flu.”

“While celebrating at the Ballermann [on Mallorca] Sascha P. caught the H1N1 virus, which almost killed him”, Bild described the story of suffering with moving words. “Lung failure, artificial coma, tracheotomy, 21 days intensive care. Even the doctors had little hope. Now he is healthy again. ‘I have been granted a second life’, says Sasha.” These are exactly the kind of heartbreaking reports that the media likes to give to their millions of readers in order to make circulation or ratings.

Stories in which, unfortunately, the facts are casted aside too quickly. Unproven assertions are sold as facts—the main point is to stir up the media audience emotionally. Thereby Bild could have easily recognized or should have recognized that even if one considers the “evil” swine flu virus to be real, there are other possible causes for the collapse of Sascha P. Thus the tabloid itself writes in its article on the prehistory of the 20-year-old’s collapse:

“Flashback: On September 14th [2009], Sasha returns from Mallorca with a high fever, aching limbs and a severe cough. Five days later he is admitted to hospital. By then the virus had already attacked his lungs. The doctors put him in an artificial coma. Without artificial respiration he would have died instantly.” In other words, a young man has had a long party on the Spanish Island Mallorca and drank himself into a delirium, perhaps even for days. It is no big secret that the circulation can collapse through such binge drinking. So at least Bild should have clarified whether Sascha P. was not (also) a victim of the coma drinking. Just to claim that “the virus has already attacked Sascha’s lungs” without being able to present even a spark of hard evidence is simply dubious.

“Form (Bild) your own opinion”—with these words the tabloid advertises itself. But how can you seriously form a well-founded opinion when the information you are presented with is completely one-sided and in fact not substantiated?

Incidentally, Bild should also have put attention to something that was anything but hard to overlook: that Sascha P. suffers from severe overweight. And “one of the most prominent risk factors for being admitted to the ICU and for dying was obesity”, says American physician Russell Blaylock. “Obese people were admitted six times more often to the hospital than those of normal weight. Obesity played a significant role in the risk to children and pregnant women as well, something that has never been discussed by the media, the CDC or the public health officials.”¹¹⁶⁹

This is all the more incomprehensible when one considers that obesity has been shown to be a risk factor for all sorts of diseases—even for such serious conditions as diabetes¹¹⁷⁰ and cancer.¹¹⁷¹ Especially since a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine at the end of 2009 showed that obesity increased the risk of contracting secondary diseases among those who were classified as having swine flu.¹¹⁷²

© Silvan Wegmann, www.swen.ch

It is precisely the fact that those affected usually suffered from overweight and/or sometimes serious underlying diseases that makes it seem so abstruse that the media has almost always only focused on the nasty swine flu virus. Thus, at least five of the six people who are supposed to have officially died of swine flu in Germany by the beginning of November had chronic pre-existing conditions. Only in one case there had been contradictory statements as to whether a 48-year-old woman from the Rhein-Sieg district suffered from asthma and liver disease or died solely as a result of the H1N1 infection.¹¹⁷³

Adjuvants in Vaccinations:
Attack on the Immune System

Anyone who, despite all the facts described, is still considering having themselves vaccinated should perhaps remind themselves that it was not the mass vaccinations that succeeded in significantly reducing the incidence of so-called infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, polio, etc. Rather, the improved living conditions, such as sufficient food and good hygiene conditions are responsible for this. We have outlined this at various points in this book (see also Chapter 11 on measles).

It is also worth it to recall the swine flu panic-mongering in the mid-1970s in the USA, which ended in a vaccination disaster—just as it would be with the swine flu panic-mongering in 2009. As described earlier in this book, around 50 million U.S. citizens panicked at the behest of the medical establishment and got injected a vaccine that had been hurriedly thrown onto the market—and which in 20 to 40 percent of those in good faith caused severe side effects, including paralysis and even deaths,. This ultimately resulted in claims for damages of $2.7 billion.

Then as now, it is not really known what is contained in the vaccines. Ultimately only the manufacturers and the regulatory authorities know.

Because the manufacturers had secretly changed the formulation of the pandemic sample vaccines. A scandal in itself and another clear indication that the health system is corrupt. After all, we taxpayers have paid for the vaccines, so we should be allowed to know what ingredients they were brewed with.

“Instead of a maximum of 5 micrograms of mercury-containing thiomersal, as stated in the technical information of the sample vaccines, according to the Paul-Ehrlich-Institute, PEI [the German regulatory authority], now suddenly up to 25 micrograms are contained, i.e. five times as much,” as Hans Tolzin, editor of the pharma critical journal impf-report (vaccination report) critically notes. “The PEI press officer, who had the misfortune to take my call, was not allowed to tell me whether any other ingredients had been changed, and I have still not received the desired confirmation by email from him to this day”.¹¹⁷⁴

The mercury-containing preservative thiomersal (see also the article “Deadly Immunity” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in this book) is not the only additive or booster—called “adjuvant” in technical jargon—that is known to have been included in the swine flu vaccines offered. Mercury is certainly the most alarming ingredient, since the heavy metal is the strongest non-radioactive poison known. Also aluminium, a cell and nerve poison, was an ingredient. Just like formaldehyde, which can have genetically modifying and ultimately carcinogenic effects. Furthermore polysorbate 80 was an ingredient, which has caused infertility and abortions, at least in animal experiments.1175 1176

Another ingredient is squalene, which is quite questionable as well— not least for reasons of animal welfare. Squalene is also obtained from sharks, which are among the endangered species. As a natural substance, squalene is also contained in olive oil, for example, and when taken orally it is of course well tolerated. However, if squalene is injected subcutaneously (under the skin) or intramuscularly (into the muscle), which is not367 provided for by nature, it can become an inflammation-promoting and immune-activating antigen/allergen, which provokes the formation of corresponding antibodies and can ultimately also promote the development of autoimmune diseases.¹¹⁷⁷

In animal experiments, squalene has caused the clinical picture of arthritis (inflammatory joint disease).”1178 1179 Of course there are also positive studies on squalene”, says Jürgen Seefeldt, a physician from Paderborn. “But almost without exception it is the vaccine manufacturers who report positive results from their tests.” The swine flu vaccine Pandemrix, which was administered to the German general population, contained squalene in the form of artificially produced nanoparticles (which in themselves can have cell-damaging effects¹¹⁸⁰) and acts as a so-called adjuvant.

In addition one must know that without a so-called vaccination titer there is no approval of vaccinations. A vaccination titer is used by established medicine as a measure of the immunity of the body to a certain disease after a previous vaccination. The concentration of antibodies present in the blood following the vaccination is determined. If many antibodies are now found in the blood, it is assumed that the antigen contained in the vaccine (the alleged virus) has triggered this antibody reaction.

However, this is not very likely and has not been proven at all. Rather, the following can be said: Since, according to the “Impfkompendium”, the most important German standard reference work on vaccinations,¹¹⁸¹ most vaccines have hardly any vaccine titer without adjuvants (up to mercury and formaldehyde), the vaccine titer is probablyan immune reaction to the numerous toxins and chemicals present in vaccinations. “So far, neither the PEI nor the RKI, the federal Disease Control Center in Germany, have been able to provide me with scientific evidence that a high titer is a guarantee of no disease”, says Hans Tolzin.¹¹⁸²

In addition, even if the vaccine could actually protect against a pandemic virus, this would virtually have no effect: because, as even official bodies had to admit at some point, the swine flu in Germany was even milder than a normal virus flu—which is usually overcome after a few days. The presumed benefit or probable non-benefit of the vaccination is therefore counterbalanced by certain risks. Already in August 2009, shortly after the WHO announced the pandemic in mid-June, serious side effects such as paralysis and deaths that could have been caused by the vaccination were reported (see last section in this chapter).¹¹⁸³

Of course one must not judge prematurely here as well. In order to be able to realistically assess the risk of “collateral damage” caused by the vaccination, an open-ended comparison of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons (in the form of a placebo group) is ultimately required. Such comparative studies, which are basically the only way to estimate a hypothetical health benefit, do not exist—allegedly for ethical reasons.

So what would basically have to happen is to get rid of the antibody titer and measure the reactions of the cellular immune system to the vaccination. But even that does not happen. This is tragic because the vaccine titer, the highest criterion for the approval of a vaccination, is questionable not only because there is no immune reaction without “adjuvants” in the vaccines, but also because the antibody reaction has in reality very little to do with the defense against viruses. “However, this has only been known since the mid-1990s”, says the science journalist Michael Leitner. “That is why, in the time before that, people had tried to add something to vaccinations that caused an antibody reaction. And this was only possible by adding metal compounds such as the supposedly ‘proven aluminium hydroxide’.”¹¹⁸⁴

The immune system is much more complex than most people think. And there is hardly anyone nowadays who fully understands it. In any case, pressing it into a simple antigen-antibody model, as the vaccine advocates still like to do, does not seem to be realistic—nor to assume that the antibodies react to “evil” viruses.

The situation in the USA also shows how critical the adjuvants in the vaccines are. Not a single vaccine with a novel adjuvant has been approved there by the end of 2009. “The US drug approval agency FDA considers the danger of excessive reactions to be too great,” wrote The Spiegel in October 2009.¹¹⁸⁵

On May 4th , 2009, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel declared the so-called swine flu virus a “world virus” in its cover story. However, as with SARS (2002/2003) or the “avian flu” (2004-2006) thesuper epidemic with countless deaths, which was conjured up by media, was not even nearly approached. In the cover story of the Spiegel magazine itself, which had the headline “Attack from the Realm of Shades”, the completely unfounded message was conveyed that the “swine flu virus” was as dangerous for the population of earth as if it was a creature from the underworld. Source: spiegel.de

As in 2009 with the “swine flu,” the Spiegel also used the terms “world” and “virus” in its 10/2020 issue—this time for Corona—to suggest a threat to the whole of humanity. Unfortunately, the self-proclaimed “assault gun for democracy” does not tell us that the scientific theses on which this threat scenario was built on were without substance. Instead, in the lead article “We are not prepared,” the horror techniqueis practiced in the tried and tested manner and it is simply claimed that “the novel corona virus is spreading in Germany, and the only question is: how bad will the epidemic be? Experts warn that it could overwhelm doctors, authorities and hospitals.” Source: spiegel.de

Judges Confirm: Swine Flu Vaccine Causes Narcolepsy

In the 6th edition of this book, which was published in 2009, the title of this section still was “Especially children and pregnant women should not be vaccinated.” Others, such as the journalist Daniel Schlicht, were of a different opinion at that time. Thus Mr. Schlicht’s article on swine flu, which appeared on the 30th of July 2009 on www.zeit.de, was not a simple message, but rather a rather offensive-pharmaceutical one: “Everyone who can, should go vaccinate himself.”

How irresponsible this was, was to be made clear to the general public shortly afterwards. For example, only one year later, in 2010, the Swedish Agency for the Regulation of Prescription Drugs for the first time reported cases of children and adolescents suffering from narcolepsy after a swine flu vaccination—a neurological disorder that leads to a disturbance of the circadian rhythm. Further analysis confirmed that the Pandemrix vaccine also caused the disease in vaccinated people in other countries.

The families of the victims then began to demand compensation, which met with fierce resistance from the relevant governments. But in the summer of 2015, for example, The Guardian reported that a 12-year-old boy was adjudicated £120,000 in British pounds by a court because it was considered proven that the swine flu vaccine had caused narcolepsy in him. The battle in court had gone on for over three years because the government would not stop claiming that his illness was not serious enough to warrant compensation.

The government representatives initially appeared downright hostile, as Peter Todd, the lawyer for the 12-year-old’s family, told The Guardian. “They were downright offended because their condition was basically dismissed as something pretty trivial.” Thereby, the boy’s condition went so far that he was unable to shower unattended or take the bus alone. And during a school day, he had to take several naps to get through it.

In the USA the legislator has practically shielded the vaccine manufacturers from such claims for damages. This also reinforces the impression that politics is only the extended arm of the pharmaceutical industry.

One must not forget: The immune system in early childhood needs time to mature and usually does so under the protection of the maternal antibodies. Any vaccination therefore potentially represents a huge disruption of these natural processes. Especially since vaccinations are by far not the only stress factors affecting our children today. As the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) showed in its “Generation X” study, for example, our children already have a dangerous chemical cocktail of around 60 industrial chemicals in their blood—”chemicals whose effects we know very little about”, says WWF expert Ninja Reineke. These include the flame retardant Tetrabromobisphenol A (TBBP-A), which is used in the circuit boards of electronic devices, so-called non-sticking substances used in pans, for example, and synthetic musk compounds used in detergents and cosmetics.

And the highest concentration of the chemical bisphenol A—a substance that can affect the hormone system even in minimal amounts—used in the manufacture of certain plastics has also been detected in a child. Many of the detected chemicals are long-lasting and accumulate in the human body over decades and can thus also contribute to the development of cancer.¹¹⁸⁶

This is especially true for the highly toxic heavy metal mercury, which can remain in the body for decades and block important bodily functions. By far the most significant source of mercury exposure are amalgam fillings.¹¹⁸⁷ The fact that mothers transfer the mercury from their amalgam fillings to their fetuses in a highly critical manner has been demonstrated by Professor Gustav Drasch of the Institute for Forensic Medicine at the University of Munich.¹¹⁸⁸

As far as microbes are concerned, they mainly enter the body through mucous membranes, i.e. through our digestive or respiratory organs. An infant’s immune system does not have its own immunity in the beginning; it is supplied with immune components through breast milk. The mother passes on antibodies to the child and even enzymes that help, for example, in the defense against fungi. Thus, the baby’s own lack of defense is replaced by components from the breast milk until the baby has developed its own immune system, especially during the first year of life.

Vaccinations, however, can be a real problem for the child’s body. The child’s immune system learns that injected foreign proteins (and nothing else the viruses claimed in the vaccines are) suddenly appear right in its tissue. This is the wrong learning content, since microbes actually always penetrate through mucous membranes. Then there are the additives in the vaccines, especially the “adjuvants.” Since the early childhood immune system is hardly capable of antibody reactions, these are present in the same quantity as in vaccines for adults, so that a vaccination reaction can occur at all.¹¹⁸⁹

And if one takes into account that in Germany, for example, until the early 1970s children only received one vaccination until the age of one, but today they have up to 30 vaccinations, and that they also have to cope with countless environmental toxins and an increasingly unpeaceful world, one can imagine that this contributes to the fact that people are increasingly having to deal with allergies and autoimmune problems.

What is certain is that none of the swine flu vaccines had been tested on children under the age of three. “That is why the risk is simply too great to use it now unhesitatingly”, said Wolfram Hartmann, President of the German Association of Paediatricians. Hartmann accused the federal government of having made “scientific false statements.” And it was also not understandable for Hartmann how the authorities were able to buy a vaccine that contained adjuvants. “Children have an immune system that tends to overreact, and that is exactly what adjuvants could do.”

Hartmann also shook his head over the fact that the mercury-containing preservative thiomersal had also been added to the vaccine. “This stuff has been deliberately left out of nowadays vaccines for infants,” Hartmann said.¹¹⁹⁰

Fatally, however, the failure of politics and the media was not effectively dealt with in the period that followed. For this reason, according to statistics professor Gerd Bosbach in an interview with the headline “I would like to remove the camera or microphone from such scientists [as from the RKI]”, the following blatant grievance also occurred in the context of Corona in 2020 (see also Chapter 12): that politicians and the media are speaking exactly to the liking of those people “who have been wrong in the past and who are partly known to be guided by interests. The Robert Koch-Institute already had gained negative attention with the swine flu back then [in 2009]. The swine flu was completely overestimated. [And] one should have reviewed why the swine flu was staged in such a way by the media at that time. One of the lessons to be learned from this was not to listen to individual prompter.”¹¹⁹¹

This blatant grievance prompted Ulrich Keil, Professor of Epidemiology and Social Medicine at the University of Münster, WHO adviser for decades and until 2002 President of the European Region of the International Epidemiological Association (IEA), to write an open letter to the Government of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany on the 30th of March 2020, together with three other people (including the aforementioned Angela Spelsberg). In this letter it says:

“In 2009 the great fear of the ‘swine flu pandemic’ was staged in the media. This has been forgotten today, since after the absence of the catastrophe, the mistakes made in the evaluation of the H1N1 flu virus infection were not dealt with in this country. The danger of the ‘swine flu’ had been completely overestimated; in the end it was milder than many seasonal flues of the previous years. Only 258 deaths were reported, in contrast to the 2017/2018 flu, for example, which killed 25,000 people according to the Robert Koch-Institute. Although demanded by many public health experts at the time, the RKI failed to establish a population-based infection epidemiology. A serious failure, as is currently evident [with COVID-19] and which must not be repeated in this way.”¹¹⁹²

Chapter 10

Postscript to Chapter 3 About AIDS

„We can be exposed to HIV many times without being chronically infected. Our immune system will get rid of the virus within a few weeks if you have a good immune system. I would think if you take poor Africans who has been infected and you build up their immune system it is also possible for them to get rid of it. It is important knowledge, which is completely neglected. People always think of drugs and vaccine. There’s no profit in nutrition.“¹¹⁹³

LUC MONTAGNIER, RECEIVED THE NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE IN 2008 FOR HIS (ALLEGED) DISCOVERY OF HIV

Nobel Prize in Medicine 2008:
Even the Nobel Prize Committee Cannot
Justify the Award for Luc Montagnier

As announced by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm at the beginning of October 2008, the German cancer researcher Harald zur Hausen receives the Nobel Prize for Medicine for the assumption that the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) triggers cervical cancer. He shared the award with the French physicians Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who are said to have detected the HI virus (HIV). But neither the hypothesis that HPV causes cancer nor the HI virus can be scientifically proven.

Thus, even the Nobel Prize Committee itself, in response to repeated requests, was unable to provide evidence of HPV and HIV detection. This reinforces the suspicion that with the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008, dogmas are once again to be built from unproven hypotheses—just as we have already seen it, for example, with the Nobel Prizes in Medicine for Carleton Gajdusek or Stanley Prusiner.

The Nobel Prize Committee also admits unambiguously that it wanted to send a clear political signal with the award to zur Hausen and Montagnier. Bjoern Vennstroem, member of the Nobel Prize jury, made the following statement on Swedish radio: “We hope this will silence those who spread conspiracy theories and who defend ideas that are not founded in research.”¹¹⁹⁴

But the problem is that no serious critic of the claim that HPV and HIV have been proven to cause cervical cancer and AIDS is speaking out in conspiracy theories. Behind the term “conspiracy” is the idea that there is a small group of people—conspirators—squatting together with the intention of deceiving a country or sometimes the whole world. But this is not the case with HPV, HIV, hepatitis C, BSE, etc. We have documented this sufficiently in this book. So we are not talking about conspiracies here.

Rather, the whole thing is ultimately a mixture of many influencing factors, including the profit interests of the pharmaceutical industry, as well as mental conditioning for microbial and especially viral phobia, which has persisted since the end of the 19th century—and which it is difficult for people living today to escape from. As a result, the idea has taken root in people’s minds that bacteria, fungi and viruses are the primary causes of certain diseases.

However, as discussed in Chapter 1, this ignores the fact that disease-causing bacteria and fungi generally only multiply when conditions are created by factors such as drug and medication consumption, malnutrition or toxins such as pesticides. With alleged viruses such as HPV or HIV, there is, as mentioned, again the fundamental problem that not only the Nobel Prize committee cannot present a study that proves that what is called HPV or HIV is really HPV or HIV. As a result, a Nobel Prize jury is now also claiming that critics of virology are “pinning their doubts on scientifically untenable arguments”—where, apparently, it is exactly the other way round. Because even the Nobel Prize committee was not able, even after repeated requests, to answer the following questions about evidence-based studies for HIV:

- Don’t you think that the article “A critique of the Montagnier evidence for the HIV/AIDS hypothesis” by Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al, published in 2004 in the journal Medical Hypotheses,¹¹⁹⁵ shows that Montagnier did not prove HIV? If not, how do you explain the following facts: Montagnier and his colleagues did not provide direct proof (complete characterization) of HIV, but only claimed on the basis of certain phenomena (surrogate markers) that they had detected HIV in 1983. They based their argumentation mainly on the presence of the enzyme reverse transcriptase in cell culture.

However, it is a fact that this enzyme is not specific for retroviruses (HIV is supposed to be a retrovirus), but is present in all cells—something that was not only stated by David Baltimore and Howard Temin, the discoverers of the enzyme reverse transcriptase, as early as 1972, but also by Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean Claude Chermann, Montagnier’s most important co-authors, in 1973. In other words: If the enzyme reverse transcriptase is present in all cells, then logically, from its presence in a cell culture it cannot be concluded, as Luc Montagnier et al. apparently did against their own better knowledge, that a retrovirus or even a special retrovirus is present in the cell culture...

... And even if the enzyme reverse transcriptase were specific for retroviruses, can the discovery of a process even be considered as evidence for the isolation of an object, in this case a virus? If so, can you provide us with the conclusive study?

Thereupon we were sent the article “Molecuar Cloning of LAV” by Montagnier et al., printed 1984 in Nature,¹¹⁹⁶ in which, in their opinion, the proof of HIV (previously called LAV by Montagnier) should be found. But in it Montagnier et al. only say “they have sought to characterize LAV by the molecular cloning of its genome.“ This means that the authors already assume that the genome from which they are making the clones originates from HIV. The argument is therefore worthless for a proof of HIV because it is circular. Luc Montagnier just like the well-known AIDS researchers Robert Gallo or even Jay Levy and their colleagues always talk about the purification and isolation of virus particles, but none of them has ever presented any proof of the isolation of retroviral particles or even virus-like particles (which would be the indispensable prerequisite for the detection of a retroviral genome). Or do you see it differently? If so, can you please send us the corresponding study?...

... and if such evidence (isolation of retroviral particles or even just virus-like particles) has ever been produced—how do you explain that Montagnier himself in an interview with the French science journalist Djamel Tahi, conducted at the Institute Pasteur in Paris, recorded on video and published in 1997 in the journal Continuum,¹¹⁹⁷ admitted that even after „a Roman effort“ it was not possible to make particles visible with the help of electron microscope imaging of cell cultures in which HIV was allegedly present, that „have the morphology typical of retroviruses“?

Much more can be said about HIV, of course. In Chapter 3, we have dealt with the subject of HIV/AIDS in detail. At this point it should be added that even the former epidemiological director of the WHO, Professor James Chin, in his book „The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology and Political Correctness,“ published at the end of 2006, admits unambiguously that the AIDS case figures for developing countries were massively manipulated in order to maintain the flow of billions of dollars. In industrialized countries, on the other hand, according to Chin, the costly prevention campaigns are simply superfluous, because the „epidemic“ simply does not want to break out of the risk groups of gays and junkies.

One does not have to be a scientist—and this cannot be emphasized often enough—to realize that AIDS simply cannot be a viral plague. By definition, there can be no viral disease that does not break out of risk groups (poppers consuming gays and hard drug taking junkies). This is especially true for HIV, because, as is often claimed, this is supposed to be the most infectious virus that has ever existed. Especially such a virus would affect all people all over the world equally.

Moreover, as explained in detail in Chapter 3, the facts indicate that the well-known diseases summarized under AIDS are (significantly) caused by factors such as drugs, medication or malnutrition. An excellent summary of the complete critique about the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS and of the Nobel Prize for Medicine to Luc Montagnier can be found on the website of the Australian researchers and critics of the established AIDS theory Eleni Papadopulos and Valendar Turner (see www.theperthgroup.com/montagniernobel.html).

Nobel Prizes in Medicine for the
Solidification of Dogmas

Why was it possible for Luc Montagnier to be awarded this Nobel Prize? One important reason for this is certainly that the belief that an evil HIV-Virus causes AIDS has become so firmly established in people’s minds that neither the scientific nor the media monitoring bodies are losing sight of the need to look closely and ask real critical questions.

In addition, profit interests and power-political aspects are likely to play a decisive role. Let us recall once again what Roland Scholz, Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology from Munich and critic of the prevailing theories of BSE and other pathogens, so aptly formulated: „Depending on the zeitgeist and depending on which authorities dominate, one or the other dogma dominates the scientific scene, often with an exclusiveness that does not allow any other way of thinking and hinders new ideas.“ And this formation of dogma can be forced by the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, since by „ennobling“ a theory with a Nobel Prize it receives a further boost in credibility and relevance.

But the truth is that the Nobel Prize Committee is far from being a haven of pure wisdom and independence. For example it came to light that Jan Peter Andersson, a member of the Nobel Prize Committee in 2008, had been a scientific advisor to the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline since 1999—a company that produces AIDS drugs on a large scale. In addition, Jan Peter Andersson founded the biotech company Avaris in 2001, which develops and produces innovative gene and cell therapy products for use in chronic infections. The Nobel Prize awarded to Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barre-Sinoussi is not only undermined by such conflicts of interest. Such events also illustrate how close the pharmaceutical industry itself is to the Nobel Prize committee.

This is also revealed by the research of Sveriges Radio from Sweden,¹¹⁹⁸ which reported at the end of 2008 that close links existed between the pharmaceutical company Astra Zeneca and the Nobel Prize Committee. Astra Zeneca was the main sponsor of two Nobel Foundation subsidiaries (Nobel Media and Nobel Webb) and at the same time held rights to the HPV vaccines. Astra Zeneca also had several people on its payroll who were involved in the decision making process for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. As a result, not only the Nobel Prize committee came under increased pressure. The Nobel Prize for Medicine to the German Harald zur Hausen also came under twilight, because the awarding of the prize to the German physician may have been a decisive factor in pushing the marketing of HPV vaccines.

The extent to which the Nobel Prize committee can serve as a vehicle for maintaining the power of certain medical interests was also demonstrated in 1949, when criticism of the so-called lobotomy—a neurosurgical operation in which the nerve tracts between the thalamus (the largest part of the diencephalon) and the frontal lobe (frontal lobe of the cerebrum) as well as parts of the grey matter (certain areas of the central nervous system) are severed and thus destroyed—began to spread. Nevertheless, the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, who had introduced lobotomy, received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949.

It should be noted that the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Moniz without any scientific proof of the safety and effectiveness of lobotomy. Originally, the lobotomy was used as the last resort treatment for schizophrenia patients. However, with the Nobel Prize to Moniz, the lobotomy gained credibility and popularity—especially in the USA. „The lobotomy is an inglorious example of how a Nobel Prize can serve as a promotional tool,“ says Vera Sharav of the patient protection organization Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHTP).¹¹⁹⁹

In 1946, only 100 lobotomies were performed in the United States—in 1949, the year the Nobel Prize was awarded, the number of lobotomies went up to 5000.¹²⁰⁰ In 1950, just one year later, the then USSR banned lobotomy. Soviet doctors had declared that this radical procedure was „incompatible with the principles of humanity“ and „turned mentally disturbed people into idiots,“ as the New York Times wrote in 1953.1201 1202 Today, lobotomy is considered as one of the most barbaric „medical“ methods in history.

„The public was fooled from the beginning,“ says Vera Sharav. „The medical community and the drug regulatory agency, the FDA, have been complicit in this by concealing the tragic consequences of this brain mutilation—for decades. Hospital operators and doctors considered the lobotomy to be a milestone in modern medicine—and so the method was widely accepted, especially after the Nobel Prize cloak was put around it.

The American psychiatrist Walter Freeman (1895-1972) and the neurosurgeon James Winston Watts (1904-1994) had made the method a popular standard technique in psychiatry in the early 1940s. What Walter Freeman was made of is shown by his distorted understanding of his own profession: „Psychosurgery achieves its success by shattering the imagination, dulling emotions, destroying abstract thinking and creating a robot-like, controllable individual.“¹²⁰³ And the lobotomy—a mutilation of the brain-achieves just that.

Freeman also approached the media with verve. And the media was at his service. The eminent Washington Star newspaper described the procedure as „one of the greatest surgical innovations of this generation“; the New York Times once called the lobotomy „surgery of the soul,“ which „made history.”

Nurses and doctors flocked in droves to the lecture halls to learn about lobotomy in theory and practice. The procedure was performed by tens of thousands of practitioners—at the most elite institutions in the country, including John Hopkins University, Harvard Mass General Hospital, Mayo Clinic and Columbia University Hospital in New York, Columbia Presbyterian, where Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of US President John F. Kennedy, was lobotomized.“¹²⁰⁴

In Sweden, according to a report by the Swedish national television station SVT in April 1998, about 4,500 people had been lobotomized by 1963, many of them against their will. At least 500 of them, according to today’s interpretation, were not psychiatrically ill, but among others hyperactive or retarded children. In Finland, until 1969, about 1,500 people had been lobotomized. In Norway, between 3,000 and 4,000 people were lobotomized between 1941 and 1981.¹²⁰⁵ Worldwide, the number of operations performed is estimated at about one million.¹²⁰⁶ In the 1950s, the operation was even carried out, among other things, to „cure“ homosexuality or a communist attitude.¹²⁰⁷

In 1967, Harvard authors Vernon Mark, Frank Ervin, and William Sweet, in a letter to the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the official organ of the American Medical Association, got carried away with the thesis that the cause of the race riots in Detroit was a „focal brain disorder“ that only needed to be surgically removed to prevent further riots.¹²⁰⁸ In 1970, Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin published a book entitled „Violence and the Brain“ in which they proposed psychosurgery as the definitive solution to the problem of violence, for example in the case of unteachable prison inmates.

The psychiatrist L.G.West called this approach „biosocial humanism“ in a 1969 article. In 1979, the Californian psychiatrist H. Brown recommended psychosurgery for the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents. Brown’s proposals were discussed in the London Times and the Washington Post— pointing out that this type of rehabilitation was far more cost-effective, at only $6,000, than lifelong custody, which costs around $100,000.¹²⁰⁹

Civil rights movements began to take action against the lobotomy in the 1960s. In 1962 Ken Kesey’s novel „One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” impressively demonstrated the effects of the surgery on psychiatric patients. The novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film in 1975 by Milos Forman with Jack Nicholson in the leading role (winning five Oscars). In the end, the lobotomy was recognized for what it was: a brutal mutilation that was like a permanent straitjacket for the brain. However, it is suspected that this procedure was abandoned by the medical establishment, not because it was tantamount to mutilation, but perhaps also because the psychotropic drugs that could be used to sedate patients had been appearing since the 1950s.

Just how unteachable the medical elite can be is shown by the fact that as late as 1998 the Nobel Prize organization defended the Nobel Prize award for Egas Moniz in 1949 with the words: „There is no doubt that Moniz deserves the Nobel Prize for Medicine.”¹²¹⁰

Meanwhile, the series of mistakes made in connection with the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Medicine is long and goes back to the medical light-shining figure Robert Koch, who in 1890, out of glory, wanted to make the world believe that he had discovered a miracle cure for tuberculosis with tuberculin—which later turned out to be a hoax that cost thousands of people their lives.

Experts such as the Heidelberg historian Christoph Gradmann stated that Koch had „skilfully staged“ the market launch of tuberculin. Everything had obviously been planned long in advance. Despite this, Robert Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1905 for his work on tuberculosis. The Nobel Prize for Robert Koch made a decisive contribution to the fact that microbiology, and especially the hunting of viruses, was able to occupy an extremely dominant position in research and that toxicology was increasingly pushed into the background (see Chapter 2).

Other examples of how the Nobel Prize for Medicine has been abused are the awards to Carleton Gajdusek and Stanley Prusiner, also mentioned in this book, who created the basis for redefining all sorts of diseases as infectious diseases at will. Thus it was Gajdusek who helped the concept of „slow viruses“ to make a breakthrough, which is also central to theories according to which HIV causes AIDS and HPV cervical cancer. In 1976 Gajdusek was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theory of slow viruses. In truth, however, the only thing that can be said about Gajdusek’s slow virus theory and the Nobel Prize is what Roland Scholz, Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology from Munich, Germany, aptly formulated as follows: „The scientific world seems to be hornswoggled by a fairy tale“ (see chapter 2).

Gajduseks erroneous theses about the slow viruses was, of course, also a decisive prerequisite for the alleged cattle disease BSE to be declared an infectious disease. The decisive work for this was then carried out by the US physician and biochemist Stanley Prusiner, who in 1982 succeeded in identifying so-called plaques in the brain, which are so characteristic of the nerve damage associated with brain degeneration. These plaques contain certain proteins, called prions, which are mainly located on nerve cells and have a pathologically altered structure.

In 1987, Prusiner finally succumbed to the temptation to bring his hitherto little-noticed prions into play as the cause of an epidemic, which earned him an enormous reputation. Ten years later, in 1997, he was „ennobled“ for this with the Nobel Prize, as the German journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt put it. This solidified the issue of infection by declaring the „Prusiner prion“ to be the trigger of sponge-shaped brain diseases. However, the experiments on which this hypothesis and thus also the Nobel Prize are based have a number of shortcomings as well, which are explained in detail in Chapter 5.

In summary, the theory of infectious prions is also unfounded. Instead, there is good reason to assume that the so-called cattle disease BSE is the result of a genetic defect of chemical poisoning caused by inbreeding (especially poisoning with the severely nerve-damaging organophosphate Phosmet).

But if you declare industrial poisons such as pesticides to be the cause of an epidemic, there is no money to be made (on the contrary, this would endanger the sales of powerful industrial branches)—but with vaccinations as well as gene, antibody and BSE tests, which all only work if you believe in an „evil“ pathogen, they do...

Strengthening of the Immune System
Instead of Antiviral Drugs

In Chapter 3 we have already gone into the subject of AIDS drugs in detail (among others in the subchapters „AIDS Drugs: The Fable of Life-Prolonging Effects“ and „The AIDS Therapy Dilemma“). However, the topic is so important—especially for those affected by it—that we would like to say a few things about it explicitly:

There are always patients who feel better or better again after treatment with so-called antiviral drugs. This is especially the case if the patient is affected by chronic fungal infections. The improvement in health is due to the fact that so-called protease inhibitors were part of the drug cocktail administered. These protease inhibitors have been described as having good effects on fungi. Just because one or the other patient who has been given the AIDS stamp has done well with these antiviral drugs does not mean that the thesis that HIV causes AIDS is correct and that antiviral drugs should always and exclusively be used.

In particular, the many patients who do not have any symptoms at all but are still classified as AIDS patients simply because they tested positive or were diagnosed with a low T-helper cell count or with a high so-called „viral load“ should refrain from taking the antiviral drugs „prophylactically,“ which are associated with severe side effects. And even for those affected who have a real ailment (Kaposi’s sarcoma, herpes zoster etc.), it is true that the AIDS drugs can only be effective in individual cases and are basically not a long-term or actual solution.

Because the actual cause is not addressed by the preparations, whether one assumes that a HI-Virus is behind it or whether one considers the fungi as an essential factor. The real cause is the factors that made the patients fall ill. These can be, as sufficiently described, drugs like poppers and cocaine, medical preparations with many side effects (AIDS drugs, antibiotics etc.), malnutrition and many other stress factors. As a rule, these also act on the patients in combination.

How important it is to build up the immune system (by means of a diet rich in vital substances, exercise, sunlight, avoidance of negative stress etc., and, if necessary, restorative preparations such as glutathione, probiotics etc.), even Luc Montagnier himself stated in 2009 in an interview with the Canadian Brent Leung, maker of the multiple award-winning documentary „House of Numbers: The HIV/AIDS Story Is Being Rewritten.“¹²¹¹ In this interview Montagnier makes the following statements:

Luc Montagnier: „We can be exposed to HIV many times without being chronically infected. Our immune system will get rid of the virus within a few weeks if you have a good immune system.“

Brent Leung: „If you have a good immune system then your body can naturally get rid of HIV?“

Montagnier: „Yes.“

Leung: „If you take a poor African who has been infected and if you build up his immune system, is it possible for him to also naturally get rid of it?“

Montagnier: „I would think so.“

Leung: „That’s an important message.“

Montagnier. „It’s important knowledge that is completey neglected. People always think of drugs and vaccines.“

Leung: „There’s is no money in nutrition, right?“

Montagnier: „There’s no profit, yes.“¹²¹²

In other words, even if one believes in HIV and its disease-causing effects (for which there is demonstrably no reason, see the beginning of Chapter 3), the primary focus should be on doing everything possible to maintain and build up physical health in a natural way—and not on throwing toxic drugs „around“ with serious side effects.

How destroying these can be was also reported by the New York Magazine on November 1, 2009 in the article „Another kind of AIDS crisis: A striking number of HIV patients are experiencing symptoms usually identified with the elderly“. The website also features a video¹²¹³ in which those affected talk about how they age much faster when taking the drugs, sometimes even go crazy, or suffer from osteoporosis, high blood pressure and dementia.

These effects are not surprising, as described in chapter 3, considering the toxic effects of the ingredients of the drugs on cells. Of central importance in the cells are, for example, the mitochondria, also known as cell power stations. They belong to the energy system of our body. Their own genetic material, and thus they themselves, can be permanently damaged by a whole range of factors, including heavy metals such as mercury, pesticides and also chemotherapeutic drugs (AIDS drugs are basically chemotherapeutic drugs, see screenshot of the Bild column of drag queen Nina Queer)—and in the end this can lead to a serious illness.

On October 26, 2019 the headline of the weekly Bild column of drag queen Nina Queer was „So dangerous is PrEP!”. PrEP stands for „Pre-Exposure-Prophylaxis.” The idea behind PrEP: People who test „negative“ for HIV should also take medication as a precaution, so to speak. But this is exactly the problem, according to Nina Queer, because this way „not only sick people are permanently provided with strong medication, but also the healthy ones. What an ingenious trick to sell drugs to healthy people and to make billions through the desire for unprotected sex. A PrEP pill is nothing more than a kind of ‘little chemotherapy’ that you expose your body to every day or possibly for years. As with any medication, PrEP has side effects, including diarrhea, fatigue and depression.” Less than a week later, the virologist Hendrik Streeck responded to Nina Queer in Bild claiming the effectiveness of PrEP is proven, and „like any drug, PrEP has side effects,“ but „a depression... is certainly not one of them“. But the drug Truvada, for example, approved as PrEP in the EU since 2016 has been proven to cause depression. And the information that Hendrik Streeck has received fees and financial contributions from pharmaceutical companies such as Gilead, which earns money with the PrEP-approved drug Descovy, for instance, should definitely not be withheld by the Bild newspaper from its readers. Source: Screenshot of bild.de

It should be noted that, apart from chromosomal damage, the second defining characteristic of cancer cells is that their mitochondria are damaged and their number is reduced. Mitochondria not only serve as “factories” in the cells in which the energy for living processes is produced, but they are also decisive for cell growth and other central functions. That this fact is still largely ignored by established medicine is a tragic circumstance, because studies have shown that a cancer cell can transform back into a normal cell if its damaged mitochondria are regenerated through things such as detoxification or a really healthy nutrition with plenty of fresh and raw food.

The fact that the condition of the mitochondria plays a decisive role in the extent to which those who are declared AIDS patients fall ill was finally also considered by established research at the end of 2008.¹²¹⁴ Unfortunately, however, virus-fixed medicine has not yet come up with the idea that it is only industrial and drug poisons and other civilizational stress factors that affect the mitochondria and can thus impair the immune system and even cause it to crash (which is then referred to as AIDS in the final stage). For them without an evil virus, nothing would work, because without a virus there would be no reason to administer antiviral drugs—from the point of view of the pharmaceutical companies and the AIDS physicians associated with them, a horrible idea. And so they twist the theory around and claim that the damaged mitochondria are involved in the spread of HI-Viruses, which in turn cause the immune system to kill itself.¹²¹⁵

But these are groundless speculations. In his book „The Silent Revolution of Cancer and AIDS Medicine,“ for example, which has been available in English since 2008, cancer researcher Heinrich Kremer shows in a well-founded way that AIDS, just like cancer, is a consequence of damage to the energy system—and that no virus is needed for this process. Ultimately, of course, a disrupted energy system leads to a deterioration of every other cell reaction, which in turn prevents the immune system from working properly. It is therefore important to keep your immune system healthy. If you are already affected by a chronic disease state, it is crucial for the recovery process to bring your immune system back into shape.

At this point, let us recall what exactly is meant by an immune system. The immune system comprises a large number of cell types and an even larger number of messenger substances (messenger substances are used for chemical communication in an organism —i.e. to transmit signals or information). It should be noted that about 80 percent of the immune cells are located in the intestinal area, which means that the intestinal flora, which is full of microorganisms, is by far the largest and most important immune system in our body.¹²¹⁶ In total, the microbes weigh a good 1 kg.

Many people are still not really aware of this fact, although even established medicine is increasingly recognizing this. How „fit“ the intestinal flora of a person is is influenced by a number of factors, especially by diet, the amount of negative stress, the amount of physical activity, the amount of drugs consumed, etc. And there is much to suggest that the state of the intestinal flora has a decisive influence on all sorts of ailments such as obesity and allergies, and also on serious diseases such as cancer,1217 1218 1219 1220 1221 which is also one of the so-called AIDS-defining diseases (see Chapter 3, subchapter „AIDS: What Exactly Is It?“).

In fact, critical experts point out that a shift in the intestinal flora, not untypical for the industrial society, in which disease-causing microbes are increasingly gaining the upper hand, is likely to make a decisive contribution to the so-called HIV tests turnpositive and AIDS patients becoming ill.1222 1223 1224 Also noteworthy in this context are studies showing that it is also beneficial to the health of AIDS patients if they do something to improve their intestinal flora. The best way to do this, of course, is to eat a diet rich in nutrients and fibre and with many enzymes (raw food); in this specific case, of course, intestinal bacteria can also be supplied in the form of preparations.¹²²⁵

Among the multitude of cells that make up our immune system, a distinction is made between so-called lymphocytes, macrophages and granulocytes. All three cell types belong to the so-called white blood cells, which fulfill special tasks in the immune defence. Lymphocytes are further divided into B-lymphocytes, T-helper cells and T-killer cells; the macrophages are also called scavenger cells. „According to recent findings, however, the cellular immune system can be divided into two main groups: The TH1- and the TH2-system,“ according to the medical specialist for environmental medicineJoachim Mutter in his book „Gesund statt chronisch krank“ (Healthy instead of chronically ill), first published in 2009.¹²²⁶

The main weapon of the TH1 system is nitrogen oxide, which can be used to eliminate cancer cells, among other things. However, the produced nitrogen oxide must be detoxified by the body’s own cells through reduced glutathione or sulphur groups (thiols), otherwise it would also destroy the healthy cells. Glutathione is a small „mini-protein“ that is present in every cell of the body and is involved in a number of detoxification, transport and biosynthetic functions. The US National Cancer Institute calls reduced gutathione „the primary antioxidant of cells, which plays an important role in neutralizing free radicals and, because it is a co-enzyme containing [sulfur-containing] thiols, in detoxifying foreign substances“.¹²²⁷

In a healthy organism, there is usually a balance between reduced glutathione and its oxidized form, whereby only the reduced variant of glutathione develops the nitrogen-neutralizing effect. If the number of free radicals in the organism increases as a result of toxic influences such as heavy metal pollution, drug consumption, vaccinations, stress, etc., the amount of reduced glutathione in the cells may decrease. If the organism cannot stop or reverse this decrease (for example, with the help of vitamin E or the amino acid cysteine, which can immediately convert oxidized glutathione back into functional reduced glutathione), a deficiency of reduced glutathione occurs and the aggressive radicals are thus able to carry out their activities without hindrance.¹²²⁸ This is often observed in cancer patients in particular.¹²²⁹ And chemo- and radiotherapies usually worsen the phenomenonconsiderably, as they lead to an increased consumption of glutathione, so that the free radicals can do their „mischief“ more intesively.

If reduced glutathione and other antioxidants are not present in sufficient quantities, the immune system switches to the TH2 response, which simultaneously reduces the TH1 immune defense. As a result, not only chronic infections with germs can occur that would have to be fended off by a TH1 response—such as Borrelia bacteria or fungi— but ultimately also cancer, since cancer cells are also destroyed by the NO gas of the TH1 immune response. In order to compensate for the throttling of the TH1 system, the TH2 immune defense can easily be over-stimulated.

And indeed, not only in people who suffer from allergies or autoimmune diseases (where the cell’s own structures are attacked), but especially in cancer patients, the TH2 system is often overactive and the TH1 system is shut down.¹²³⁰

„This means that in people suffering from cancer or other chronic diseases, it is advisable to increase the body’s own glutathione production by detoxifying the mitochondria and by taking in certain substances“, proclaimed the physician Joachim Mutter. „This then leads to the TH2 system being broughtdown to a balanced level. The significant increase in all kinds of chronic diseases over the past decades suggests that the population in industrialized countries is suffering from a growing glutathione deficit or mitochondrial hypofunction, caused on the one hand by the increasing exposure to more and more toxins and harmful radiation, and on the other hand by the supply of poor-quality food that contains less and less vital nutrients because it is produced using industrial farming methods and on depleted soils.“

Cancer researchers Roberto Locigno and Vincent Castronovo from the University of Liège in Belgium also note in a review published in the International Journal of Oncology in 2001: „Reduced glutathione (GSH), a ubiquitous thiol-containing tripeptide, is unanimously recognized to play a central role in cell biology. It is highly implicated in the cellular defense against xenobiotics and naturally occurring deleterious compounds such as free radicals and hydroperoxides. Consequently, reduced glutathione is an essential factor in the prevention and treatment of several human diseases including cancer and cardio-vascular diseases.”¹²³¹

As research shows, the glutathione content in the human body is greatly increased by the consumption of raw vegetables and wild herbs.¹²³² Studies have also shown that foods containing sulphur have antioxidant effects and stimulate glutathione synthesis—and thus can counteract cancer.1233 1234 The exotic fruit durian, which is available in Asian shops in Germany, as well as wild garlic and garlic, for example, contain large quantities of these sulphur-containing compounds. Healthy sleep is also said to help regenerate the glutathione reserves of the liver and to lead to an increase in melatonin levels as well.

Melatonin is a sleep hormone and, like glutathione, is a radical scavenger (some say that melatonin is an even stronger radical scavenger than glutathione). However, the formation of melatonin is only possible if the body was exposed to enough natural light during the day and received sufficient vitamins and the essential protein component L-tryptophan (which must be taken in with food). Melatonin also protects glutathione from premature degradation, whereas the heavy metal mercury quickly leads to glutathione deficiency and cell damage. Studies show that the allocation of melatonin has been shown to counteract or prevent cell damage by heavy metals.¹²³⁵

„A central component of a successful therapy must therefore be to strengthen the immune system or to bring the TH1- and TH2-defence systems into a robust condition and thus also to regenerate the damaged mitochondria, i.e. the cell power plants“, emphasizes Frankfurt physician Juliane Sacher, who has been treating AIDS and cancer patients for many years. In order to achieve this, it is important to increase the concentration of the protein glutathione in the mitochondria. This can be achieved by supplying the amino acids cysteine, glutamine and glycine. These are transported from the cell plasma to the mitochondria. „As a result, cancer cells can sometimes be transformed back into normal cells,“ adds the physician Mutter.¹²³⁶

A fact that is also known in other areas of medicine, such as emergency medicine. In the case of poisoning with the common painkiller paracetamol, for example, high doses of the amino acid cysteine are administered (for example in the form of fluimucil ampoules) in order to stimulate glutathione production. Paracetamol is a thief of glutathione and has therefore already led to deaths. Unfortunately, very few doctors are aware that sometimes only a few things have to come together to cause a dicey or even fatal situation.

If, for example, a patient is operated on who has already taken a lot of paracetamol because of pain, who has a poor diet and is therefore strained with pesticides (which is normal nowadays) and who perhaps has some unnoticed inflammatory skin disease, it can happen that glutathione is additionally consumed by the anaesthetics and the wound healing. In this case it is not surprising if the patient gets increasingly worse. And if, by chance, he also happens to be affected by the increasingly common genetic defect of the glutathione S-transferase theta, he can also die in such a situation—and most doctors are at a loss to explain why this has happened and how they could have avoided this drama.

Doctor Sacher has found this genetic defect in practice in a number of cancer and AIDS patients. She therefore warns these patients against using paracetamol and instead carries out glutathione infusions a few days before and after operations. In this context, Boyd Haley, Professor and Director Emeritus of the Chemical Institute of the University of Kentucky, has also developed a new remedy that has been shown in animal studies to be practically as non-toxic as water and which he has named Oxidative Stress Relief, or OSR for short. It can effectively increase the glutathione concentration in the brain and in the spinal cord and can also remove heavy metals.

Initial experiments with humans have shown that people who themselves suffer from serious illnesses such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular diseases have experienced rapid improvement or that it has at least been possible to halt the progression of the diseases. As a dietary supplement, it has been approved by the FDA to raise the body’s own glutathione levels.¹²³⁷

It goes without saying that these substances or procedures work all the sooner and better, or only then when the person concerned does something else to improve his or her immune system. This includes regular exercise, breathing fresh air, maintaining loving relationships, sunbathing sufficiently (among other things to ensure the supply of vitamin D), eating a healthy diet (rich in nutrients and fresh foods, low in toxins), etc.

The importance of the immune system in serious illnesses such as cancer is also confirmed by studies conducted by Jérôme Galon and his team at the Institute National de la Santé et de la recherche Médicale in Paris. According to these studies, the course of the disease in patients with colorectal cancer is largely determined by the activity of the body’s defenses in the tumor and its immediate surroundings. This applies irrespectively of how much the tumor has already spread locally or whether metastases have already formed.¹²³⁸

Therefore, the analysis of the local immune response should definitely be included in the diagnosis and therapy decision, emphasised Galon at the second European Congress of Immunology, which took place in Berlin in September 2009.

Karri Stokely and Maria Papagiannidou Died
from AIDS Medication—and Not from HIV!

Tragically, there are also people who fail in their attempt to get off AIDS medication. Among them is the American Karri Stokely, who died in 2011 at the age of 44. Even The Guardian wrote an obituary about her, which comes across as rather cynical and states that Stokely, „the poster girl for a different way to look at health“, died the „death by denial“ of the usefulness of antiviral drugs.¹²³⁹ But as always, one has to look very closely in order not to run the risk of jumping to the wrong conclusions.

This is exactly what the Guardian article does. The writer of the article, Brian Deer, should have realized that himself, since he is praised as a great „investigative journalist.“ Deer quotes the journalist Joan Shenton, who is one of the prominent critics of the HIV=AIDS dogma and who knew Stokely well, as saying: „I think Karri died from the side-effects of the drugs. She’d stopped taking them, but she’d been taking them for about 10 years before.“

Karri Stokely

Immediately following this quote, Deer then writes that “there’s no answer, of course,” to thesis that Shenton puts forward in the Stokely case. So Deer cannot possibly say with any certainty that Stokely died because she stopped taking or “denied” medication. And to the request (sent by e-mail on February 12, 2014 and again on March 24, 2020) to explain this, Deer did not respond.

So let’s just look closely at how Stokely died. Stokely had been on medication for a whole eleven years from 1996 until she came across critical reports that eventually led her to stop taking the drugs. After that she experienced a relatively short period of good health, even though it was accompanied by unpleasant „excretion crisis“ including drug-related abstinence symptoms. But after a while, the problems reappeared again, mainly due to the „invisible” depth effects of the AIDS drugs. For example, these had caused her to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a malignant disease of the lymphatic system.

At the beginning of 2010 an anal fissure was diagnosed, which became ulcerous in the following months and led to severe pain. The doctors took a tissue sample in which they claimed to have found cytomegaloviruses, abbreviated CMVs. The topic of cytomegaloviruses is worth a discussion of its own, which will not be dealt with further here. However, it is a fact that there is no peer-reviewed study that proves that what is called CMVs are infectious viruses.

Apart from that, the viral scaremongering and the unshakable (though unfounded) belief in the effectiveness of the drugs meant that the doctors would only operate on Stokely if she agreed to take antiviral drugs. Finally, the American gave in to medical pressure, because the fissure had to be removed—and she was intravenously administered the particularly toxic ganciclovir, whose frequent(!) side effects include liver and kidney dysfunction and retinal detachment. And indeed, shortly afterwards (at the end of 2010) she was affected by massive visual disturbances or loss of vision, among other things. „The administration of ganciclovir together with a highly toxic antibiotic caused the neurological and visual damage in Karri and ultimately caused her death,“ concludes David Rasnick, a researcher critical of HIV/AIDS who accompanied Stokely during her final months.

The use of protease inhibitors, for example, which are administered to AIDS patients, can be quite helpful temporarily. However, this is not because they block an „evil“ virus, but because they are antifungal, i.e. fungicidal, and probably also have an effect against parasitoses. And indeed, many AIDS patients are also suffering from fungal infections. However, protease inhibitors and HAART are only treatsymptoms and not the actual causes, which make the fungi grow pathologically. Therefore, when the preparations are discontinued, the fungal infections often reoccur.

Remarkable in this context is also the meta-analysis „Antiretroviral effects on HIV-1 RNA, CD4 cell count and progression to AIDS or death“ published in HIV Medicine in 2008. According to the authors, this study, in which they evaluated 178 papers, is the largest of its kind to investigate how HAART affects the surrogate markers CD4 helper cell count and viral load as well as the two clinical endpoints „the outbreak of AIDS“ and „death“. And the scientists concluded that they „were unable to demonstrate a relationship between change in CD4 cell count or viral load and clinical events” [= AIDS outbreak and death]. „Even if one assumes there are beneficial effects from HAART therapy,“, says Valendar Turner of the Australian Perth Group, „the fact that no correlation exists between virological and clinical outcomes means the benefits are not the result of an antiretroviral effect.”

„I have done intensive research into the damage caused by AIDS drugs,“ says Rasnick. „And I found that about half of those who take antiretroviral drugs experience vision loss and varying degrees of blindness. That’s a tremendous proportion, but how often do you hear about it in the media or from the doctors? Another side effect of these drugs is progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy or PML for short, a severe disorder of the central nervous system, which has the exact symptoms that Karri Stokely ultimately suffered from and that caused her death.¹²⁴⁰ AIDS physicians know about this as well, but they do their best to avoid educating people about it. Moreover, the autopsy report clearly shows that Karri did not die of ‘AIDS’ or ‘HIV’, but of kidney failure followed by multiple organ failure. It should also be mentioned that shortly before Karri Stokely’s death abnormally high levels of lead-like thallium and other heavy metals were measured in samples of her stool and urine. And as incredible as this may sound, it basically allows only one conclusion: deliberate poisoning ...

Another tragic example of the power of official propaganda is the Greek Maria Papagiannidou. She was tested „positive“ in 1985, when she was just 20 years old, and then treated with AZT from 1987 on. In 2007, a whole 20 years later, when she was just over 40, she stopped taking the medication and published the book „Goodbye AIDS!” In 2011, however, she unfortunately became very ill again and returned to antiviral therapy in desperation until she died in spring 2012.

But why had Papagiannidou got into such a health crisis after stopping the medication? And the answer is that this was mainly caused by two factors. On the one hand, her body had forgotten how to keep potentially disease-causing germs in check, since the medication had taken this over for years. In addition, the preparations she had been taking for no less than two decades had massively damaged her mitochondria over time.¹²⁴¹ And when she had stopped taking the preparations, new resistant germs quickly accumulated, which cannot always be treated successfully with a new antiviral medication. Just like with Stokely, with Papagiannidou it was not—as is often hastily claimed—the rejection of the medication that was fatal for her, but the highly toxic medication itself, which not only did not help her, but actually destroyed her physically.¹²⁴²

So what could Papagiannidou have done? „An exit from years of AIDS medication is only possible if laboratory analyses are made, on the basis of which specificinfusion treatments can be carried out,“ says Felix de Fries, who has been active in the Gay Rights Movement since the mid-1970s and who has also been a former employee of Alfred Hässig, a pioneer of blood transfusions. „This makes it possible to help the patients be immune active again and to rebuild their health, especially with regard to the mitochondria. Anyone who undergoes antiviral therapy simply loses the ability to fend off bacterial, fungal and parasitic infections after a short time. Combination therapy intervenes in a fundamental way in metabolic processes and immune reactions. Protease inhibitors slow down the cell division in organs that, however, depend on increased cell division in order to function.“

De Fries has compiled „Therapy recommendations for HIV-positive and AIDS patients.”¹²⁴³ „For example, it makes sense to give antioxidant plant substances and probiotics to rebuild the intestinal flora and the intestinal mucosa,“ says de Fries. In addition, the administration of various substances could remedy deficiencies and support the activity of the mitochondria, the formation of their membrane and the repair of mitochondrial DNA damage and thus the cell metabolism and the functioning of all organs.

Maria Papagiannidou on May 19, 2009 on Greek television (Youtube screenshot)

Examples of this would be trace elements, amino acids, vitamins, medicinal mushrooms and plant substances such as the co-enzyme Q10, L-glutathione, folic acid, lecithin, lutein, manganese, orotic acid, pangamic acid, selenium, magnesium, humic acid, chromium, zinc, L-arginine, L-cysteine, L-glutamine, L-glycine, L-histidine, L-isoleucine, L-lysine, L-tyrosine, grape seed extract, Ling-Zhi, Agaricus, shitake, yam root and vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B12, C, D and E as well as alpha-lipoic acid, reduced glutathione and phosphatidylserines, which have anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, anti-allergic, antibacterial and detoxifying effects and support the defense activity, blood circulation and metabolism in the brain.

In this context, it should also always be remembered that the conditions subsumed under the term AIDS are often the result of oxidative substances damaging the body’s antioxidant system. And when these oxidative processes, produced by drugs, medication, industrial toxins, stress, etc., act on the body over a longer period of time, degenerative phenomena such as skin cancer Kaposi’s sarcoma occur, which is one of the most important AIDS-defining diseases in industrialized countries, and increased cell decay leads to the increased release of proteins from the cytoskeleton and mitochondria. Against these proteins and against a large number of different bacterial antigens, the body then builds up antibodies to a greater extent, which cause HIV antibody tests to be „positive“ above a certain laboratory value, which was set in 1984.

Those who have tested „positive“ should therefore definitely have further laboratory analyses carried out to show which germs have spread and what resistance to individual classes of antibiotics they exhibit. „This is possible nowadays thanks to PCR tests,“ says de Fries. In addition, they should also measure whether their mitochondrial function is disturbed, how their metabolism is and whether they are poisoned by drugs, toxins or heavy metals—for example from vaccine carriers and metal-containing dental fillings—which can severely impair their immune response.

And of course it must always be remembered that it can be a very long process to get the „cart that is deep in the mud“ back onto firm and healthy ground. This can sometimes require an iron will.

Two Experience Reports: A Life Without AIDS Drugs

Raúl Erichs de Palma

„In the mid-1980s, when I was not even 20 years old, I started injecting heroin intravenously. And after about eight years, I even started mixing it with cocaine. This drug addiction lasted for almost ten years, until 1995, when my health literally collapsed. My kidneys, for example, were only functioning at 20 percent, the damage to my liver left my blood with very few platelets, and even one of my heart valves was broken off and surrounded by several warts, two to three centimeters in diameter. When I was admitted to the hospital, I weighed less than 40 kg—with a height of 1.83 m.

Raúl Erichs de Palma (2018)

After the admission I tried to breathe, but no oxygen got into my lungs and I had a respiratory arrest. On the way to the heart valve surgery I lost consciousness and woke up three days later. I had to stay in the hospital for another three and a half months for minimal recovery. At this point I decided to change my life completely.

After I left the hospital, I never took drugs again and became a vegetarian. For five years I have even been on a vegan diet, following the philosophy that animals should not be hurt or used. I also studied naturopathy for three years and Gestalt therapy for four years. And still I am constantly trying to acquire knowledge about how to live a healthier life.

I was first tested for HIV in 1995. It was negative. In 1997, I had to go to the doctor to get a prescription for anticoagulants that I had been taking since my heart valve surgery. However, although the only clinical signs that I showed were of recovery, the doctor urged me to have an ‘HIV test’. The Explanation: I had been an intravenous drug user, which is why I would have to have such a test every six months. Finally I gave in and took the test. At that time I had no background knowledge about HIV/ AIDS. When I got the ‘positive’ test result, my first thought was: ‘This is the beginning of the end’. And I didn’t tell anyone about the results for months. But then I thought: The news that I am supposed to suffer from a deadly viral disease does not fit at all with how I was feeling physically and what the doctors told me about my health condition.

And so I started to read various books about how to get healthy. One of the first was ‘¡Cuídate compa!: Manual para la Autogestión de la Salud’ (Take care of yourself, buddy! Manual for the self-management of health) by Eneko Landaburu, which mentions the doubts of solid scientists and doctors about the HIV=AIDS theory.¹²⁴⁴ Then I came across, for example, the book ‘Roger’s Recovery from AIDS’ by Dr. Bob Owen, or ‘Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story’ by the great gay rights activist and prominent critic of the HIV=AIDS theory John Lauritsen.

Books that have helped me a lot include ‘El arte de saber alimentarte’ and ‘La enfermedad, qué es y para qué sirve?’ by Karmelo Bizkarra Maiztegi, ‘Toxemia: The basic cause of disease’ by John H. Tilden and also books by Désiré Mérien and Herbert M. Shelton.

I also felt better and better the longer I followed the healthy lifestyle. And also the doctors always confirmed that I was very healthy. I never had a so-called ‘viral load’, by the way—and the value for my CD4 helper cells was always higher than 400. With what I know today, I will always refuse any ‘AIDS medication’.”

Raúl Erichs de Palma lives in Spain, his website is http://replanteamientodelasalud.blogspot.com

Nash

„For more than 20 years now (as of 2020), I have been living disease-free without taking the ARV drugs after being told I was HIV positive. I am now 55 years old. I am doing fine, I feel great and look great. One year ago there was a bad flu virus going on here at work and my colleagues was dropping like flies, I had minor symptoms that lasted one day and I was fine.

I was diagnosed positive in September 1999, then immediately was coerced into taking the drugs. I started the ARV therapy a year later after I initially refused to do so. I took the drugs for just over a year, then against the doctor’s advice, I stopped taking them, because I simply couldn’t take the horrific side effects anymore. When I first started taking the drugs, I got a burning and stinging sensation in my fingertips and toes, which lasted for about 4 months. The other side effects were the wild crazy dreams every night, and the feeling I got every day like I was drunk or high. I also felt as though my organs were hardening. The later effects lasted until I decided to stop taking the drugs.

The fact that I was suicidal at the time helped me make the decision to stop and just let the ‘virus’ take its course. But, a wasting disease didn’t happen. To my surprise, I immediately started to feel and look better.

Since late 2002, like any other healthy person, I’ve had cases of the flu and a couple of times serious bouts of pneumonia (which I suffered often as a child). None of those illnesses killed me, I think it made my immune system stronger. The longest I am down with the flu is two days—no more than three. I can’t prove it yet but the drugs may have damaged my arteries (arteriosclerosis) during the time I took it (I now suffer from hypertension which I didn’t have before I took the drugs, only during and after).

I am constantly studying the work of HIV/AIDS dissidents on this subject so that I can best defend our point of view.

I’m ready to join in the fight against the HIV-AIDS lie and hopefully, together we can help put an end to the horrific HIV-AIDS machine. Their lie cannot last much longer.

Thanks to the work and time of all those who have fought this battle. May they all have much success and happiness in life.”

Nash, born 1965, lives in Houston, Texas, USA. His experience report can also be found at www.livingwithouthivdrugs.com.

The full name of Nash is known to the authors of this book.

Chapter 11

10 Reasons against Measels Vaccination

“It is well known that deaths from common infectious diseases declined dramatically before the advent of most vaccines due to improved environmental conditions—even diseases for which there were no vaccines.”¹²⁴⁵

ANTHONY R. MAWSON PROFESSOR OF EPIDEMIOLOGY AND BIOSTATISTICS

“[Since the second half of the 19th century,] unquestionably the doctrine of specific etiology has been the most constructive force in the medical research. In reality, however, search for the cause may be a hopeless pursuit because most disease states are the indirect outcome of a constellation of circumstances.”¹²⁴⁶

RENÉ DUBOS MICROBIOLOGIST AND PULITZER PRIZE WINNER

They are literally pelting at us: the recommendations to get vaccinated, whether for cervical cancer, influenza, mumps, rubella, measles, etc. And if you follow them well, your child has been injected with almost 40 vaccines in Germany by the time he reaches the age of two.¹²⁴⁷ In March 2020, Germany also introduced the “Measles Protection Act”, which makes measles vaccination compulsory for children in day-care centres and schools, for teachers and educators, for staff in medical institutions such as hospitals and doctors’ surgeries, and for residents and staff in asylum centres. But as vehement as the pressure is from authorities and industry to make vaccinations “palatable” to people, there is little factual substance behind it. Here are the top ten reasons why it is better not to have your child vaccinated against measles:

1. The Monocausal Mindset—a Virus Causes Measles
and Vaccination Is the Only Protective Measure
Against It—Is Unrealistic

Waldorf pupils near Stockholm who were not vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) have a lower risk of allergic skin reactions than the vaccinated children from mainstream schools. This is the result of a study published in 1999 in the Lancet, one of the world’s most respected science journals.¹²⁴⁸ With regard to this study result, vaccination advocates in particular like to raise the question: Should we not, in addition to non-vaccination, also consider lifestyle factors such as better nutrition as a possible cause of the reduced risk of allergies in non-vaccinated Waldorf pupils?

However, the problem with this question is not only that there is no study that—conversely—shows that vaccinated children have a reduced risk of allergies compared to their non-vaccinated peers. This logic would also lead to the conclusion that if there are several possible causes for the development of allergies—including diet and other lifestyle factors as well as the vaccinations themselves—this should also apply to diseases such as measles, which are vaccinated against. But then, for this reason alone, it would no longer be justified to demand that one should be vaccinated against measles.

The fact that it is unrealistic to assume that only one cause—a virus— could be the primary cause of diseases such as measles has already been discussed in detail in chapter 1 “Society Under the Spell of the One-Dimensional Microbe Theory”. Of course, this also applies to the disease measles, which can be seen from the fact that by far not everyone who comes into contact with people who have been diagnosed with measles develops measles. Factors other than a measles virus must therefore determine, or at least play a part in determining, whether or not someone falls ill with the symptoms associated with the term measles.

Just think of the fact that the condition of the intestine, which, mind you, is teeming with microbes, has been proven to be a very decisive factor when it comes to health and illness—and the condition of the intestine, for example, is particularly strongly influenced by diet. In this context, experts point out that the severe course of the disease is usually also related to the fact that those affected have previous illnesses, have a lack of vitamin A or are confronted with unrestrained fever reduction measures—all factors that have nothing to do with a disease-causing virus.

2. The Historical Curves Show: Vaccinations Have
Nothing to Do With the Containment of Diseases
like Measles

In connection with the fact that, of course, factors such as diet, industrial toxins, lack of exercise, psychological stress, etc. must also be taken into account as causes of measles, the Harvard physician Edward H. Kass should be quoted again at this point. He pointed out in a 1971 article for the Journal of Infectious Diseases:

„We had accepted some half-truths and had stopped searching for the whole truths. The principal half-truths were that medical research had stamped out the great killers of the past—tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, etc.—and that medical research and our superior system of medical care were major factors in extending life expectancy. The data on deaths from tuberculosis show that the mortality rate from this disease has been declining steadily since the middle of the 19th century and has continued to decline in almost linear fashion during the past 100 years [till 1970]. There were increases in rates of tuberculosis during wars and under specified adverse local conditions. The poor and the crowded always came off worst of all in war and in peace, but the overall decline in deaths from tuberculosis was not altered measurably by the discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus, the advent of the tuberculin test, the appearance of BCG vaccination, the widespread use of mass screening, the intensive anti-tuberculosis campaigns, or the discovery of streptomycin. It is important that this point be understood in its completeness. The point was made years ago by Wade Hamptom Frost, and more recently by René Dubos, and has been repeatedly stressed through the years by many observers of the public health. Similar trends in mortality have been reported with respect to diphtheria, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, pertussis, measles, and many others.“¹²⁴⁹

Anthony R. Mawson, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, confirms this in 2018: “It is well known that deaths from common infectious diseases declined dramatically before the advent of most vaccines due to improved environmental conditions—even diseases for which there were no vaccines.”¹²⁵⁰

And indeed, the historical course of measles in Germany, for example, clearly shows that the mass vaccination came at a time when the “measles spook” was de facto over (see diagram 10).

And although the facts are clear, the Süddeutsche Zeitung in all seriousness claimed that “vaccination with viruses could almost eradicate measles except for rare outbreaks like the one now [2015] in Berlin”.¹²⁵¹ When asked how the newspaper came to publish such a statement, which clearly contradicts the factual data, the answer was that it was not “the number of deaths but the number of illnesses” that was important for assessing the situation. And these sickness figures “were not recorded in West Germany, but they were recorded in the GDR. There, the number of measles cases fell significantly with the start of vaccinations in 1967.”¹²⁵²

But this answer is without substance. First of all, it should be noted that the disease figures are de facto irrelevant when it comes to assessing whether a vaccination against a disease such as measles has worked or is useful. Instead, one must look at the number of deaths, because if no one dies from measles or its complications, or if no serious consequences are withheld, there would be no need to vaccinate.

Diagram 10 Measles Deaths in Germany (1961-1995)

Measles vaccination was introduced in West Germany in the mid-1970s (where the syringe is shown in the graphic), at a time when the “measles spook” was de facto over. Where the arrow is (early 1990s), the curve continues with the data from reunited Germany. Source: Buchwald, Gerhard, Impfen: Das Geschäft mit der Angst (in English: Vaccination: a Business based on Fear), emu-Verlag, 1994

Therefore, in his book “Vaccination: a Business based on Fear”, the physician Gerhard Buchwald explicitly points out that the vaccination campaigns were started precisely because of serious complications such as encephalitis. And “if the deaths [associated with measles] are decreasing, it means that the complications of this disease, in this case encephalitis, are decreasing, because it is the severe cases that are often fatal.” And this decline, as the historical progression curves clearly show, simply cannot be explained by vaccination.

Moreover, the data from the DDR which the Süddeutsche Zeitung cites cannot be considered credible. For example, the Enquete Commission of the German Bundestag concludes that the GDR statisticians as a whole were a “professional gang of counterfeiters” who had deliberately used statistical information as a propaganda tool in the worldwide confrontation between the two opposing social systems (East against West).¹²⁵³ And indeed, the GDR Ministry of Health boasted—in propaganda style—that it had been possible to eliminate measles as a widespread disease by means of its own vaccine and that this “represented a success that was also highly regarded internationally” (see its “Vademecum für Impfärzte”, published in 1972).

When we asked the Süddeutsche Zeitung to comment on this information, we did not receive an answer—even after twice checking it out, we did not.¹²⁵⁴

The measles case figures from the GDR, cited by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, are also refuted by data from the USA (data that can be considered as solid as those from Germany). These show that in the United States of America both the death rate from measles and the number of measles cases had fallen drastically long before the vaccination was finally introduced.¹²⁵⁵ Moreover, although the German Federal Statistical Office does not have any data on the number of cases of measles, it does have, for example, data on the number of cases of respiratory diphtheria (see diagram 9 in chapter 8). And these also reveal that vaccinations have nothing to do with the control of diseases against which vaccination is used.

Vaccination against diphtheria was introduced in this country in 1925— with the result that diphtheria diseases actually increased massively and peaked in 1945, the last year of the Second World War, with 250,000 cases per year. Subsequently, the number of cases then fell steeply, “although hardly any or very little was vaccinated in the post-war period,” as the physician Buchwald writes in his book “Impfen: Das Geschäft mit derAngst” (Vaccination: The Business of Fear). And even the mass vaccination campaigns between 1970 and 1980 had no discernible effect. According to Buchwald, these data also provide clear evidence “that misery, hunger and miserable years are breeding grounds for infectious diseases, as can already be seen from the curves for smallpox, tuberculosis and whooping cough.”¹²⁵⁶

In this context, it should be noted that in Germany in the mid-1970s, when measles vaccination was increasingly introduced, about 40 measles deaths were reported annually. This number subsequently fell to a few isolated cases per year. However, even this does not change the fact that the measles death rate had fallen by no less than 99.9% compared to 1900 and that vaccination cannot, with the best will in the world, be held “liable” for this drastic drop. In addition, even after the start of mass vaccination against measles in the 1970s, living conditions in Germany continued to improve gradually, which explains the further drop in the death rate.

3. Many Vaccinated Persons Get the Disease
They Were Vaccinated Against

A study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases in 2013 shows that vaccinations are not only ineffective, but can even be counterproductive. For example, in 2011 there were more measles cases in Quebec, Canada, than in ten years. And as the study reveals, only a subsequent active case search led to the realization that the number of measles cases among those vaccinated twice was actually more than twice as high in Quebec as originally estimated.¹²⁵⁷

This example from Quebec shows what is observed again and again everywhere, namely that you can very well get the disease against which you have even been vaccinated several times. And it is indeed the case that the assertion made by politicians and many doctors and media, almost like a prayer wheel, that high vaccination rates protect against outbreaks of disease is simply not accurate. This is also proven by numerous reports that have been published in established professional journals.

For example, in 2008 the journal European Surveillance reported that in the Czech Republic, although a programme for vaccination against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) had been started in 1987, thousands of people contracted mumps in 2002 and even more so in 2005. The highest number of cases was in the group of 15 to 19-year-olds, almost 90 percent of whom had been vaccinated twice.¹²⁵⁸

There are even many cases of the above-mentioned meningitis—the so-called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, or SSPE—in which those affected have been vaccinated once or even several times before being diagnosed with SSPE.¹²⁵⁹ And as Angelika Müller from the organization Eltern für Impfaufklärung (EIA) reports in the specialist magazine impf-report, even a manufacturer of a measles vaccine concedes: “There have been reports of SSPE in children who, according to their medical history, were not infected with the wild measles virus but had received a measles vaccine. Some of these cases could be the result of an undetected measles infection during the first year of life or could be due to the measles vaccine.¹²⁶⁰

4. There Is No Evidence of the Effectiveness
of Vaccination

It is true that it is sometimes claimed—as in the German film “Eingeimpft” (“Vaccinated”), which ran in cinemas in 2018—that a group around the Danish anthropologist and epidemiologist Peter Aaby showed in several studies in Africa that the live vaccine version for measles prevented the disease and, for example, reduced infant mortality by about half under the conditions of a developing country. But Aaby’s data sets are not only vehemently criticized by orthodox groups—which is not surprising considering, for example, that Aaby was based in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, a region where experience shows that “clean” data collection is much more difficult than in industrialized countries.

Even the German news magazine Der Spiegel, whose reports usually look like a copy of the press releases of the vaccine manufacturers, writes with reference to Aaby’s live vaccine theses: “The vaccination can cause symptoms similar to the disease.”¹²⁶¹ And Martin Hirte, pediatrician and member of the association Ärzte für individuelle Impfentscheidung (Doctors for Individual Vaccination Decisions), points out that “for dead vaccines, which are usually administered in infancy, infant mortality actually increases, at least in African countries.”¹²⁶²

Aaby also did not include in his vaccination studies any participants who were given a placebo, which was proven to be harmless. But that is exactly what he would have had to do in order to make his thesis hard, according to which the vaccination (and not an improvement in living conditions, for example) is responsible for the observed decrease in infant mortality. Strictly speaking, he would have had to carry out so-called placebo-controlled double-blind studies (see also the chapter on HIV/AIDS). “Placebo-controlled” means that in a study one group of participants (subjects) receives the vaccine and the control group receives an ineffective sham drug (placebo). And “double-blind” means that neither those who conduct the study nor the test persons have been informed which participants receive the vaccine and which receive the placebo.

Only such a double-blind study with a real placebo can determine beyond doubt whether the measles vaccine or any other vaccine is effective and superior to non-vaccination. During a January 2018 deposition, Dr. Stanley Plotkin, one of the world’s most influential vaccinologist, acknowledged that researches who try to ascertain vaccine safety without a placebo are in “La La land.”¹²⁶³ But there is no such study—not on measles and not on many other vaccines. There are a number of studies that claim to be placebo studies. But in most cases of these studies no ineffective sham drug is used. For example, in the pivotal trial of the cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil, the placebos contained aluminum hydroxide with side effects. And in the very few studies where a vaccine was actually compared with a real placebo, the vaccines came off badly.

One of the most famous examples of this is a large-scale field trial which the WHO implemented in India at the end of the 1960s, on the BCG vaccine (= tuberculosis vaccine).¹²⁶⁴ In this trial “a large collective was vaccinated with BCG, while an equally large one remained unvaccinated” (= placebo group). The result of the field trial: Not only did the vaccination show no protective effect against tuberculosis, in the vaccinated group, significantly more participants fell ill and died than in the non-vaccinated group.

Another of these study rarities dates from 2012, in which an influenza vaccine was compared with a real placebo.¹²⁶⁵ And here too, the result is devastating. Not only did the influenza vaccine cause almost six times as many respiratory illnesses in the group of vaccinated persons as in those who received the ineffective sham drug. The vaccine was also counterproductive because it actually increased the risk of influenza.¹²⁶⁶

5. Comparative Studies Show: Unvaccinated People
Are Healthier Than Vaccinated People

In addition to the few genuine placebo studies mentioned above, there are studies that examine who is in better health: vaccinated or unvaccinated. And the data situation speaks a clear language: unvaccinated people are in noticeably better shape. For example, an analysis published in May 2020 showed that “vaccination before 1 year of age was associated withincreased odds of developmental delays, asthma and ear infection.”¹²⁶⁷ The study is unique in that all diagnoses were verified using abstracted medical records from each of the participating pediatric practices. And the lead author Brian S. Hooker from the Department of Sciences and Mathematics at the Simpson University in Redding, California stated:

“The results definitely indicate better health outcomes in children who did not receive vaccines within their first year of life. These findings are consistent with additional research that has identified vaccination as a risk factor for a variety of adverse health outcomes. Such findings merit additional large-scale study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children in order to provide optimal health as well as protection against infectious diseases.”

The organization Children’s Health Defense, founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reported about this study. And the article about the subject says that “nearly 60 studies have been assembled that find vaccinated cohorts to be far sicker than their unvaccinated peers.”¹²⁶⁸

And a study published in the journal Human & Experimental Toxicology in 2012 revealed that the more people were vaccinated in the USA, the more hospital admissions and deaths occurred in a statistically significant manner.¹²⁶⁹

A year earlier, a paper published in the same journal revealed a no less piquant fact: that the more vaccinations a country has had, the higher the mortality rate is for people aged up to one year in that country.¹²⁷⁰ Not less than 34 nations were compared, including several leading industrial nations such as the USA, Germany, Great Britain, France, Denmark, Sweden, Japan, Canada and Australia. Infant mortality was highest in the USA—and thus in the country where per capita health expenditure is higher and where more people are vaccinated than anywhere else in the world.

Also worth mentioning is the study on the health of children and adolescents in Germany (KiGGS) under the leadership of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI). The KiGGS data sets also include those of unvaccinated persons—and an evaluation showed that vaccinated children and adolescents have many times more allergies, suffer more often from developmental disorders and are affected by more infections and chronic diseases than unvaccinated persons. Although—not surprisingly—RKI researchers in the journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt 2011 contradicted this evaluation by stating: “Differences in the occurrence of allergic diseases and the frequency of infections between unvaccinated and vaccinated persons are not observed.”

There are some objections to this conclusion. First of all, it should be noted that two authors of this paper declared conflicts of interest because they were associated with two large vaccine manufacturers.¹²⁷¹ In keeping with this, the physicians Martin Hirte and Steffen Rabe begin their criticism of the work of the RKI researchers, which is also printed in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, with the following words: “In an article that gives undifferentiated praise to the ‘protective vaccinations’ in the very first sentence, doubts about objectivity are justified. And they further state that “the unvaccinated children in two of the three age groups investigated tend to have fewer infections and atopic diseases than the vaccinated, and none of the unvaccinated children under ten years of age has bronchial asthma.”¹²⁷²

Incidentally, the RKI authors achieved their “desired result” only through unfair trickery. For example, migrants were excluded from the evaluation, which decisively decimated the group of unvaccinated 11 to 17-year-olds in terms of numbers. And this exclusion of migrants was simply justified by claiming that their vaccination documents were often incomplete or missing altogether. But this argument is not plausible. Not least because in an earlier publication from 2007 the RKI had analyzed the vaccination rate on the basis of the KiGGS data—and in this the migrants were very well included, without the RKI being in any way disturbed by this.

Apart from this, there are further studies that show that unvaccinated people are better off than vaccinated people. These include the Canadian Cohort Study, published in 2008 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.¹²⁷³ This study investigated whether the timing of vaccination against DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis) influences the risk of suffering from asthma at the age of seven. Result: The later the vaccination is administered, the lower the risk of asthma.

With all the studies mentioned, you will certainly find fault with something, if you really want to. For example, one could argue that factors that could potentially cause illness or be beneficial to health (smoking, no sport, breastfeeding, nutrition, etc.) were not taken into account in a comprehensive way or that the period of investigation was not long enough. “Ideally, one would have to carry out a detailed planned study that accompanies a large number of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons over many years and removes all disruptive factors, but such a study has not been carried out so far,” says the physician Martin Hirte.¹²⁷⁴

But one can only agree with Barbara Loe Fisher, President of the American National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), who laments that “industry and government agencies have refused to fund sound research to better understand whether there are significant differences in the health status of vaccinated and unvaccinated people.”¹²⁷⁵ But why do they refuse to do so? There is enough money and time!

This leads to the suspicion that such solid studies are being omitted for fear that such research might reveal results that confirm the results of the studies mentioned here by way of example and which in part meet the very highest standards (1999 study with Waldorf pupils in Stockholm, WHO field trial in India, 2012 placebo study with an influenza vaccine etc.).

6. Vaccine Manufacturers and Their Studies
Lack Credibility

Such suspicion seems all the more justified when one considers that the credibility of the vaccine manufacturers and their studies is already very low. And it is further diminished by the fact that there is an increasing number of reports of scientific misconduct, biased reporting, conflicts of interest and downright fraudulent activities by pharmaceutical companies producing an ever-growing list of vaccines.

The main driver for this development is that there is a lot of profit potential in the vaccination business. At the beginning of the 21st century, vaccine manufacturers had a turnover of “only” around $5 billion, but by 2014 it was already more than $30 billion—and by 2020 the $60 billion mark will be scratched.1276 1277 That this is also due to the fact that the authorities are being corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry for the purpose of maximizing profits is described by the physician Klaus Hartmann, for example, who worked for a long time at the Paul Ehrlich Institute responsible for vaccine approval, in his book “Impfen bis der Arzt kommt: Wenn Pharmakonzernen Profit über Gesundheit geht” (Vaccinate until the doctor comes: When pharmaceutical companies profit over health.

This casts even more doubt on the accuracy of the companies’ claims about the safety and efficacy of their vaccines—doubts that are confirmed by analyses such as those carried out by the Cochrane Collaboration, which is also highly regarded in established circles. The Cochrane Collaboration has looked at many studies of MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) combined vaccination. The analysis published in 2012 found that the design of the trials and the presentation of results on the safety of MMR vaccines—both before and after they were launched—were not only t seriously flawed.

Also, none of the studies included in the review met the methodological criteria of the Cochrane Collaboration. What is particularly noteworthy iswhat the Cochrane Collaboration states in relation to one of the studies analyzed: that of Fombonne and Chakrabarti in 2001—a work that was generally considered by medical authorities to be the most convincing to refute the link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Because they drew the following conclusion: “The number and possible impact of biases in this study was so high that interpretation of the results is impossible.”¹²⁷⁸

7. Vaccinations Entail Incalculable Risks

Meanwhile, pivotal studies such as those on measles are also lacking in significance because they do not have enough test subjects and were too short-term in design to be able to record severe side effects with statistical certainty. And no one can say with certainty how many people are harmed by vaccinations.

Mother “Are there long-term studies on the side effects?” Doctor: “Certainly in ten years!”
© Ingmar Decker, www.achecht.de

As reported by the magazine impf-report, an average of 130 vaccination complications are reported in Germany every year after a measles vaccination, including four reports of permanent damage and one death. However, according to an expert estimate quoted by the Paul Ehrlich Institute in the Bundesgesundheitsblatt, the number of undetected cases is at least 95 percent. According to this, the actual number of annual vaccination complications would be more than 2,600 including 19 deaths—and some estimate the number of undetected cases to be even noticeably higher. Incidentally, the Paul Ehrlich Institute says it lacks the solid data to refute such estimates.

In this context, Anthony R. Mawson from the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Jackson State University wrote in 2018: “Over $3 billion has been paid by the US Vaccine Injury Compensation Program for vaccine-associated injuries and deaths, and only about 1 percent of vaccine-associated injuries are officially reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. The long-term effects of vaccination on children’s health remain virtually unknown but are assumed to be limited solely to prevention of the targeted disease. Studies have been recommended by the Institute of Medicine to address this question. However, randomized controlled trials, the ‘gold standard’ for such research, have been considered unethical because they normally involve depriving some children of the needed vaccines in order to create a control group. Vaccines also have a quasi-religious status as a ‘sacred cow’ of medicine and public health, which has discouraged scientific inquiry, and critics are often attacked personally and pejoratively labeled as ‘anti-vaxxers.’”¹²⁷⁹

In other words: There is no trace of an exclusion or even a calculability of a vaccination risk far and wide. It is often said that there is no evidence of a causal link between the reported complications and the vaccinations. But this reference is irrelevant, if only because the first question that is relevant is whether the authorities and manufacturers are in a position to rule out this link—and they simply cannot.

It should also be borne in mind that a causal link between vaccinations and vaccination damage is much less frequently identified or reported than would be appropriate. The reasons for this include the following:

The vaccine is not compared with an ineffective placebo, see point (4) above.

Those who carry out the research or studies usually assume that the vaccines cannot cause adverse effects at all.

The studies are not designed to identify vaccination complications.

Only the administration of one vaccine is investigated, although in reality several vaccines are usually given at once.

And if very poorly tested active ingredients are tested on the most vulnerable population groups—on the youngest, young children and older children—this can hardly be considered ethical. Unfortunately, this is often the approach taken in medical practice when it comes to vaccinations.

8. Antibody Titer—Replacement Measurement
With High Belief Factor

Since the company refuses to conduct placebo-controlled double-blind studies, the so-called antibody titer (number of antibodies in the blood), i.e. a pure laboratory value, is gathered in the approval studies. However, as the magazine impf-report found, even the federal authorities have been unable to provide evidence that there is a health benefit for people who have a high antibody titer.¹²⁸⁰ And even various orthodox sources confirm that the amount of so-called antibodies in the blood does not allow a reliable statement about a person’s immunity.¹²⁸¹ Here are a few voices:

Ulrich Heininger, member of Germany’s Permanent Vaccination Commission (Ständige Impfkommission, STIKO), writes in his book “Handbuch Kinderimpfung” (Child Vaccination Manual): “It is neither necessary nor useful to determine the effectiveness of a vaccination by taking blood samples and determining antibodies after the vaccination has been carried out. On the one hand, even an antibody determination does not provide a reliable statement about the presence or absence of vaccination protection, and on the other hand it is simply too expensive”

arznei-telegramm (April 2001 edition): “Even increases in titer caused by vaccines are unreliable substitute criteria for effectiveness. What benefit or harm the vaccinated person can expect cannot be deduced from such findings. The regulatory authorities are required to review their requirements.”

“Impfkompendium” (Vaccination Compendium), published by Heinz Spiess, 5th edition 1999: “A conclusion from the level of the measured titer on the immune status regarding protection against reocurrence of the disease is currently not possible.”

Epidemiological Bulletin (EpiBull) No. 30 (2012), p. 299: “Antibody levels are not indicative of a possible cellular immunity.”

Answer of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institute to a question (May 13, 2006) from Hans Tolzin, editor of the journal impf-report: “There is no general statement of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institute that a sufficiently high regarded specific antibody titer is a guarantee for non-disease.”

9. The Worthless Measles Infection Experiment
from 1911

The world’s most important publication by vaccination experts is with no doubt “Vaccines,” a compendium of far more than 1000 pages. If one searches there for the medical historical sources for the currently valid doctrine on measles, one is referred to a contagion experiment from 1911. This was carried out by researchers John F. Anderson and Joseph Goldberger in Washington and, according to “Vaccines,” represented the pinnacle of measles research until 1954.

And so it happened that after various attempts to transmit measles in small animals had failed, Anderson and Goldberger were the first to carry out experiments with rhesus monkeys. They may have been encouraged by the famous (but in reality lousy) contagion attempts by Landsteiner and Popper, which they had made in Vienna in 1908 in the context of polio (see Chapter 2, section “Polio: Pesticides Such as DDT and Heavy Metals under Suspicion”).

The aim of the measles contagion experiments was to cause fever in the monkeys and consequently a rash typical of measles. Hans Tolzin, editor of the impf-report, has analyzed the experiments in detail.¹²⁸² His conclusion: “According to the understanding at the time, the experiment may have been scientifically up to date, but according to today’s understanding, it is at best useful as a warning medical-historical example of how not to do it.”

A total of nine rhesus monkeys were injected with defibrinated blood (i.e. blood that is free of the glycoprotein fibrinogen) from four human measles patients. Of these nine pitiful animals, four showed measles symptoms (fever and skin rash). And assuming that nothing was faked in the experiments (which is not in the realm of the impossible, considering that, as described at the beginning of chapter 2, even Koch and Pasteur gained their fame through scientific fraud), this result shows only one thing: that monkeys can produce measles-like symptoms by injecting them with blood from diseased humans.

However, this in no way realistically illustrates the infection route as it should occur in real life—namely through sneezing or physical contact.

The natural route of contagion could easily have been reproduced, for example by spraying the suspected pathogen into the throat and face via an aerosol. But such experiments have not been documented. And since even this drastic physical intervention—the injection of patient’s blood—was able to produce disease symptoms in just three of the nine monkeys, it is not only impossible to postulate a regularity from this and not to build a hypothesis on it. It also suggests that none of the nine monkeys would have developed disease symptoms in the end if they had been sprayed with an aerosol.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that no control experiments were made. This means that there was no comparison group with monkeys injected with blood from healthy people. This would have made it possible to rule out that the manner of the experiment alone caused the observed symptoms. Moreover, not even the first Koch’s postulate was fulfilled, i.e. no recording of the alleged virus was made. This is not surprising, since in 1911 the existence of viruses was even more pure conjecture, since the resolution of the light microscopes of that time was not sufficient to make viruses visible (see chapter 1, section “Viruses: Lethal Mini-Monsters?”).

10. As a Rule, the Opposite Is True of
What the Media Reports About Viruses

In the previous chapters we have already explained in detail how irresponsibly the media misses the point when it comes to the subject of viruses. And the topic of measles is sadly no exception. As an example, let us briefly trace the hysteria that was triggered in early 2015 by sensationalist media coverage after Berlin’s then Senator for Health, Mario Czaja, announced in a press release¹²⁸³ that a boy in Berlin had died of measles and had not been vaccinated against measles.

The whole thing culminated, among other things, in the fact that the medical doctor and TV presenter Eckart von Hirschhausen missed out on any fairness on German television in the ARD talk show hart aber fair when he lashed out at a critical attitude to the measles vaccination with“bullshit to the power of 10.” And the physician Werner Bartens, in his function as head of the science department at the German daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, also joined the choir of a mandatory measles vaccination led by Justice Minister Heiko Maas.¹²⁸⁴ In his article entitled “Dangerous Ignorance,” he wrote to his readers’ consciences that such a compulsory vaccination resulted from “responsibility—for oneself, but also for others.”¹²⁸⁵

Newswoman: “Mister Spahn, what do the vaccination critics say? [German Minister of Health Jens] Spahn: “Nothing meaningful...!” © Ingmar Decker, www.achecht.de

But also in this case, the media did not show the first signs of having done their job and did not ask the necessary critical questions. For the whole thing began with a lie or at least a false report. In the press release by Berlin Senator Czaja, which formed the starting point for the panic triggered by the media, it was first stated that the boy had “no chronic pre-existing conditions.” The mass media carried this message to their audience of millions. But when asked, the Berlin authorities had to admit that the boy did indeed have a “previous illness.” But the authorities did not want to tell them what kind of pre-existing condition it was.

Equally cautiously the question was answered of whether there was solid scientific evidence that, as was claimed, “The measles disease alone was the cause of the child’s death” and not the boy’s previous illness and, possibly, any errors in treatment—and that the boy’s measles would not have led to his death without his previous illness and/or medical treatment.

The question of whether the boy had actually not been vaccinated against measles also suggests itself because it was reported from the environment of the kindergarten that the deceased boy had visited that he had indeed been vaccinated against measles. The fact that the mass media have not turned their gaze in this direction is all the more serious when one considers what the physician Steffen Rabe commented: “Only a complete clarification of this death can restore the credibility of the Berlin health authorities, which was badly damaged by the (dis) information campaigns, and can protect the actually renowned Charité [Clinic] from the suspicion of being misused by political-media-pharmaceutical campaigns.”¹²⁸⁶

The case is a parade example of how remote from facts media and politics promote vaccination against measles and other diseases.

Addendum: The Measles Virus Process

For the sake of completeness, the “measles virus process” should also be briefly mentioned here, as it caused a lot of attention in Germany and also had a remarkable outcome. The starting point was that microbiologist Stefan Lanka had offered a reward of €100,000 in 2011 to anyone who,by means of a scientific publication, could prove the existence of and the size of the measles virus.

In response, the physician David Bardens submitted six publications. However, Stefan Lanka felt that the conditions of his tender were not fulfilled, and therefore Bardens sued Lanka. In March 2015, the Ravensburg Land Court ruled that Lanka had to pay the €100,000, including interest. However, Lanka appealed against this ruling and won the case before the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court in February 2016. Although Bardens appealed against this ruling to the BGH, the appeal was dismissed in December 2016.

Lanka then proudly announced: “Five experts have participated in the process and presented the results of scientific studies. All five experts, including Prof. Dr. Dr. Andreas Podbielski, who was appointed by the court of first instance, agreed that none of the six publications submitted to the trial contained scientific evidence of the existence of the alleged measles virus.” This is all the more remarkable when one considers that “the six publications presented in the trial are the authoritative publications on the ‘measles virus’” and that “apart from these six publications, there are demonstrably no other publications in which scientific methods have been used to attempt to prove the existence of the measles virus.”¹²⁸⁷

Strictly speaking, the judgement does not mean that there is no scientific evidence for the existence of the measles virus. The court “only” ruled that the six scientific publications submitted by Bardens did not meet the conditions of Lanka’s offer of a reward—because they required the submission of “one” single scientific publication with complete proof. The judgement thus allows the conclusion that “the one” publication with complete proof of the existence of a specific disease-causing measles virus does not exist.

But one should actually expect that there is one single(!) conclusive study on a virus, because otherwise—whether with HIV or with the SARS-CoV-2—individual studies are usually mentioned with which the virus is supposed to have been detected. And this is not surprising at all, because in order to show the processes that are or would be necessary to detect a virus, no more than one study is needed. In addition, the question arises: Why not simply carry out an individual study and prove the measles virus in this study, in order to dispel any last doubts? There would undoubtedly be more than enough funds and time for this...

Chapter 12

Total Corona Mania: About Worthless PCR Tests
and Lethal Medication

„For urgent questions, [unfortunately] often the very same people are taken who have been mistaken in the past, and of whom some are known to be guided by interests. The Robert Koch Institute already had attracted negative attention in the context of the swine flu back then [2009]...The swine flu was completely overestimated… One should have reviewed why the swine flu had been staged by the media like this at that time... One of the lessons you could have learned from it is not to listen to a few prompters... I would like to remove the camera or the microphone from such scientists.“¹²⁸⁸

GERD BOSBACH PROFESSOR OF STATISTICS AND EMPIRICAL ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

„Not only a virus, but many other factors could have played a critical role for people getting sick. The measures taken by the politicians concerning corona are grotesque and self-destructive.“¹²⁸⁹

SUCHARIT BHAKDI, LONGTIME HEAD OF THE INSTITUTE FOR MEDICAL MICROBIOLOGY AND HYGIENE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MAINZ

„Fear is a market. To instill fear in people, also has advantages. Not only in terms of drug use. Anxiety-driven people are easier to rule.“¹²⁹⁰

GERD GIGERENZER DIRECTOR EMERITUS AT THE MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

Virology, Politics and the Media vs. Common Sense

In 1882, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in aphorism 224 of his book “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft” (“The Joyous Science”): “I fear that animals regard humans as beings of their own kind, who have lost433 their common “animal” sense in a highly dangerous way.”¹²⁹¹ How right he was with this apprehensionshould also become apparent almost 140 years later, in 2020, when the total corona delusion broke out worldwide.

In fact, the whole world was de facto more or less put into quarantine, although there was (and still is) no scientific proof whatsoever for the theory that in December 2019 a new and highly dangerous subtype of a corona virus (SARS-CoV-2) started to cause lung diseases (COVID-19) in humans in the Chinese city of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, and then spread practically all over the world.

A very decisive point in this context is that the PCR tests used, which were claimed to be rock-solid in their ability to detect SARS-CoV-2 infections, were (and still are) without validity and thus worthless in reality. That something is phony about the official theory is indicated by the fact alone that central figures in the “play”, including the Robert Koch Institute and the Charité virologist and advisor to the German government Christian Drosten, were unable to answer the most fundamental questions, even after repeated requests (four of the questions asked and the complete list of those contacted are listed in the box below).

This is incomprehensible. After all, the official theory on SARS-CoV-2 can only be correct if the aspects we are addressing with our questions have been properly clarified. And if the aspects had actually been clarified, answering the questions should have come easily from all the authorities contacted. The science historian Horace F. Judson writes about this “model of how not to respond” in his book “The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science”:

„Central to the problem of misconduct is the response of institutions when charges erupt. Again and again the actions of senior scientists and administrators have been the very model of how not to respond. They have tried to smother the fire. Such flawed responses are altogether typical of misconduct cases.“¹²⁹²

We have already quoted Judson in Chapter 3 on HIV/AIDS. And with HIV/ AIDS, we have indeed come full circle, for the irrational generation of the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 mega-panic was ultimately only possible because HIV/AIDS entered the world stage or was raised up. This is a point of importance that cannot not be overestimated.

It is important to bear in mind what we state at the end of Chapter 2 in the section “The Virus Disaster of the 1970s—and HIV as Salvation in the 1980s”: that at the end of the 1970s—not least as a result of the swine flu disaster at that time—the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the most powerful institutions in the field of health policy and biomedical science, came under massive political pressure. And in order to rehabilitate themselves, a new “war” would of course be best. Ideally against a microbe, because the topic “infectious diseases” remained— despite permament setbacks—the most effective way to catch public attention and open government pockets.

In fact, Red Cross officer Paul Cumming told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1994 that “the CDC increasingly needed a major epidemic” at the beginning of the 1980s “to justify its existence.”¹²⁹³ And the HIV/AIDS theory was a salvation for American epidemic authorities.

Since the establishment of the HIV=AIDS dogma, the virus hunters have had an almost godlike status. And gods are not to be questioned. A kind of “big bang” for this HIV=AIDS dogma was that Hollywood actor Rock Hudson was presented to the world as the first megastar with AIDS in the mid-1980s. In order to do justice to the immeasurable significance of this event—ultimately also for SARS-CoV-2—we sketch this deceptive AIDS legacy of Rock Hudson in the epilog at the end of this book.¹²⁹⁴

And while with the HIV=AIDS dogma the already unbelievable idea was put into the world that sex could mean certain death, in 2020 the most perverse message was transported with the corona panic, namely that even a contact-free encounter can lead to infection and death.

„When an experiment is challenged no matter who it is challenged by, it’s your responsibility to check. That is an ironclad of science... One of the great strenghts of American science is that even the most senior professor if challenged by the lowliest technician or graduate student, is required to treat them seriously and to consider their criticism.“

Howard Temin, Biologist and Nobel laureate in medicine

——

Neither the Robert Koch-Institute, nor the virologist Christian Drosten (Charité Berlin/Advisor to Germany’s Federal Government), nor the physician Alexander S. Kekulé (University of Halle), nor Hartmut Hengel and Ralf Bartenschlager (Society for Virology), nor Thomas Löscher (member of the Federal Association of German Internists), nor Ulrich Dirnagl (neurologist/Charité Berlin), nor the virologist Georg Bornkamm were able to answer the following questions among others—even after repeated requests:

The Süddeutsche Zeitung article “Too good to be true” (March 24, 2020) states: “Ulrich Dirnagl says that the thesis that without the tests no one would possibly be interested in this virus has been disproved with regard to [the horrible TV pictures from] Italy.” But even if we assume that the mortality in Italy has risen significantly, how can we rule out the possibility that people have died prematurely as a result of non-microbial factors such as the administration of drugs? A Lancet study, for example, shows that out of 41 patients who tested “positive” when they came to hospital in Wuhan, China, at the beginning of the crisis, all received antibiotics and 38 (i.e. almost all) of them received the highly toxic antiviral drug oseltamivir. Six of the patients (15 percent) subsequently died.

If there are “no unmistakable specific symptoms” for the COVID-19 disease and a “differentiation of the various pathogens is clinically not possible,” as the physician Thomas Löscher concedes—and if, in addition, non-microbial factors (industrial toxins, drugs, etc.) come into question as the cause of the most severe respiratory disease such as pneumonia, how can we be sure that only what is called SARS-CoV-2 can be considered as the cause of the symptoms of COVID-19?

The second Koch’s postulate and textbooks state and leading virologists such as Luc Montagnier as well that complete cleaning of particles (“purification”) is an indispensable pre-requisite for the detection of a virus (see quotes in the section “Lousy, More Lousy, Corona PCR Test” later in this chapter). However, the authors two significant papers, which are mentioned in connection with the detection of SARS-CoV-2, concede on request that the electron microscope images shown in their work do not depict completely purified particles. But how can one then conclude with certainty that the RNA gene sequences “pulled” from the tissue samples prepared in these studies and to which the PCR tests are then “calibrated” belong to a very specific virus—in this case SARS-CoV-2? Especially since studies also show that the very substances (including antibiotics) used in the test tube experiments (in vitro) can “stress” the cell culture in such a way that new gene sequences can be formed that were previously undetectable?

If the PCR test is not sufficient to detect an HIV infection, why should it be good enough to detect a SARS-CoV-2 infection?

And so it happened again that although the theory that a new coronavirus threatens practically the whole of humanity is without foundation, the important articles published in the major medical journals and which have fueled a panic of unimagined proportions, were based on this unfounded theory. Therefore, these papers can only be described as unscientific, which is also shown by the fact that the published data were interpreted in the sense of the completely unproven virus hypothesis, even if they were confusing or contradictory.

And despite this fact, political policymakerdid not shy away from draconian restrictions on people’s liberty rights by quarantining entire cities or even imposing nationwide curfews, as happened not only in Wuhan. French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, enacted this for his country on 17 March 2020.

According to this, citizens were from then on generally not allowed to leave their houses—unless they had compelling reasons, for example because they had to go to work or to the doctor or to buy food. Also short sport activities close to the apartment were allowed, but only if one was alone, as well as walking dogs. And hundreds of thousands of policemen and gendarmes were supposed to control the curfew (see also the report in the box “Mopo reporter in the restricted zone: How the holidays in Italy turned into a nightmare”).

According to official figures, only 150 people had died of Corona in France by then. This fact alone shows that common sense of a normal citizen is quite sufficient to realize that the actions of the policymakers were completely unfounded. This is even true ifit is assumed theoretically that the people concerned were in fact killed by a new virus called SARS-CoV-2, as the virologists were never tired of pointing out.

There is no question that it is always a sad event when a person dies. But this happens countless times every day, because it is still the case—high-tech medicine or not—that human life is finite. So it is crucial that we put the number 150 into a realistic relation. For example, the about 150 deaths ascribed to SARS-CoV-2 are happened over a period of about 30 days. That would be five corona deaths a day. In France, however, a total of almost 620,000 people die every year—around 1,700 every single day. Against this background, five SARS-CoV-2 deaths per day seem nominal. And even if you take the 860 deaths that were ascribed to the alleged “horror virus” in the statistics up to the 23rd of March 2020, this results in a daily average of 23 corona deaths. And even this number is still “puny”, both in absolute terms and in comparison to the 1,700 total deaths per day in France.

It is also revealing when parallels are drawn to other areas. According to analyses, fine dust is responsible for the premature death of around 50,000 people in the Grande Nation every year—around 130 people a day.¹²⁹⁵ In Germany, the number of people who die prematurely due to fine dust is as high as 120,000 (the equivalent of about 330 people a day), according to a 2019 study by the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.¹²⁹⁶ The French Senate already classified the fine dust problem as extremely precarious in 2015, partly because it generates costs of just over €100 billion in the form of increased health costs, a reduced economic productivity or even lower agricultural yields. It would also leave Paris in a very bad position vis-à-vis the EU.

One of the main causes of life-shortening air pollution is the transport sector in France, which is responsible for 59 percent of nitrogen oxide emissions and almost 20 percent of the fine dust emissions. And indeed, the politicians also called for increased efforts to combat air pollution in 2015.¹²⁹⁷ But not much has happened since—and certainly no attempt has been made to bring the polluters to a halt anywhere near as much as was done with whole societies concerning Corona.

Of course, the means of transport—cars, trains and planes—as well as other sources of fine dust such as power stations, waste incineration plants or heating systems in residential buildings are central elements for coexistence in highly industrialized societies. Correspondingly it is, of course, difficult to take measures that actually reduce fine dust significantly and at the same time not to destroy the economy and social fabric of society.

On 23 March 2020, the reporter Janina Heinemann from the Hamburg newspaper Morgenpost (Mopo) reported in a self-experience report how she was caught red-handed during her working holiday in Sicily on the 10th of March when the “zona rossa,” the “red restricted zone,” was extended to the whole of Italy. “What was initially just annoying turned out to be a nightmare,” writes Heinemann. She booked an earlier return flight—but the next one was only available shortly a week after the new decree. “A long week ... during which there were always new, stricter rules implemented”, Heinemann groans. “For example, that you needed an ‘Autocertificazione,’ a self-declaration, to leave the house. Name, address, identity card and telephone number must be named on it. And the most important thing: the reason why you are on the road. Shopping and doctor’s visits are okay, going for a walk is not.”

“Psychological ordeal”

When she managed to reach the airport with difficulty, it had been particularly “spooky.” “Empty aisles, dark restaurants and worst of all, just a handful of people. All cleaning staff. None of the check-in counters were manned. I felt panic rising up, but then calmed down because my flight was still displayed normally on the destination board. But then it was canceled ... [Finally] I stood alone at the airport and cried.” And also... the two days in the hotel “were a psychological ordeal,” especially because of the “imprisonment.” A hotel room, a balcony, no other people.”

Like “a disaster film”

Getting a flight seemed almost impossible, even after Heinemann asked the German embassy in Italy for help. “The flights were... all fully booked. In the meantime I’ve become resigned ... even if I’m in a kind of paradise here: A Paradise that you cannot leave is a prison. No matter how beautiful it is.”

On the 3rd of May, Heinemann then reported in the Mopo how, after a real odyssey, she got “through all of Italy and Switzerland to northern Germany”, where she lives—and that “this longest journey”of her life “was like a disaster film.” Source: screenshot from mopo.de

But this view of the total should have been even more important for the politicians in the matter of corona. Instead, they slammed on the brakes—with results of collateral damage that even led to the destruction of livelihoods and suicides, such as that of 19-year-old Emily Owen on the 18th of March or of Finance Minister of Hesse Thomas Schäfer on the 28th of March, which politicians would neverever have accepted in the slightest when it came to air pollution/fine dust.

The fact that such a course of action is not open to any rational logic is also evident when one looks at other areas. For example, in 2016 hunger has even increased again in the world.¹²⁹⁸ Nine million people die of hunger and its consequences—and thus more than officially of AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Hunger kills a child every ten seconds on this planet—and according to Jean Ziegler, the world-famous critic of capitalism and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, even every five seconds.¹²⁹⁹

Poor nutrition is responsible for almost half of all deaths among children under five years of age. And about three million children die every year because their bodies do not have enough basic nutrients to function and grow.¹³⁰⁰ Nine million starvation deaths—that means about 25,000 death tragedies per day.¹³⁰¹ In comparison, according to official data as of the 23rd of March 2020, 240 people worldwide died from SARS-CoV-2 in one day (data without scientific basis). That is one hundredth of what can be ascribed to hunger.

Here it is also incomprehensible that not even the slightest effort is being made to combat hunger, which is associated with unimaginable suffering and above all affects those most in need of protection, namely children and very young children, as much as with corona. This is all the more scandalous if we follow what Jean Ziegler says: “Every child who dies of hunger is murdered.” And the perpetrators would be “all of us, if we remain silent, and definitely the bandits in the banks and hedge funds who speculate in agricultural commodities on the commodity exchanges and drive up prices.” As a result, the well over 1 billion people in the slums, who would have to live on less than $1.50 a day, could no longer buy enough food. These speculators are “mass murderers.”¹³⁰²

Children, with their strong drive for play and freedom, were particularly severely hit by the draconian political measures. Not only had many parents, out of panic of contagion, forbidden their children to meet with their friends. Schools and kindergartens were also closed down and even the playgrounds were forbidden to be entered—and all this in a world where open spaces and wild zones, where a child may just be a child and can go on voyages of discovery, are hardly present anymore anyway. Even a Lancet study came to the conclusion that „there are no data on the relative contribution of school closures to transmission control“, whereby „Data from the SARS outbreak on the mainland of China, Hong Kong, and Singapore [in 2002] suggest that school closures did not contribute to the control of the epidemic.“¹³⁰³

This also means—and this makes the situation even more scandalous— that it would basically be easy to eliminate hunger, for example, by distributing the food in the world that is available in sufficient quantities fairly and at the same time putting an end to food speculation, which benefits no one but the speculators themselves. Or simply “ladle” from the exorbitant pot of global military expenditure, which in 2019 was filled to the brim with a little more than US$ 1.8 trillion, more than ever before.¹³⁰⁴

And the scoop wouldn’t even have to be that big. “With a fraction of the global military expenditure, hunger in the world could be eliminated and poverty fought,” stated Sevim Dagdelen, deputy chairman and disarmament policy spokeswoman of the parliamentary group of the German Left Party in April 2019.¹³⁰⁵ Only 0.5 percent of the 1.8 trillion US dollars, i.e. a “paltry” 9 billion US dollars,¹³⁰⁶ would be enough. Meanwhile, aid organisations warned in early April 2020 that “far more people” would die from the consequences of the corona lockdowns than from Covid-19 himself. The global recession could plunge 35 to 65 million people into absolute poverty and many of them will be threatened with starvation.

This is anything but a new topic after all. Former German Chancellor and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Willy Brandt wrote in his book “Organized Madness: arms race and world hunger,“ first published in 1985:

“We don’t have to put up with the cold-blooded political and economic bureaucrats talking past simple truths or suffocating them in a tangle of trivialities ... [The question arises] why is it not possible and why should the states of the world not be able to redirect a few percent of the military expenditure. And in such a way that the branched off, diverted funds are used for meaningful, peacekeeping purposes and for mass hunger and blatant misery to disappear.”¹³⁰⁷

So how has it come to pass that such a serious problem, which means so much misery and suffering, has not been actively tackled by policymakers for decades—where is the “alarming” of the media to draw the attention to it? It brings to mind what Amartya Sen, Harvard economist and Nobel Prize winner, said: “Famines do not happen in countries with a free press. For famine results from a problem of food distribution, not from an absolute lack of food. A free press would create such a furore that the government would act accordingly.“¹³⁰⁸

If these words are taken seriously, it follows that not only politics but also the media have failed blatantly. Of course, this is not only true with regard to world hunger, but especially with regard to the reporting on corona/COVID-19, this even though the action of politics in the matter of Corona even threatened to “expand the world food crisis”, as the group of experts of the UN World Food Council Committee on World Food Security (CFS) reported on the 1st of April. Nevertheless, the media again did not act as a critical control organ of the powerful, but only as a propaganda booster for politicians and virologists.

One Example for this is the lead story of the German newspaper Bild from the 24th of March 2020 “Inner-German border controls: Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania locks out Brandenburgians (see screenshot). The media would only have had to rummage a little in their memory in order to realize that one must accompany the statements of the top virologists of the world very critically. “On the whole, however, the media memory simply does not seem to be good enough,” commiserates the German internist Wolfgang Wodarg, who publicly argued that the solution to the corona problem was to isolate the alarmists¹³⁰⁹ and thus came under fire from the established media. “For example, it had been forgotten again that the ‘swine flu pandemic’, which the WHO predicted in 2009 in conjunction with the mass media, was in fact one of the mildest flu waves in history. And in the end, it mainly had beenthe side effects of the vaccines that caused great suffering in the form of narcolepsy and even led to lawsuits for damages” (see end of chapter 9).

Of course, politicians based their decision to implement draconian measures on horror scenarios from “experts”. According to the motto: It will soon get very, very bad, so we have to take precautions now and quarantine everything as best we can. And the chief prompter of these horror scenarios in Germany has been Christian Drosten. The director of the Institute for Virology at the Charité and advisor to the German government claimed to the Osnabrücker Zeitung on the 6th of March that in Germany “278,000 corona deaths can be expected.”¹³¹⁰ For England, the USA and other countries, the British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson took on the role of the “whip” (see screenshot with the frontpage of The Sun). Statements of this kind were immediately spread by the big media and contributed decisively to the public being “aligned.”

In mid-March 2020, British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson had predicted around 510,000 corona deaths for Great Britain and around 2.2 million for the United States in the event that the countries would not implement the strictest control measures. This prompted these two and other countries to lockdown. But Ferguson’s calculations not only lacked any medical-scientific basis, the whole thing also had the taste of bought politics. For example, “professor Lockdown” was called in by the British government for emergency coronavirus research immediately after his prophecies of doom and received money for it. In addition, the work of 1968 born Ferguson at the Imperial College in London was financed by the Gates Foundation; and the Imperial College received almost $ 80 million from the multi-billionaire’s foundation in 2020, which is closely linked to Big Pharma. Incidentally, Ferguson did not care about his own instructions as he allowed his beloved to visit him at home while he was teaching the public about the need for strict social distancing, as The Sun (and other media) reported on the 5th of May 2020.

But the data situation at that time was so lousy that such prophecies of doom were not justified in the slightest. After all, “We don’t even know if the risk of dying if you get infected with coronavirus is higher than with influenza or many of other virus infections, and most of those who die are old and suffer from comorbidity, just like with influenza,” wrote Peter C. Gøtzsche, professor of medicine and co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, on the 21st of March 2020 in his personal blog Deadly Medicine & Organized Crime. “The panic looks like an unfortunate overreaction.”¹³¹¹

And John P. A. Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Stanford University, also advised caution: “The data collected on SARS-CoV-2 so far are utterly unreliable,” he stated. “The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.”1312 1313

Incidentally, caution would have been advisable, if only because the supervirologists had repeatedly been wrong with their forecasts in the past. For example, at the end of 2004, Klaus Stöhr, then coordinator of the influenza programme at the World Health Organisation (WHO), said in connection with the so-called Avian Flu that even in the most optimistic scenario, between two and seven million people would die and billions would fall ill worldwide. But in the end, this did not even begin to happen (see chapter 7 about the co-called “Avian Flu”).

The fact is, however, that Mr. Stöhr moved to the pharmaceutical company Novartis shortly afterwards to head the vaccine department. And the magazine Der Spiegel, for example, approved Stöhr’s statements at that time with the headline “Millions of deaths: WHO considers global epidemic unavoidable.¹³¹⁴ Such a line would be disqualified as “fake news” today.

“Abstinence from media cannot do any harm in the current corona excitement for a while,” said Gerd Gigerenzer, psychologist and Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research, in an interview published of the Austrian magazine Profil on the 8th of March.²⁷ Statistics professor Gerd Bosbach is even clearer: “The Robert Koch Institute had already attracted negative attention at the time [2009] with the swine flu... The swine flu was completely overestimated... We should have reviewed why the swine flu was staged in such a way in the media at the time... One of the lessons to be learned from this would have been not to listen to a fewprompter... I would gladly take the camera or microphone away from such scientists.¹³¹⁵

And Peter C. Gøtzsche resignedly noted: “The world has gone completely crazy and the media profits from this hysteria. It’s like the Middle Ages.” But he adds a joke concerning politics and media: “’Why do you blow the horn?’ ‘To keep the tigers away.’ ‘But there are no tigers here.’ ‘There you see!’”¹³¹⁶

Unexplained Paths of Virus Transmission

The basic assumption in the Corona/COVID-19 panic is that contact between humans transmits the virus and those who are tested would get a “positive” PCR test result—potentially a death sentence. And in order to get this assumption deep into people’s minds, it was brought mantra-like to the population via the mass media—with the goal of presenting the draconian “lockdown” measures as the only sensible way to go.

To the regret of the political policymakers, however, on the 24th of March 2020, as reported by focus.de, there was still disagreement among the population as to whether these measures were actually effective.¹³¹⁷ And as chance would have it, a paper from Hong Kong then appeared withthe central message to convince more people that the official virus theory could simply be correct. The tenor of the study was that “many infected people infect others before they feel sick themselves,” as was stated in the aforementioned focus.de article.

This sounds particularly frightening: even without being really ill, you are still contagious... And focus.de, how could it be otherwise, drew the following conclusion: “Germany is resisting the spread of the Corona virus and is reducing social life to a minimum. The results of a study from Hong Kong show that these measures are exactly right to counteract the pandemic.”

And no matter what happened, the media turned everything in exactly this one direction: that the virus hypothesis is irrefutable and there is no alternative to the draconian restrictions on freedom. However, between 1985 and 2008, long before the Corona virus “appeared,” between 3 and 17 million people have died in China every year as a result of pneumonia.¹³¹⁸ And it was precisely this disease that particularly affected the first 41 patients who are said to have become infected with SARS-CoV-2 at the Huanan Seafood Market in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan.

This undoubtedly means: It does not need a SARS-CoV-2 virus at all to plausibly explain what is called COVID-19. In addition, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that examined the first 425 Corona cases reveals that 72 percent of those who tested “positive” for corona on the 1st of January 2020 or later had “no exposure to neither the [Huanan Seafood] market [in Wuhan] nor a person with respiratory symptoms.“¹³¹⁹

Studies in the no less important journal Lancet, which examined the first Chinese cases, point into the same direction. One of these studies showed that only 27 of the first 41 patients had contact with the Huanan Seafood Market. This means: 14 (34 percent) had no such contact. This work also shows that the first patient to whom the Corona label was attributed developed symptoms on the 1st of December 2019. However, none of his family members developed fever or any respiratory problems. And in any case, no epidemiological link could be found between the first patient and later cases.¹³²⁰ Another study reveals that only 49 of 99 pneumonia patients who tested “positive” had ever been at the said market in Wuhan; in other words, about 50 percent never went there.¹³²¹

In another analysis, a family (two grandparents, their daughter and son-in-law as well asa 10-year-old grandson and a 7-year-old granddaughter) travelled from Shenzhen near Hong Kong to Wuhan on the 29th of December 2019 and returned on the 4th of January—all of whom were found “positive” on the 9th /10th of January. But the study contains serious inconsistencies.

The major one is that none of the family members had any contact to markets in Wuhan or with animals (which are believed to be the actual source of the SARSCoV-2 virus). In addition, no one had eaten game meat in restaurants. Meanwhile, the grandparents were in poor health. The grandmother, for example, had already been treated for a brain tumour, and both of them had suffered from high blood pressure. In Wuhan, both suffered from fever, dry cough and weakness—and later laboratory tests revealed various abnormal values. So they were really sick.

The grandson was a “naughty” boy, as he had actually refused to wear a face mask in Wuhan. That is why the parents insisted that he should be taken for a CT scan. And although the boy was completely symptom-free, i.e. not ill, he was diagnosed with pneumonia simply because the CT scan showed slight clouding of the lungs. In the case of the daughter, on the other hand, although she had been tested 18 times by PCR, more than all the others, no “positive” result was shown. The authors nevertheless classified the woman as an “infected case”, on the absurd grounds that she could be strongepidemiologically linked to the Wuhan hospital and that X-rays had shown abnormalities in the lungs.

And it was not only here that the study-distorting bias of the researchers became apparent. They had also failed to consider any other causes of disease, such as food contaminated with chemicals or similar. The purpose of this study was therefore obviously to show that the suspected Corona virus is infectious, and not to try to refute it as well—which is actually the duty of solid scientists. It is therefore clear from these and other reports that the official theory of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 cannot be proven.

If you want to learn more about this, we recommend the paper “Is the 2019 Coronavirus Really a Pandemic?” by Canadian David Crowe.¹³²²

Lousy, More Lousy, Corona PCR Test

In the New York Times in 2007, for example, science journalist Gina Kolata described how problematic it is to declare virus pandemics on the basis of PCR tests, which also played a decisive role in the groundbreaking Corona panic at the beginning of 2020. The title of her article was “Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t.“¹³²³ The bottom line of the article was that epidemiologists and specialists in infectious diseases had declared an epidemic without any foundation by placing far too much trust in molecular biological diagnostic methods such as the PCR test. Such “admonitions” for scepticism were completely ignored in the context of corona.

And so the virologist Hendrik Streeck was allowed to claim in all seriousness in an interview with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ): “Almost all infected persons whom we interviewed, and this applies to a good two thirds, described a loss of smell and taste lasting several days.“¹³²⁴ But even with the best will in the world, you cannot equate “two thirds” of a patient group with “almost all,“ even if this formulation fits you better. And above all: “loss of smell and taste” cannot really be called “new” symptoms.

Nevertheless, the FAZ was not too sorry to make the statement “We have discovered new symptoms” the headline. So this is also a fake news based on statements of a virologist who was either in need of validation or lacking basic medical knowledge, or both. The calculation behind this was obvious: They wanted to present a big news story, which was to be the first to tell the world that COVID-19 was indeed a new disease. But this was and is medically untenable.

This is also confirmed by Thomas Löscher,¹³²⁵ an infection physician and expert presented by focus.de in the “Corona crisis,“¹³²⁶ on request. This is because “for most respiratory diseases there are no unmistakable specific symptoms,” says Löscher. “Therefore a differentiation of the different pathogens is purely clinically impossible.” According to Löscher, the pathogen SARS-CoV-2 alone is novel.¹³²⁷

So the focus was on saying that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was something completely new. But first of all it must be said that even if one assumes that SARS-CoV-2 is a potentially disease-causing virus, solid studies from Scotland for the years 2005 to 2013 show that even a slight “flu-like” infection has a 7 to 15 percent risk of corona viruses being detected.¹³²⁸ Therefore, according to the physician Wolfgang Wodarg, corona is ultimately only a test epidemic.

“The horror reports from Wuhan were something that virologists all over the world are waiting for,” said Wodarg. “This would have meant looking only at test results and not at clinical findings.¹³²⁹ “And the more tests came on the market, the more cases were found.¹³³⁰ Many experts agree on this. And the tests came onto the market almost en masse.

Germany’s chief virologist Christian Drosten, for example, who developed the world’s first PCR test and presented it on 13 January 2020,¹³³¹ told Deutschlandfunk radio on 23 January that his team had “immediately set about doing what we are particularly good at: Developing diagnostic test procedures in a very short time. And then above all, make them available worldwide.” And as Deutschlandfunk further reports, “there would have been great interest among the Southeast Asian nations in Christian Drosten’s test. And there are also many enquiries from Europe ... padded envelopes containing the reagents are piled up in the corridor—financed by EU subsidies. Wherever a traveller from Wuhan arrives with breathing difficulties and high fever, the new test can be used.”¹³³²

About two months later, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche received emergency approval in the USA for a highly automated test for SARSCoV-2, which could test up to 4,000 samples within 24 hours, as reported.¹³³³ And as reported by the Multipolar magazine on 28 March 2020 in the article “Coronavirus: Misleading case numbers now proven,” official data then also showed that there was simply a massive increase in testing, while the number of infected persons themselves—or rather the number of “positive” test results—did not actually grow at all, let alone exponentially.

In order to understand this, the following must be made clear: According to the RKI situation report, the number of “positively” tested persons (who officially like to be referred to as “infected”) was 7,582 in the second week of March 2020, and 23,820 in the third week of March. This quickly gives the uninitiated observer the creepy impression that there has been an increase in the number of “infected” persons in Germany of around 300 percent within one week. But this is absolutely wrong, because in the third week of March, tests were also carried out around three times as often as in the second week of March. The bottom line is that the increase in “positive” results was ultimately negligible.

“So if we had not started testing wildly in Wuhan, China, but in Beijing, we would have found the corresponding corona case numbers there,” says Wolfgang Wodarg. In this context, one would simply have to realize that the people in the Middle Kingdom would have relatively homogeneous lifestyles. So why then would a new virus have spread from animals to humans in Wuhan? “And what a coincidence,” says Wodarg, “that the ‘epidemic’ has just started in Wuhan—a metropolis of millions that is a kind of center of virology in China. This is where the country’s large laboratory for research into pathogens is located with the highest level of security, and it is also where the people who work most with viruses are based.“¹³³⁴

The virologist Georg Bornkamm also agreed with Wodarg on one point, as was reported in the the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung: “Coronaviruses have always been around, and in part they are responsible for the respiratory tract infections including pneumonia during every flu season. That much is true about Wodarg’s thesis. But the new coronavirus is by no means similar to the previous viruses.” And even if all corona viruses belong to one virus family, the former professor from Helmholtz Zentrum München said, they could differ from each other like a shark from a stickleback, both of which are fish. According to Bornkamm, the new SAR-SCoV-2 is genetically only a distant relative of the other corona viruses, which is why it cannot be confused with the older viruses when tested. “The thesis that the pandemic exists only because testing is carried out is absolutely untenable,” said Bornkamm.¹³³⁵

Comments of world-famous experts on the topic “Complete particle purification as an essential prerequisite for the detection of a virus“:

Luc Montagnier: „Analysis of the proteins of the virus demands mass production and purification. It is necessary to do that … to prove that you have a real virus.“

Robert Gallo: „You have to purify … Conclusive serological testing, in our view, required finer, more specific assays based on using purified virus particles of [sic: or] proteins obtained from the virus instead of whole cells infected with virus.“

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi: „You have to purify the virus from all this mess … Because we wanted these diagnostic kits [the antibody tests] to be as specific as possible. If you use a preparation of virus which is not purified of course you will detect antibody to everything not only against the virus but also to all the proteins that are produced in the supernatant.“

Jean-Claude Chermann: „[To identify the HIV proteins and RNA they had to extract them] from the virus which we had concentrated and purified.“

David Gordon: „It’s a natural step from obtaining the virus in cell culture to then obtain purified virus … because purification of virus is then very useful for further studies for the nature of the virus and the nature of the immune response against the virus.“

Dominic Dwyer: „The purification, as far as one can go, is important in analysis of any virus or bacteria, for that matter well.“

Source: The Emperor’s New Virus?, www.theperthgroup.com, July 12, 2017, p. 37-38

But his conclusion is scientifically without substance. SARSCoV-2 can very well be confused with other viruses when tested. This is even stated in the description of a PCR test from CD Creative Diagnostics, for example, which clearly states that the test would not only react to SARS-CoV-2, but also to other viruses and bacteria.¹³³⁶

And virologists can of course speculate long and hard in metaphors about whether certain coronaviruses are as dangerous as “sharks” or as harmless as “sticklebacks”—even this does not change the fact, which can even be read in the Süddeutsche Zeitung article itself: that “nobody knows at the moment how dangerous SARS-CoV-2 is.” Or in the words of Bornkamm himself: “The [SARS-CoV-2] virus may not be as dangerous, that may be true.”¹³³⁷ And on March 19, a study entitled “SARS-CoV-2: Fear versus Data” was published (previously online) in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents. Result: SARS-CoV-2 does not differ from other coronaviruses in terms of its dangerousness.

That is to say, if there is no doubt that

there are no unmistakable specific symptoms for COVID-19 disease

it is not clinically possible to differentiate between pathogens,

no one has evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is an exceptional hazard; and that

non-microbial factors such as industrial poisons¹³³⁸ and various drugs such as antipsychotics, opioid analgesics, anticholinergics or even antidepressants¹³³⁹ may be a cause of severe respiratory diseases such as pneumonia and thus also of COVID-19

then it is impossible to conclude that only what is called SARS-CoV-2 can be considered as the cause of the symptoms in patients who have the “COVID-19” label attached.

Incidentally, there is a very fundamental problem in the argumentation of the virus hunters: Not only the second Koch’s postulate and textbooks1340 1341 say, but also leading virus researchers such as Luc Montagnier state (see box with quotes from well-known experts) that complete purification is an indispensable pre-requisite for the detection of a virus (see chapter 3, subchapter “Where Is the Proof of HIV?”). And the authors of two relevant papers (Zhu et al.,¹³⁴² Wan Beom Park et al.¹³⁴³), for example, which are mentioned in connection with the detection of SARS-CoV-2, conceded on request that no “purified” particles were visible on the electron microscopic images shown in their work.

Consequently, it cannot be concluded that the RNA gene sequences “pulled” from the tissue samples prepared in these studies and “calibrated” to the PCR tests belong to a very specific virus, in this case SARS-CoV-2. Especially since a glance at the electron microscopic images printed in the relevant studies, which show particles that are supposed to represent SARS-CoV-2, reveals that these particles vary extremely in size. In one paper, the bandwidth ranges from 60 nm to 140 nm. A virus that has such extreme size variation cannot actually exist.

The “Drosten test” is no better. So says the product announcement of the LightMix Modular Essays, which were produced by the Berlin-based company TIB Molbiol (and which were developed on the basis of the study by Drostens Team) and are distributed exclusively by Roche: “These assays are not intended for use as an aid in the diagnosis of coronavirus infection” and “For research use only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.”

Moreover, some product descriptions even explicitly state that PCR tests are “qualitative” tests (and not “quantitative” tests). In other words: PCR tests, which, it should be noted, do not “pick up” complete viruses, but only RNA molecules, definitely do not provide information on how much virus is present in the body. And this is crucial, because in order to be able to talk about actual diseases in the real world (and not in the test tube), the patient would have to actively replicate millions and millions of a virus in his body.

Incidentally, it has never been proven that PCR tests provide solid quantitative results. This is because the following experimental design was never implemented: Take tissue samples from a few thousand people. Then the testers, who are not allowed to know anything about the test subjects, carry out their PCR on the tissue samples. Then, let’s say, they find quite a lot in patients 29, 186, 599, 1272 and 3293. As a result, all these patients must be sick because, according to the theory, they supposedly replicate so much virus in their bodies. But are they really sick—or are they as fit as a fiddle?

Moreover, not only the ‘Drosten Test’, which is exclusively marketed by Roche, has a Cq of 45 (45 cycles). This is extremely problematic because the “MIQE guidelines” by Stephen A. Bustin et al. (Clinical Chemistry, April 1, 2009, pp. 611-622) state that Cq values of more than 40 make a PCR test de facto meaningless.

In addition, in the in vitro tests for virus detection, from which the RNA is extracted to which the PCR tests are calibrated, substances such as antibiotics are used which have been shown to “stress” the in vitro cultures. This can then lead to the formation of new gene sequences that were previously undetectable—and which are not viral.¹³⁴⁴ Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock spoke here of “shocks”¹³⁴⁵ (see chapter 1, subchapter “Viruses: Lethal Mini-Monsters?”). Consequently, it is quite possible that the RNA that the PCR tests “pick up” is actually one of the new non(!) viral gene sequences created by test tube shocks.

In fact, the said PCR test from the company CD Creative Diagnostics explicitly states: “For research purposes only, not for use in diagnostic procedures.“¹³⁴⁶ In this context, it must also be remembered that some people who are “negative” in a so-called HIV antibody test come home with a “positive” PCR test. Therefore, the PCR test is officially not sufficient to diagnose HIV infection.

The background is that manufacturers such as Roche warn: “Their specificity is not sufficiently known, so these tests must not be used for diagnostic purposes.”¹³⁴⁷ This is confirmed by researchers from the Massachusetts School of Medicine, who stated that “Plasma viral [RNA] load tests [= PCR tests] were neither developed nor evaluated for the diagnosis of HIV infection,” that “Their performance in patients who are not infected with HIV is unknown,” and that their use leads to “misdiagnosis of HIV infection.“¹³⁴⁸ So why should the PCR test be good enough to detect SARS CoV-2 infection?

Against this background, it is not surprising that the use of PCR tests in connection with SARS-CoV-2 causes total confusion in the results.¹³⁴⁹ Even Wang Chen, President of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, stated in a TV interview in February 2020 that PCR tests are only “30 to 50 percent accurate.“¹³⁵⁰ In fact, for example, some people who had been stamped with the COVID-19 label and who had fully recovered from their disease were retested by PCR. Result: First they were tested “negative” and then they received a “positive” result again.

Another example of the total test result chaos: According to a news report, patients in China are not considered cured until they no longer show any symptoms, have clear lungs and are tested “negative” twice. And so it happened that the health authority in the Chinese province of Guangdong, the country’s most populous province with 113 million inhabitants, reported that a proud 14 percent of patients who had made a complete recovery in health were later tested “positive” again.¹³⁵¹ Many more examples of this can be enumerated.¹³⁵²

And to explain such results, it would certainly be helpful to imagine that the RNA that the PCR test is looking for is not of viral origin.

Horror pictures from Italy burn a groundless
virus dogma into people’s minds

But the idea that no virus could be at work here was almost unimaginable for the majority of the media and politicians and for most of the virologists who are in the spotlight at such mega-events. This is all the more incomprehensible when one considers that the data basis for the messages that the supervirologists passed on to politicians and journalists was simply miserable.

Renowned statisticians such as Gerd Bosbach or Frank Romeike, founder of the RiskNET competence centre, as well as Stanford epidemiologist John P. A. Ioannidis therefore strongly criticised at an early stage that far too little was known about the new virus and about case and death rates to justify the measures taken by politicians. According to Ioannidis, no one would possibly be interested in this virus if it was not specifically sought out, he said.¹³⁵³

So let’s face it: the PCR tests and the data are demonstrably lousier than lousy. Apparently only one thing helped: not tiring of spreading horror reports through the media, thus pushing his demands for even more draconian measures—even if they were based on false information. For example, the German Society for Epidemiology (DGEpi) warned on 19 March 2020 that because of corona we would have more than one million patients in Germany within a short time who would need intensive medical care. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for example, immediately made itself the mouthpiece of the DGEpi and carried the headline “Researchers for tougher measures: Flatten the curve? That is no longer enough.“

What this is supposed to mean in consequence, you can find out immediately afterwards in the lede: “Now containment is the motto. That would mean: Tough measures that take a long time.“¹³⁵⁴ Shortly afterwards, the DGEpi put its published data into perspective again, although it did do so considerably. The prognosis had been made on the basis of assumptions which, let’s say politely, were not really scientifically proven. But the media did not relativize or correct their reports. According to the statistician Gerd Bosbach, this was mainly due to the fact that the DGEpi only gibberish about “adjusted model parameters” instead of admitting in an understandable and simple way that a gross mistake had been made. In truth, Bosbach says, the entire DGEpi simulation model was “undecided” and its approach simply “catastrophic.”

But from the spongy wording of the DGEpi correction, “no journalist would have been able to quickly recognize the error of the previous day. And so the threatening figure [of one million patients who will require intensive medical care] will continue to have an effect on some people. Ultimately, however, it was above all frightening images that found widespread distribution via the channels of TV stations and social networks and which—with the active support of the drastic warnings of the virologists, which were recited like a prayer wheel—burned the image into most people’s heads: Only one thing can rage here, a life threatening virus.

This “scam” has already worked very well with HIV/AIDS, for example. Here were pictures of emaciated world stars, of whom it was said that the HIV virus was responsible for their unfortunate physical condition and later also for their death. The first was Hollywood superstar Rock Hudson, whose tragic fate “gave AIDS a face” all over the world, as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung put it¹³⁵⁵ (see epilog after this chapter). Later on, the fates of world-famous personalities such as Freddie Mercury, front man of the rock band Queen, the tennis professional Arthur Ashe (see chapter 3) and many others were linked with HIV in the media.

Article on sueddeutsche.de on March 24, 2020. The headline could easily be read as saying that the whole of Italy was a “death zone.”

And what Rock Hudson was for HIV/AIDS, Italy was for SARS-Cov-2/ COVID-19. Thus, by mid-March 2020, media coverage was practically dominated by only one topic: that the corona-related death toll in Italy had skyrocketed. Of course, the reporting was always based on the narrative “SARS-CoV-2 = death”—and it was accompanied by dramatic pictures of coffins without end, queues of military vehicles etc. And why not do things in a big way? The Süddeutsche Zeitung, for example, simply declared the whole country a “death zone” by headline on 24 March 2020—and placed a moving picture of a mourning ceremony with a man wearing a face mask in front of a coffin underneath (see screenshot).

As in the case of HIV/AIDS, stories of personal destinies had a particularly intense effect, as they are particularly close to the people. One example of this is a report by Vatican News on 24 March 2020: “The drama associated with the spread of the coronavirus has a new face. In the particularly affected Italian region around Bergamo, a sick priest has given up his respirator to save a younger patient. The 72-year-old priest died as a result.”¹³⁵⁶ Those who had the SARS-CoV-2 chant more or less firmly anchored in their minds could hardly escape the effect of these images.

On March 25, 2020, gmx.net, like many other media, reports on the moving act of the Italian priest Giuseppe Berardelli—of course with the narrative of a killer virus.

This even applied to professors like neurologist Ulrich Dirnagl. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote on 24 March, he considered the thesis of Stanford researcher Ioannidis that without the mass application of PCR tests, nobody would possibly be interested in SARS-CoV-2, „refuted.“ But not because he would know the relevant facts. No, no. He just considered Ioannidis’ thesis “with regard to Italy” to be refuted.

And the Süddeutsche Zeitung also brought a second researcher gun into position against Ioannidis: Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health. But even his ammunition did not consist of hard facts. Nevertheless, he was allowed to use the Süddeutsche to shout out his prophecy of doom that the number of serious cases would “reach appalling proportions without control measures.” Lipsitch is quoted as saying that this is particularly true “in Italy [where] the coffins of Covid 19 victims are gathered in churches.” His conclusion: Whoever waits too long risks the collapse of the health system, and its functioning is essential in order to keep mortality low.¹³⁵⁷

Unfortunately, we do not know on what solid basis he bases his statements. And such a basis did not even exist at that time. For nowhere was there any reliable information to prove that the death figures had been significantly increased overall or in certain regions. “We would have to make sure that the media do not use the power of images to generate emotions that influence our judgment,” says statistics professor Gerd Bosbach. “When pictures of coffins and death departments from Italy are shown, or pictures of absolutely empty shelves, their effects exceed even the stated facts. If we pick out only a small part of the whole with a magnifying glass, we lose the overview.”¹³⁵⁸

After all, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported in January 2018 that the Italian intensive care units had already collapsed under the flu epidemic of 2017/2018, so that operations had to be postponed and nurses recalled from their holidays.¹³⁵⁹ The British Telegraph also asked the question on 23 March: “Why have so many coronavirus patients died in Italy? And the newspaper addresses three points in particular: The high death rate in the country is due to an ageing population, the health care system is overburdened and the way deaths are reported is distorted.¹³⁶⁰

One of the people quoted in this context was Walter Ricciardi, scientific advisor to the Italian Minister of Health, who said that “the way we count deaths in our country was very generous,“ in the sense that of all people who die in hospitals and have been tested “positive,“ one practically automatically believes that they died from the coronavirus. But a re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health would have revealed that 88 percent of the patients who died had at least one previous illness, and many even had two or three.

A Bloomberg report of 18 March even states that “more than 99 per cent” of those who died and tested “positive” for corona were people who had previous illnesses, according to a study by the national health authority. At the same time, the average age of the deceased was 79.5 years. And “all victims in Italy under 40 years of age were men with serious illnesses”.¹³⁶¹

The palliative physician Matthias Thöns commented on this on 11 April 2020: “In Italy, only three of the deaths in 2003 had been patients without serious pre-existing conditions”.¹³⁶² Klaus Püschel, head of Hamburg Forensic Medicine, told the Hamburger Abendblatt four days later that the fatalities he examined had all had such serious pre-existing conditions that, “even if this sounds harsh, they would all have died in the course of this year.“

Just how unreliable the data material on which the horror scenarios are based is shown, for example, by the fact that in the USA the authorities began to recommend that all deceased persons who tested positive, and even suspect cases without a “positive” test result, be registered as “COVID-19 deaths,“ as the New York Post reported on 7 April in the article “Feds classifying all coronavirus patient deaths as ‘COVID-19’ deaths, regardless of cause.“ A US physician and state senator from Minnesota declared that this was tantamount to manipulation. Furthermore, there would be financial incentives for hospitals to declare patients as Covid19 patients.¹³⁶³ In the same horn blew a doctor from the US state of Montana in her YouTube video “COVID-19 death certificates are being manipulated.“ Good summaries were published on April 5th, 2020 on off-guardian.org (“Covid19 Death Figures: ‘A Substantial Over-Estimate’: Bizarre guidelines from health authorities around the world are potentially including thousands of deceased patients who were never even tested”) and on April 13th in the German online magazine Rubikon (“The Lethality Scam: So much for ‘millions of deaths’ worldwide. The numbers are manipulated and are estimated to be twenty times inflated”).

Potentially lethal drugs
are used from the very beginning

And if the death rates in Italy or elsewhere have indeed risen significantly, there is no reason to look only at the virus in the search for causes. After all, any self-respecting scientist should always look at things from a “wide angle,“ especially in microbiology—a world that could hardly be more complex. There are also very good reasons, as we have explained, to regard the virus theory on COVID-19 as unfounded and unsound. At the same time, there is another factor that must not be ignored as a possible cause: the use of drugs with severe side effects or potentially fatal drugs.

After all, “our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in the United States and Europe,” as Peter C. Gøtzsche states.¹³⁶⁴ And in the course of the corona megapanic, experiments were even carried out with drugs that were rich in side effects, although their effect on COVID-19 patients had not been comprehensively investigated at all. For example, the Pharmazeutische Zeitung reported as early as 28th January 2020 that, although there are “no specific drugs against corona viruses,“ even “certain HIV drugs are used experimentally”—according to the motto: trial and error. These include “certain HIV drugs” which, it should be noted, can be potentially fatal (this is particularly true for old and frail people suffering from the most serious diseases). There have also been reports in the media that “a spokeswoman for the US pharmaceutical company AbbVie has confirmed that the Chinese health authorities have requested the HIV drug Kaletra”¹³⁶⁵—a combined preparation (Lopinavir and Ritonavir), which, like other antiviral drugs, is also available in China, can have “life-threatening” side effects.¹³⁶⁶

At the end of April, the pharmaceutical industry was testing not less than 140 drugs on COVID-19 patients.

But before starting such human trials, one should at least have taken a look at history to avoid mistakes already made. As the aforementioned article in the Pharmazeutische Zeitung states: “During the SARS pandemic in 2002/2003, patients were also treated with corticosteroids and the hepatitis C drug ribavirin. Initial reports had sounded promising, according to a review from 2007, but it turned out that the toxicity of ribavirin was too high ... The intake regimen and the dosage of corticosteroids were controversial ... [And] at that time the HIV drug Kaletra was also given to SARS patients on an experimental basis. It contains the two HIV protease inhibitors lopinavir and ritonavir.“¹³⁶⁷

The article thus refers to a WHO report,¹³⁶⁸ whose negative résumé regarding the use of the drugs in SARS patients is on the one hand not surprising, since many of the drugs used at the time can be associated with the most severe side effects. On the other hand, if one takes a closer look at the structures at the World Health Organisation, one might also wonder whether the result should not have been even worse in reality.

The WHO is dependent on private foundations, especially the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In the article “The power of money: A fundamental reform of the WHO is overdue”, published in 2011 in the journal Dr. med. Mabuse and opened with a photo of Bill Gates (see article clipping), it says: “Increasingly, private money or earmarked donations from individual states are deciding on the goals and strategies of the WHO. The extent of their influence was recently demonstrated by the way the WHO dealt with the ‘swine flu’.“

For example, on the advice of its Standing Committee on Immunization, the WHO would have declared the highest pandemic alert level for H1N1 in June 2009. “The worldwide vaccination campaign that it thus set in motion became a multi-billion dollar business for the pharmaceutical companies,“ writes the author Thomas Gebauer, a psychologist and spokesman for the medico international foundation. „This was made possible, according to a Council of Europe study, partly because WHO had previously lowered the criteria for pandemic alerts. At the same time, health authorities around the world had entered into contractual purchase guarantees with vaccine manufacturers. The taxpayers and, as mentioned, those who were physically harmed by the lousily approved vaccines were left behind.¹³⁶⁹

In 2011, the journal Dr. med. Mabuse published the article “The power of money: A fundamental reform of the WHO is overdue.”

Three years later, the British physician David McCoy, for example, criticized the Gates Foundation. It was primarily a means of exercising power and influence, avoiding taxes and supporting large corporations such as the pharmaceutical giants Novartis, Glaxo-Smith-Kline, Sanofi and Merck.¹³⁷⁰ According to McCoy, it is also the case that the assets of the Gates Foundation come from investments in companies such as Monsanto, Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Shell.¹³⁷¹

This is also evidenced by the fact that Gates has been able to double his fortune between 2010 and 2020—a timespan Gates named “Decade of Vaccines”—from $53 billion to $106 billion. This was made possible above all by the investment company Cascade Investment, which he founded. In the spring of 2020, more than half of the shares were held in the holding company Berkshire Hathaway founded by multi-billionaire Warren Buffett, which in turn had been deeply immersed in the pharmaceutical industry with its investments a few months earlier.¹³⁷²

In April 2020, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. points out in his article “Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination” that the multi-billionaire “finances a private pharmaceutical company that produces vaccines and donates $50 million to 12 pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the development of a coronavirus vaccine.” Gates has also invested in Drostens Charité and in leading media such as Spiegel, Zeit and Guardian (see “Awarded Grants” at www.gatesfoundation.org).

In 2019, this behaviour caused the News Medium Modern Ghana to headline: “Why The World Health Organization Treats Bill Gates Like A President”.¹³⁷³ And in the Politico article “Meet the world’s most powerful doctor: Bill Gates” (April 5, 2017), a Geneva-based NGO representative is quoted as saying that Gates “is treated liked a head of state, not only at the WHO, but also at the G20.“

COVID-19 has been experimented with highly toxic preparations right from the start. When it came to the search for vaccines, the pharmaceutical companies even started a real “race,” as the Spiegel reported: “A new vaccine against COVID-19 is being researched at full speed. To this end, common rules are now being softened in drug development.“¹³⁷⁴ And German virologists Drosten also put pressure on the industry: “We have to see where we can conjure up a vaccine.”¹³⁷⁵ Bill Gates, on the other hand, is putting massive pressure on the industry and even wants to have all seven billion people on earth vaccinated.

Bill Gates: „With you I will reach my goal!“ (On the two lying horses it says: „Bird flu 2004“ and „Swine flu 2009“). © expresszeitung.com issue 32, www.wiedenroth-karikatur.de

A Lancet report published on February 18, 2020, describes where this could end.¹³⁷⁶ It describes a case of a 50-year-old patient who suffered from fever, chills, coughing, tiredness and shortness of breath and who is said to have died, how could it be otherwise, within a short time from a SARS-CoV-2 infection. But there is no proof of this. What is certain, however, is that the ailing patient was treated with the antiviral drugs interferon alfa-2b, lopinavir and ritonavir, the antibiotic moxifloxacin and the anti-inflammatory methylprednisolone—substances that can have fatal side effects even when taken alone. Considering the fact that the patient was maltreated with such a “drug armada,“ the thought seems justified that the patient did not die despite but because of the drugs.¹³⁷⁷

Three days earlier, on 15 February, a study had been printed in the Lancet describing the cases of 41 Chinese who suffered from severe pneumonia and had tested “positive.“ All received antibiotics, some of which were administered intravenously, and almost all (93 percent) received the antiviral drug oseltamivir. Nine of them (22 percent) were also given anti-inflammatory drugs (corticosteroids), which also have many side effects. Six of them died as a result.¹³⁷⁸

Another study from China showed that 75 out of 99 patients were given antiviral drugs.¹³⁷⁹And another analysis (17 March) revealed that 99 per cent of those examined in Italy had pre-existing conditions before they tested “positive”—and that 53 per cent of people who officially died of “corona”, had received antiviral drugs and even 83 percent antibiotictherapy.¹³⁸⁰

And, as the journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt reported on 25 March 2020, German cardiologists warned against the experimental use of the malaria drug chloroquine in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin in COVID-19 patients. Both agents could trigger ventricular fibrillation with fatal consequences.¹³⁸¹ A study published on May 22, 2020 in The Lancet, blew into the same horn and concluded that hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, when used alone or with an antibiotic such as azithromycin, was associated with decreased in-hospital survival in COVID-19 patients. But the study may have served primarily the purpose of blaming the relatively cheap hydroxychloroquine—a drug US president Donald Trump has taken since the beginning of May and which he described as a “gift from God”—and of distracting from the deadly effects of drugs, some of which are outrageously expensive.¹³⁸²

As a preprint article suggested on 8 May 2020, adding zinc to hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin might help the drug combination resolve some symptoms associated with COVID-19. But even one of the co-authors said, “There is currently no highly effective agent for COVID-19 that we are aware of.”¹³⁸³ And there is no doubt, hydroxychloroquine can be accompanied by severe side effects. But if we take a closer look at the mentioned Lancet study, it shows the following mortality rates: 18 percent for hydroxychloroquine without macrolides compared to 23.8 percent for hydroxychloroquine with macrolides; and 16.4 percent for chloroquine without macrolides compared to 22.3 percent for chloroquine together with macrolides. That is to say that antibiotics have a significant influence on the mortality rate.

At the beginning of May 2020, the pharmaceutical industry was already testing more than 140 active ingredients. 77 of these are drugs that have been developed for other diseases, 68 new developments, said Thomas Cueni, general director of the umbrella association of the pharmaceutical industry (IFPMA) in Geneva.¹³⁸⁴

Among them was Tamiflu (oseltamivir), produced by Roche, having “side effects” such as breathing difficulties and the worsening of existing respiratory diseases. It was also reported about its potentially fatal effects (see chapter 7 about H5N1/Avian Flu).

The HIV drug darunavir, manufactured by Johnson & Johnson, is no better off. It damages the immune system—and at aidsinfo.nih.gov we can read: “What are the most important things to know about darunavir? Darunavir can cause serious, life-threatening side effects. These include liver problems and severe skin reactions or rash.”

COVID-19 patients were also given Tocilizumab (trade names Actemra and RoActemra), also manufactured by Roche and used, among other things, to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Tocilizumab is immunosuppressive and side effects include respiratory infections (over 10 percent) and other serious infectious diseases, high liver function tests, high blood pressure and many more. Since the Tocilizumab hit the US market in 2010, more than 1,000 deaths have been reported to the FDA (as of 2020). However, the actual number is likely to be higher, as the FDA’s reporting system captures only a fraction of the adverse events that occur in patients.¹³⁸⁵

And as for corticosteroids, a study published in the Journal of Infection on 10 April 2020 concluded: “Patients with severe conditions are more likely to require corticosteroids. Corticosteroid use is associated with increased mortality in patients with coronavirus pneumonia.”¹³⁸⁶

Another possible cause of death is intubation (introduction of holoprobes), which was increasingly used because it was feared that the significantly less invasive mask respiration would carry a higher risk of viral infection. The fact that patients died more frequently as a result of this is documented, for example, in relation to SARS (2002/2003). And there are also clear indications of this in the treatment of COVID-19 patients.1387 1388 In New York, for example, doctors reported at the beginning of April 2020 that 80 percent or even more of Covid-19 patients connected to ventilators had died.¹³⁸⁹ And a Lancet study from February drew an even bleaker picture: only three out of 22 intubated patients survived (13.6 per cent).¹³⁹⁰

The Death of Magician Legend Roy Horn—and the
Unscientific Approval of Remdesivir by the “Gray
Eminence” Fauci

Roy Horn, the magician legend, passed away on May 8, 2020 at the age of 75 years in Las Vegas.¹³⁹¹ He is the first megastar worldwide who was said to have died from COVID-19 and thus from the so-called coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. But not only is there no evidence to support this thesis (as outlined). Roy Horn, born in Nordenham close to the German city Bremen, was in such poor health that it seems downright absurd to ignore non-viral factors as the cause of his sad demise.

Horn, as German daily newspaper Bild reported (see screenshot),¹³⁹² was diagnosed with advanced skin cancer in December 2016. “Chemotherapy and radiation should help, but they weakened him furthermore,” as bunte. de wrote. “He had to take strong medication every day. A friend: ‘Before dinner, Roy took in the many pills like smarties.’ Not only did he fight cancer, but also the pains he has suffered from since the tiger attack almost 17 years ago.”¹³⁹³

On top of that, after he has been tested “positive” for COVID-19, he received Gilead Sciences’ rapid-release drug remdesivir, which was approved on the 2nd of May for emergency use only.1394 1395 1396 1397 But this medication inhibits cell reproduction in the body—which can undoubtedly have fatal effects for a seriously ill old person. This justifies the conclusion that the already terminally ill and heavily medicated Roy Horn died tragically and sadly prematurely not in spite of, but because of the administration of remdesivir.

In connection with remdesivir the most serious side effects have been reported, including multi-organ dysfunction, septic shock (usually fatal blood poisoning) or acute kidney failure.¹³⁹⁸ In experiments with Ebola patients, for example, it was found that the drug increases liver enzyme values, which is a sign of liver damage.¹³⁹⁹ And once the liver is severly damaged, death is not far off remdesivir had not received full approval from the American agency for the regulation of prescription drugs, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), even not long after the administration to Roy Horn—not for COVID-19, not for Ebola and also for not for any other disease. And the European Medicines Agency (EMA) was just tripping behind the FDA, but not with a full approval, but only with a recommendation for a wider use when it comes to “hardship cases” (“compassionate use”).

On the 11th of May 2020, the German daily newspaper Bild reported on its website on the magician legend Roy Horn who died on 8 May 2020 in Las Vegas at the age of 75 after being treated with the highly toxic drug remdesivir: “Roy Horn’s last secret: He has been fighting skin cancer for four years.” Source: screenshot from bild.de

The fact that remdesivir has been presented as the great rescue for COVID-19 patients can only be described as a scandal—especially when you look at the fraudulent way in which the drug was approved for “emergency use.”

In late April, Anthony Fauci, director of the US Department of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the “gray eminence” of US virology since 1984 (see also chapter 3 about HIV/AIDS and especially the fraudulent approval of the first ”AIDS drug” AZT),1400 1401 claimed that a study found remdesivir would reduce recovery time and reduce mortality.1402 1403

But an article of the Alliance for Human Research and Protection (AHRP)—“Fauci’s Promotional Hype Catapults Gilead’s remdesivir”1404 1405—brought up a painful subject: That “Fauci has a vested interest in remdesivir. He sponsored the clinical trial whose detailed results have not been peer-reviewed. Furthermore, he declared the tenuous results to be ‘highly significant,’ and pronounced remdesivir to be the new ‘standard of care.’

Fauci made the promotional pronouncement while sitting on a couch in the White House, without providing a detailed news release; without a briefing at a medical meeting or in a scientific journal—as is the norm and practice, to allow scientists and researchers to review the data. When he was asked about a recently published Chinese study on remdesivir, in The Lancet (April 29th , 2020); a trial that was stopped because of serious adverse events in 16 (12%) of the patients compared to four (5%) of patients in the placebo group, Dr. Fauci dismissed the study as ‘not adequate.’”

But while the Chinese study that Fauci denigrated, was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multi-center peer-reviewed, published study in a premier journal, The Lancet, with all data available, the NIAID-Gilead study results have not been published in peer-reviewed literature—nor have details of the findings been disclosed. “However, they were publicly promoted by the head of the federal agency that conducted the study, from the White House,” as the AHRP underlined. “What better free advertisement?”

Anthonay Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the “gray eminence” of US virology since 1984, made the promotional pronouncement regarding remdesivir while sitting on a couch in the Oval Office of the White House (far left in the picture with a raised hand)— and violated fundamental scientific rules. Fauci speaks as White House Coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and President Donald Trump listen during a meeting on the Coronavirus on the 29th of April , 2020. Source: Screenshot from deseret.com

What Fauci also failed to disclose to the public in his promotional pronouncement was that the primary outcomes of the study were changed on the 16th of April 2020. Changes in the primary outcome are posted on clinicaltrials.gov. Where previously there was an 8-point scale, which also included the deceased patients, from then on there has been only a 3-point scale, which leaves the deceased patient out of the equation and which at the same time only measures the time until recovery or being released from the hospital.

“Changing primary outcomes after a study has commenced is considered dubious and suspicious,” as the AHRP pointed out.

And Reuters News reported that highly respected prominent leaders in the medical community—such as Steven Nissen, MD, the chief academic officer at the Cleveland Clinic and Eric Topol, MD, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California—were unimpressed by remdesivir’s tentative, modest benefit at best. Referring to the Lancet report, Topol stated: “That’s the only thing I’ll hang my hat on, and that was negative.” As for the NIAID modest results, Dr. Topol was unimpressed: “It was expected to be a whopping effect. It clearly does not have that.”

The change in primary outcome measures raised serious red flags for scientists; but was largely ignored by the mainstream media which mostly repeated Fauci’s promotional script.

Steve Nissen told The Washington Post: “I think that they thought they weren’t going to win, and they wanted to change it to something they could win on. I prefer the original outcome. It’s harder. It’s a more meaningful endpoint. Getting out of the hospital early is useful, but it’s not a game-changer.”

It was also Fauci who managed to push the first AIDS drug AZT onto the market in a fraudulent way back in 1987 (see chapter 3). And, as it happened with Roy Horn in 2020, celebrities had been experimentally treated with highly toxic drugs as well in the early days of HIV/AIDS. The most important example is Hollywood world star Rock Hudson who was treated with the untested and highly toxic medication HPA-23—a drug for which (a) the necessary controlled studies had not been carried out and for which there was therefore no proof of its efficacy with regard to Hudson’s suffering, for which (b) the liver-damaging effect alone was sufficiently documented and which (c) due to its high toxicity is above all also dangerous for patients who are already ailing. Sounds a lot like COVID-19, except that there have been 35 years in between.

Epilog

Rock Hudson Gave „AIDS“ a Face—and Its Fallacious
Story Gave the Virus Hunters Godlike Status

„We would have to ensure that the media do not use the power of images to create emotions that influence our judgment.“¹⁴⁰⁶

GERD BOSBACH PROFESSOR OF STATISTICS AND EMPIRICAL ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

On the 23rd of April 1984, the US microbiologist Robert Gallo and the then US Secretary of Health and Human Services Margret Heckler claimed towards the world in front of running cameras: „The probable cause of AIDS has been found: a variant of a known human cancer virus.” The word „probable” was practically unnoticed, not least because the two also used phrases like „Today’s discovery represents the triumph of science over a dreaded disease” (see chapter 3, subchapter „23 April 1984: Gallo’s TV Appearance Carves the Virus Dogma in Stone”). But the whole thing was still relatively theoretical. So for people to really realize, even really feel, that a deadly virus is „raging”, more is needed. It needs stories of fates, of dramas that touch us deeply.

With Corona, these were particularly the dramatic TV pictures from Italy, which went around the world in mid-March and showed military vehicles that carried away numerous coffins. And in the case of HIV/AIDS, it was the Hollywood world star Rock Hudson who depicts a kind of „big bang” here. Hudson was one of the first to undergo an „HIV antibody test”. This happened on June 5, 1984, just a few weeks after Gallo’s TV appearance on stage.

The test was not even officially licensed at that time, as this was only done nine months later by the US FDA.¹⁴⁰⁷ Moreover, the first HIV antibody test, developed in 1985, was designed to screen blood products, not to diagnose AIDS, as it says in the study „Human Immunodeficiency Virus Diagnostic Testing: 30 Years of Evolution”, published 2016 in the journal Clinical and Vaccine Immunity. Nevertheless, Gallo and Heckler were not afraid to send the completely unfounded message around the globe: „We now have a blood test for AIDS. With a blood test, we can identify AIDS victims with essentially 100 percent certainty.”¹⁴⁰⁸

And so it happened that the 1.96-metre tall image of American manhood received a „positive” test report.1409 1410 1411 Hudson did not make this public for a long time, but about a year later, on the 25th of July 1985, he finally passed on the news to the world public that he had AIDS. And the fact that Hudson was the first Hollywood star to be officially considered an AIDS patient and who died only a few months after his „AIDS-Outing” finally brought the AIDS phenomenon out of the gay community and conveyed the message that a real epidemic was underway.

In 2010, the German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeigung (FAZ) published the article „Rock Hudson: He gave AIDS a face” on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Rock Hudson’s death and hit the nail on the head with it. For it was indeed the Hollywood legend who gave HIV/ AIDS a face in 1985. Unfortunately, the FAZ article does not tell us how scientifically untenable the message was that Hudson had died of HIV, and in what fatal way the worldwide virus hunters were to gain undreamt-of powers as a result. Source: screenshot from faz.net

According to the motto: if AIDS can affect someone like Hudson, it can affect anyone, men and women alike. Or as the German news magazine Spiegel put it in August 1985: „At the latest since the long death and public confession of AIDS by the film idol Rock Hudson, once the epitome of radiant health and (heterosexual) love, the mood has changed. ‘Danger for us all—a new epidemic plague,’ discovered the Munich tabloid Quick. ‘No one is safe from Aids anymore,’ was a title of the US magazine Life ... ‘Aids—now the women are dying’ (Bild am Sonntag).”¹⁴¹²

But especially the medical history of Hudson shows on a closer inspection that it is, there is no other way to put it, a lie to claim that AIDS can affect anyone—just as it is wrong to assume that a so-called „HIV test” would reliably indicate that a deadly HI Virus is haunting the body of the person concerned (see chapter 3).

Hudson was at least bisexual—and in any case homosexually active throughout his entire acting career.¹⁴¹³ And apparently even the Hollywood personage indulged in a fast-lane lifestyle typical of many gays, which is characterized by the excessive consumption of highly toxic drugs and medication and which can cause precisely the symptoms that occur in seriously ill AIDS patients. For example, one of Hudson’s lovers, the writer Armistead Maupin, reported how Hudson lovingly presented him with the sex drug Poppers, which is extremely popular among gays, from a leather case with „RH” engraved on it.¹⁴¹⁴

But especially Poppers can be very liver-damaging and even carcinogenic (see chapter 3, subchapters „The Early 1980s: Poppers and AIDS Drugs“ and „How the ‘Fast-Lane Lifestyle’ Topic Got Out of Sight“). Therefore, it is not surprising that Hudson is reported to have been diagnosed with the cancer Kaposi’s sarcoma in 1984.¹⁴¹⁵ In addition he has drunk and smoked heavily over decades. Even after a quadruple heart bypass surgery in 1981, he still took a pack of cigarettes every day—even though his doctors warned him that if he didn’t stop, he would soon be in dire need.1416 1417

And so it came about that Hudson becamethe star guest of the first episode of Doris Day’s „Best Friends“ show on July 16th , 1985—and that his long-time acting colleague was visibly shocked by the frail appearance of the 59-year-old, whom she and the world had known as the model of a handsome man.¹⁴¹⁸ Shortly afterwards, on July 21st, 1985, he collapsed in a Paris hotel and on the same day asked his spokesman to announce that he had „inoperable liver cancer“, as the New York Times also reported.1419 1420

But liver cancer, unlike HIV/AIDS, does not have the potential to create headlines that the masses are craving. In contrast to the HIV=AIDS narrative, liver cancer does not touch the most secret of human intimacy. In 1987, the Spiegel journalist Wilhelm Bittorf wrote the following in a personal experience report on HIV/AIDS: „Even the worst environmental damage is further away than an infection in the erogenous zone. And if the Pershing missiles in Baden-Württemberg only affected the sex lives of Germans, they would be long gone by now.”¹⁴²¹

And so it was that on the 25th of July 1985 Hudson had it announced from Paris that he was „dying of AIDS“—and it became a story the world had hardly seen before. At the end of his stay in the French capital, he was even flown out of his hotel by helicopter, lying motionless on a stretcher, in front of running cameras of course, and loaded into a chartered Boeing 747. In addition to himself, there were only two doctors, two assistants, a nurse and four of his confidants.¹⁴²² Hudson is said to have spent a few hundred thousand dollars on this transport action to make it possible for him to „die in his own bed“ in Los Angeles.

As a result, „HIV testing“ experienced a real boost, and an AIDS industry was boosted, generating hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Elizabeth Taylor also benefited enormously. The Hollywood icon reportedly called Hudson shortly after his collapse to thank him for his announcement that he was dying of AIDS, believing it would „save millions of lives.“ A few weeks later, in September 1985, Taylor co-organized the „Commitment for Life“ gala dinner in Los Angeles to raise money for AIDS sufferers. Originally, only 200 tickets were sold for this event, but after Hudson’s „AIDS confession“ more than 2500 tickets were sold—and even the then US President Ronald Reagan felt compelled to send a greeting telegram saying that it was of „highest priority“ for the US government to stop the spread of AIDS.

In the following years, Taylor was even able to raise funds of several hundred million for AIDS research. But although the Hollywood diva is said to have been a close friend of Hudson since their film „Giant“ in 1956, it is reported that she paid him only one visit to his bed in the last months of his life, the day before his death.¹⁴²³

But why had Hudson set off for Paris in the summer of 1984? The reason was that his „HIV test“ turned out „positive“—and he had the opportunity to receive a drug from doctors in the capital of France, which he was led to believe was a kind of last resort before an AIDS death. This drug was called HPA-23, which the Pasteur Institute in France provided for experimental purposes. One of the inventors was Luc Montagnier.

But as melodious as the names Pasteur Institute and Montagnier may be to some, the administration of HPA-23 to Hudson (and many other desperate people) can only be described as highly irresponsible. The liver-destroying effect of this drug alone was sufficiently documented, but there was no proof of its effectiveness in the context of AIDS. William A. Haseltine of Harvard Medical School, for example, stated that the reports on the success of HPA-23 in France were of „the crummiest kind of anecdotal stories“—and they didn’t “do the scientifically controlled trials” for HPA-23, although these are necessary to provide the evidence about a drug’s safety and efficacy. According to Haseltine, it was „really a crime“, as had been done here.¹⁴²⁴

Other physicians took the same line and emphasized that HPA-23, due to its high toxicity, was especially dangerous for patients who were already ailing.¹⁴²⁵ And Rock Hudson, when he started taking HPA-23, was a man who was severely ill. Yet virtually no one in the major media asked if there was any solid evidence of the efficacy of HPA-23 in treating AIDS—or why patients, rather than chasing after such a lousy drug, should not tackle their underlying health problems.

Apparently, journalists and their recipients had fallen victim to the fallacy at the time that it can only be good if a famous actor like Hudson receives this drug, but the average citizen does not. In addition, even then the public interest in tabloid stories spiced with sex was huge. And so the general attention was only directed to find out if Rock Hudson would have infected his acting colleague Linda Evans with HIV after he kissed her in the series „Denver-Clan“.

Even the self-proclaimed assault gun for democracy, the news magazine the Spiegel, readily took up the subject in 1985, in its article on „Hollywood stars’ fear of AIDS“: „Linda Evans, who was carelessly kissed by the AIDS-infected Rock Hudson in the ‘Denver Clan’, is scared out of her sleep night after night. She screams for help on the phone, because her nightmares make her believe all stages of the disease. Burt Reynolds must reaffirm over and over again that he is neither gay nor has AIDS.”¹⁴²⁶

This smug reporting was diametrically opposed to the harsh reality for Rock Hudson, who had started taking HPA-23 in August 1984.¹⁴²⁷ And shortly afterwards he developed severe itching, rashes and Vincent’s disease, a painful, ulcerative gum disease. During the winter months of 1984, he was also confronted with loose teeth and a weeping rash called contagious impetigo.

The thesis that these severe reactions are due to HPA-23 is also supported by a study published in 1988 in the journal Animicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, in which AIDS patients were administered HPA-23 over a period of just eight weeks. The result: the patients showed exactly the same severe symptoms that Hudson had to struggle with. At the same time, the study showed that the drug had no clinical benefit for the patients.¹⁴²⁸

It is therefore not surprising that Hudson’s appearance had already changed considerably by the end of 1984—after only a few months of HPA-23 medication—and had lost a lot of weight in the process. Hudson claimed in this connection that he was merely suffering from anorexia (loss of appetite)— but even the magazine People, which was already riding the AIDS panic wave at the time, considered this to be an „unbelievable“ explanation.¹⁴²⁹ It seems plausible, however, that Hudson’s already weakened liver was once again severely affected by HPA-23—and that he therefore had hardly any appetite left, which often happens with liver damage.

The preparation, which is rich in side effects, brought Hudson, who was already very badly „hit“ in terms of health, close to physical knockout after a short time. It is not difficult to imagine how serious the consequences must have been for Hudson’s already severely battered body that HPA-23 was used on him over a period of about a year.¹⁴³⁰

In late July 1985, Hudson finally turned his back on Paris and flew back to the USA because his doctors in Paris assessed that he was too weak to continue taking HPA-23¹⁴³¹—whereby his French medical practitioners unspokenly admitted that the toxic effects of the drug were extremely severe. Nevertheless, Hudson is likely to have continued to be administered HPA-23 or similar preparations in the USA, which were also severely damaging to the liver.¹⁴³²

Summarizing, Rock Hudson has been drinking and smoking chain for decades, which in itself is very damaging to the liver and the body as a whole. In addition to that is the intake of lifestyle drugs like poppers, which also have a highly toxic effect on organs such as the liver. Due to this wasting lifestyle Hudson was already a seriously ill man in his mid/ late 50s, which was also reflected in his heart surgery at the age of 56. In this very unstable physical stage, the Hollywood legend received drugs such as HPA-23, which has liver-destroying effects, over the twelve (or even more) months before his death. And once the liver is gone, death is inevitably not far away.

Therefore it can only be concluded that the highly toxic medication played the crucial part in Hudson’s death on the 2nd of October 1985.

„Ultimate Scepticism.—But what after all are man’s truths?— They are his irrefutable errors.“

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE „THE JOYOUS SCIENCE“, APHORISM 265

Literature

Introduction

Society under the Spell of a One-Dimensional Microbe Theory

1 Kass, Edward H., Infectious Diseases and Social Change, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, January 1971, pp. 110-114

2 Golub, Edward, The Limits of Medicine: How Science Shapes Our Hope for the Cure, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 3-4

3 Smith, Lewis, £1m scientific ”gospel” of Newton’s greatest rival, Times, 9 February 2006

4 Hunter, Michael, The Royal Society and Its Fellows, 1660-1700: The Morphology of an Early Scientific Institution, British Society for the History of Science, 1982

5 Robert Boyle (1627-1691), University of Dayton, see www.udayton.edu/~hume/Boyle/boyle.htm

6 Starr, Paul, The Social Transformation of American Medicine. The rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry, Basic Books, 1982, p. 3

7 Ibid., pp. 6-7

8 McCarthy, Michael, Lies, Damn lies, and scientific research (Rezension des Buches The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science von Horace Judson, Harcourt, 2004), Lancet, 6 November 2004, p. 1657

9 Golub, Edward, The Limits of Medicine: How Science Shapes Our Hope for the Cure, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 178

10 McKeown, Thomas, Die Bedeutung der Medizin, Suhrkamp, 1979, p. 214

11 Moss, Ralph, Fragwürdige Chemotherapie. Entscheidungshilfen für die Krebstherapie, Haug, 1997, p. 39-43

12 Manipulating a Journal article, New York Times, Editorial, 11 December 2005, Sektion 4, p. 11

13 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Ungesunde Verhältnisse. Wie die PharMayndustrie die Medien beeinflusst, Journalist, November 2005, pp. 40-42

14 Lieberman, Trudy, Bitter Pills, Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2005

15 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Spitze des Eisbergs: Warum Journalisten auch den angese-henen Wissenschaftszeitschriften nicht blindlings vertrauen sollten, Message, 3/2005, pp. 70-71

16 Smith, Richard, Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies, Plos Medicine, May 2005, p. e138

17 Krimsky, Sheldon, Science in the Private Interest. Has The Lure Of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research?, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, pp. 163-176

18 Chargaff, Erwin, Das Feuer des Heraklit, Luchterhand, 1989, p. 224

19 Krugman, Paul, Drugs, Devices and Doctors, New York Times, 16 December 2005

20 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, p. 9

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26 Engelbrecht, Torsten, „Die Industrie macht Druck,“ Interview with Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, on editorial autonomy, fraud in science and the purpose of peer reviewing, Message, 3/2005, pp. 66-69

27 Martinson, Brian, Scientists behaving badly, Nature, 9 June 2005, pp. 737-738

28 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Gaunereien und Betrug sind auch in der Wissenschaft verbreitet (review of the book „The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science“ from Horace Judson, Harcourt, 2004), Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag, 9 January 2005, p. 69

29 Washburn, Jennifer, University, Inc: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education, Basic Books, 2005

30 Krimsky, Sheldon, Science in the Private Interest. Has The Lure Of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research?, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004

31 Moynihan, Ray, Who pays for the pizza? Redefining the relationships between doctors and drug companies, British Medical Journal, 31 May 2003, pp. 1189-1192

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33 Global Corruption Report 2006. Special Focus: Corruption and Health, Transparency International, February 2006, see http://www.transparency.org/publications/gcr

34 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, p. 41

35 McCarthy, Michael, Lies, Damn lies, and scientific research (Rezension des Buches The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science von Horace Judson, Harcourt, 2004), Lancet, 6 November 2004, p. 1658

36 Miller, Donald, On Evidence, Medical and Legal, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Fall 2005, p. 70

37 See de.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Osler

38 Miller, Donald, On Evidence, Medical and Legal, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Fall 2005, p. 70

39 Weihe, Wolfgang, Klinische Studien und Statistik: Von der Wahrscheinlichkeit des Irrtums, Deutsches Ärzteblatt, 26 March 2004, p. C683

40 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, p. 39

41 Prange, Astrid, Hoffnung kostet 140 Dollar, Rheinischer Merkur, 48/2005, p. 14

42 Solomon, John, NIH Medical Safety Officer Reinstated. Government Reinstates Safety Officer Who Alleged Misconduct in AIDS Research, Associated Press, 24 December 2005

43 Engelbrecht, Torsten, AIDS-Krimi. WHO spielt Nebenwirkungen herunter, Freitag, 11 February 2005, p. 18

44 Klon-Star Hwang hat Studie gefälscht, Spiegel Online, 23 December 2005

45 Klonskandal: Kritik an der Sensationsgier der Forscher, Spiegel Online, 24 December 2005

46 McKeown, Thomas, Die Bedeutung der Medizin, Suhrkamp, 1979, p. 237

47 Tracey, Michael, Mere Smoke of Opinion; AIDS and the making of the public mind, Continuum, Summer/Fall 2001

48 Krugman, Paul, Drugs, Devices and Doctors, New York Times, 16 December 2005

49 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 129

50 Burnet, Sir MacFarlane, Genes, Dreams and Realities, Medical and Technical Publishing, 1971, pp. 217, 219

51 Epstein, Samuel, Losing the „War against Cancer“: A Need for Public Policy Reforms, International Journal of Health Services and Molecular Biology, 4 February 1992, pp. 455-469

52 Engelbrecht Torsten, Aneuploidie. Paradigmenwechsel in der Krebstherapie, Co’Med, August 2005, pp. 30-35

53 Duesberg, Peter, Multistep Carcinogenesis—A Chain Reaction of Aneuploidizations, Cell Cycle, May/June 2003, p. 204

54 Miklos, George, The Human Cancer Genome Project—one more misstep in the war on cancer, Nature Biotechnology, May 2005, pp. 535-537

55 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Schuss auf den Matrosen, interview with US molecular biologist Peter Duesberg on anti-smoking campaigns, gene-mutations, aneuploidy, and the failure of the established cancer research, Freitag, 27 April 2005, p. 18

56 Deutschen Institut für Ernährungsforschung Potsdam-Rehbrücke (DIFE), World Cancer Research Fund, American Institute for Cancer Research, Krebsprävention durch Ernährung, 1999, see www.dife.de/de/publikationen/krebsbrosch99k.pdf

57 Epstein, Samuel, US National cancer Institute. Misguided policies, funding lucrative drug treatments, caving in to corporate interests, see www.preventcancer.com/losing/nci/why_prevent.htm

58 Epstein, Samuel, Cancer-Gate: How to Win the Losing Cancer War, Baywood Publishing, 2005, p. 114

59 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Schuss auf den Matrosen, interview with US molecular biologist Peter Duesberg on anti-smoking campaigns, gene-mutations, aneuploidy, and the failure of the established cancer research, Freitag, 27 April 2005, p. 18

60 Mehr Krebstote erwartet, Welt.de, 18 January 2005

61 Critser, Greg, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Alter Our Bodies, Houghton Mifflin, 2005

62 Sharav, Vera, Selling Sickness: Pharma Industry Turning Us All into Patients, press release, Alliance for Human Research Protection, 12 September 2005

63 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Risiken und Todesfälle eingeschlossen. Killer Nummer eins: In den USA sterben jährlich 800.000 Patienten durch fehlerhaftes ärztliches Handeln, schätzen Experten. Dennoch fehlt es nach wie vor an einem gezielten Fehlermanagement, Freitag, 3 December 2004, p. 18

64 Gøtzsche, Peter C., Our prescription drugs kill us in large numbers, Polskie Archiwum Medycyny Wewnetrznej, epub 30 October 2014

65 Angell, Marcia, The Truth About the Drug Companies. How They Deceive Us And What To Do About It, Random House, 2004, p. 120

66 Lacasse, Jeffrey, Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature, Plos Medicine, December 2005, p. e392

67 Sharav, Vera, Eli Lilly finances World Health Org (WHO) promoting psychotropic drugs. The Credibility of the World Health Organisation is in doubt since its financial ties to Eli Lilly and Johnson and Johnson, press release, Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), 20 August 2005

68 Dobson, Roger; Lenzer, Jeanne, US regulator suppresses vital data on prescription drugs on sale in Britain, Independent, 12 June 2005

69 Lenzer, Jeanne, NIH Secretes, The New Republic, 30 October 2006

70 Lenzer, Jeanne, Conflicts of Interest are common at FDA, British Medical Journal, 29 April 2006, p. 991

71 Lurie, Peter, Financial conflict of interest disclosure and voting patterns at Food and Drug Administration Drug Advisory Committee meetings, Journal of the American Medical Association, 26 April 2006, pp. 1921-1928

72 Sharav, Vera, Disease Mongering Conference/Plos Special Issue, press release, Alliance of Human Research Protection (AHRP), 10 April 2006

73 House of Commons Health Committee, The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry, Forth Report of Session2004-05, Volume 1, 22 March 2005

74 Angell, Marcia, The Truth About the Drug Companies. How They Deceive Us And What To Do About It, Random House, 2004, p. 133

75 Ibid., p. 126

76 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, pp. 57-58

77 Marcuse, Herbert, Der eindimensionale Mensch, Luchterhand, 1988, pp. 29-32

78 Golub, Edward, The Limits of Medicine: How Science Shapes Our Hope for the Cure, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 160

79 Ibid., p. 176

80 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, p. 57

81 Golub, Edward, The Limits of Medicine: How Science Shapes Our Hope for the Cure, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 160

82 Dubos, René, Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change, Harper&Brothers, 1959, p. 86

83 Michael Specter, The Vaccine, The New Yorker, 3 February 2003, p. 59

84 Roach, Mary, Germs, Germs Everywhere. Are You Woried? Get Over It, New York Times, 9 November 2004

85 Review of the book „Leben auf dem Menschen“ (by Jörg Blech, Rowohlt 2000), Spektrum der Wissenschaft, 11/2000

86 Kruis, Wolfgang, Informationen über eine Therapiestudie: Rezidivprophylaxe bei Patienten mit Colitis ulcerosa durch Mutaflor im Vergleich zu Mesalazin, Der Bauchredner, 3/1996, pp. 64-68

87 Bjorksten, Bengt, Effects of intestinal microflora and the environment on the development of asthma and allergy, Springer Seminars in Immunopathology, 25 February 2004, pp. 257-70

88 Knight, David, Gut flora in health and disease, Lancet, 24 May 2003, p. 1831

89 Tannock, Gerald, Medical Importance of the Normal Microflora, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999

90 Langosch, Angelika, Einfluss der Ernährung insbesondere der Rohkost auf die Darmflora und Infektabwehr, Institut für Medizinische Balneologie und Klimatologie der Universität München, 1984 (Dissertation)

91 Golub, Edward, The Limits of Medicine: How Science Shapes Our Hope for the Cure, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. xiii

92 Ibid., pp. 3-5

93 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 457

94 Katzenellenbogen, Jonathan, Third of Africans Undernourished, Business Day (Johannesburg), 20 August 2004

95 Duesberg, Peter, The African AIDS Epidemic: New and Contagious—or—Old under a New Name?, Report to Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS Panel, 22 June 2000

96 Engelbrecht, Torsten; Crowe, David, Avian Flu Virus H5N1: No Proof for Existence, Pathogenicity, or Pandemic Potential; Non-‘H5N1’ Causation Omitted, Medical Hypotheses, 4/2006; pp. 855-857

97 Schwägerl, Christian, „Die Gefahr wird unterschätzt,“ Interview with Reinhard Kurth, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 August, 2005

98 Köhnlein, Claus, Zur Epidemiologie moderner Test-Seuchen, Fachhochschule Dortmund, 6 December, 2003

99 Köhnlein, Claus, Hepatitis C—the epidemic that never was?, British Medical Journal (online), 7 March 2002, see bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/324/7335/450

100 Duesberg, Peter, Rasnick, David, AIDS in Africa, British Medical Journal (online), 1 March, 2003

101 World Health Organisation, Summary of probable SARS cases with onset of illness from 1 November to 31 July 2003, see www.who.int/csr/sars/country/table2003_09_23/en

102 Mullis, Kary, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Vintage Books, 1998, p. 180

103 Johnson, Judith, AIDS funding for federal government programs: FY1981-FY2006, CRS Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, The Library of Congress, 23 March 2005

104 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Therapien ohne Beweiskraft, Freitag, 12 March, 2004, p. 18

105 Sharav, Vera, 38 Senators With $13.4 Million in Pharma Stock Approved Sweeheart Deal; Rumsfeld’s Growing $$ Stake in Tamiflu (Fortune), press release, Alliance for Human Research Protection, 23 December 2005

106 Abramson, John, The Effect of Conflict of Interest on Biomedical Research and Clinical Practice Guidelines: Can We Trust the Evidence in Evidence-Based Medicine?, The Journal of the American Board of Family Practice, September 2005, p. 417

Chapter 1

Medicine Presents a Distorted Picture of Microbes

107 French Wikipedia article about “Antoine Béchamp”

108 Verner, Robinson, Rational Bacteriology, chapter 1: Bacteria In General, H. Wolff, 1953

109 Nicholson Jeremy, The challenges of modeling mammalian biocomplexity, Nature Biotechnology, 6 October 2004, p. 1270

110 Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth, Die Schweigespirale: Öffentliche Meinung—unsere soziale Haut, Langen Müller, 2001, p. 211

111 The Humane Society of the United States, Facts about the Canadian Seal Hunt, 2005, see www.hsus.org

112 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Dying To Entertain Us: A harrowing insight into the hugely profitable and brutal world of captive dolphins, The Ecologist, October 2004, pp. 53-57

113 Myers, Ransom, Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities, Nature, 15 May 2003, pp. 280-283

114 Dubos, René, Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change, Harper&Brothers, 1959, p. 71

115 Golub, Edward, The Limits of Medicine: How Science Shapes Our Hope for the Cure, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. xiii

116 Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth, Die Schweigespirale: Öffentliche Meinung—unsere soziale Haut, Langen Müller, 2001, p. 210

117 Chargaff, Erwin, Das Feuer des Heraklit, Luchterhand, 1989, p. 229

118 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, p. 57

119 Chargaff, Erwin, Das Feuer des Heraklit, Luchterhand, 1989, Luchterhand, 1989, p. 229

120 Ibid., p. 209

121 Ibid., pp. 232-233

122 Super Size Me: Wer dauerhaft super size isst, endet beim XXL-Gewicht, medizin. de, 29 July 2004

123 Martindale, Diane, Burgers on the brain: Can you really get addicted to fast food? The evidence is piling up, and the lawyers are rubbing their hands, New Scientist, 1 February 2003

124 Dronda, Fernando, CD4 cell recovery during successful antiretroviral therapy in naive HIV-infected patients: the role of intravenous drug use, AIDS, 5 November 2004, pp. 2210-2212

125 Fast Food macht süchtig wie Heroin: New Scientist Studie warnt vor Burgers, Pommes und Co, naturkost.de, 3 February 2003

126 A high with your fries: Even if fast food is not as addictive as tobacco it still merits a health warning, New Scientist, 1 February 2003

127 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Krank durch tierisches Eiweiß: Eiweißspeicherkrankheiten— die unterschätzte Gefahr, Bio, December 2004, pp. 32-34

128 Campbell, Colin, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health, BenBella Books, 2005

129 Wendt, Lothar, Gesund werden durch Abbau von Eiweißüberschüssen. Wissenschaftliche Einführung in neueste Forschungsergebnisse der Eiweißspeicherkrankheiten, Schnitzer, 1987

130 Jede Hand hilft! Prominente unterstützen den Weltkindertag bei McDonald’s, news-ticker.org, 10 November 2005

131 McDonald’s-Website

132 DJV lehnt Reding-Vorschläge zum Product Placement ab, press release, Deutscher Journalisten-Verbandes (DJV), 13 December 2005

133 Stiftung Warentest, Die Andere Medizin: „Alternative“ Heilmethoden für Sie bewertet, Stiftung Warentest, 2005

134 Personal e-mail communication with Stiftung Warentest, 22 December 2005

135 Abbott, Alison, Gut reaction, Nature, 22 January 2004, p. 284

136 Tannock, Gerald, New Perceptions of the Gut Microbiota: Implications for Future Research, Gastroenterology Clinics, September 2005, p. 363

137 Fast Food macht süchtig wie Heroin: New Scientist Studie warnt vor Burgers, Pommes und Co, naturkost.de, 3 February 2003

138 Langosch, Angelika, Einfluss der Ernährung insbesondere der Rohkost auf die Darmflora und Infektabwehr, Institute for Medical Balneology and Climatology at the University of Munich, 1984 (dissertation), p. 89

139 Canibe, Nuria, An overview of the effect of organic acids on gut flora and gut health, Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Research Centre Foulum, 2002

140 Haysche Trennkost ist als langfristige Ernährungsform nicht zu empfehlen, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ernährung, 21 April 1998

141 Tunsky, Gary, The Battle For Health Is Over pH, Crusador, 2004

142 Lloyd, Tuhina, Lifestyle factors and the development of bone mass and bone strength in young women, Journal of Pediatrics, June 2004, pp. 776-82

143 Tylavsky, Frances, Fruit and vegetable intakes are an independent predictor of bone size in early pubertal children, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, February 2004, pp. 311-317

144 Sellmeyer, Deborah, A High Ratio of Dietary Animal to Vegetable Protein Increases the Rate of Bone Loss and the Risk of Fracture in Postmenopausal Women, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, March 2001, pp. 118-122

145 Campenhausen, Jutta, Sauer macht gebrechlich: Neuen Forschungen zufolge ist nicht Kalziummangel die Ursache für Knochenschwund, sondern ein ernährungsbedingte Übersäuerung des Körpers, Stern 49/1999, pp. 256-257

146 Die richtige Ernährung kann einer Osteoporose vorbeugen und sie günstig beeinflussen, brochure „Osteplus“ from Merckle Arzneimittel

147 Kruis, Wolfgang, Informationen über eine Therapiestudie: Rezidivprophylaxe bei Patienten mit Colitis ulcerosa durch Mutaflor im Vergleich zu Mesalazin, Der Bauchredner, 3/1996, p. 64

148 Personal interview with Francisco Guarner, 26 January 2006

149 Eckburg, Paul, Diversity of the human intestinal microbial flora, Science, 1 June 2005, pp. 1635-1638

150 Prados, Andrew, Milestones in gut microbiome science in 2019, www.gutmicrobiotaforhealth.com, 26 December 2019

151 Blech, Jörg, Leben auf dem Menschen: Die Geschichte unserer Besiedler, Rowohlt, 2000, p. 47

152 Abbott, Alison, Gut reaction, Nature, 22 January 2004, p. 285

153 Guarner, Francisco, Gut flora in health and disease, Lancet, 8 February 2003, pp. 512-519

154 E-Mail to te EU, 7 February 2006; no response

155 E-Mail to the DIFE, 7 February 2006; no response

156 Abbott, Alison, Gut reaction, Nature, 22 January 2004, p. 284

157 Probiotics for Human Health. European Commission, Research, see http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/quality-of-life/wonderslife/project05_en.html

158 Epstein, Samuel, The Stop Cancer Before It Starts Campaign, February 2003, p. 4, see www.preventcancer.com/press/pdfs/Stop_Cancer_Book.pdf

159 Hinsliff, Gaby, Drugs firms ”creating ills for every pill”: Expensive new medicines are oversold when cheaper therapies or prevention would work better, say MPs, The Observer, 3 April 2005

160 Abramson, John, Overdosed America, The Broken Promise of American Medicine: How The Pharmaceutical Companies Are Corrupting Science, Misleading Doctors, And Threatening Your Health, Harper Perennial, 2005, pp. 169-186

161 Greg Ciola, Health Maverick Turns Medical Science Upside Down, Interview mit dem Mediziner Gary Tunsky, Healthliesexposed.com, 23 December 2005, see www.healthliesexposed.com/articles/article_2005_12_23_3950.shtml

162 Blech, Jörg, Leben auf dem Menschen: Die Geschichte unserer Besiedler, Rowohlt, 2000, p. 204

163 Dubos, René, Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change, Harper&Brothers, 1959, p. 64

164 Jenuwein, Hans, Tropische Nutzpflanzen für Wintergarten und Terrasse, Ulmer, 1992, p. 22

165 Langbein, Kurt; Ehgartner, Bert, Das Medizinkartell: Die sieben Todsünden der Gesundheitsindustrie, Piper, 2003, p. 37

166 Burkart, Thomas, Pro- und Eukaryontenzellen, in: Mikrobiologie/Infektiologie (Grundlagen), Thema 02, Institut für Infektionskrankheiten der Universität Bern; see www.ifik.unibe.ch/uploads/education/02_pro_und_eukaryontenzellen.pdf

167 Loibner, Johann, Bakterien, die Gesundheitserreger; see www.aegis.at

168 Alfred-Nissle-Gesellschaft, Darmflora und chronische entzündliche Darmerkrankungen: Colitis ulcerosa, Morbus Crohn, Hagen, 2002; see www.rationale-phytotherapie.de/de/pdfs/buecherbroschueren/patienten_ced.pdf

169 Blech, Jörg, Leben auf dem Menschen: Die Geschichte unserer Besiedler, Rowohlt, 2000, p. 201

170 Nicholson, Jeremy, The challenges of modeling mammalian biocomplexity, Nature Biotechnology, 6 October 2004, p. 1270

171 Personal Interview, E-Mail from Jeremy Nicholson, 23 January 2005

172 Dubos, René, Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change, Harper&Brothers, 1959, p. 70

173 Ibid., p. 69

174 Ibid., p. 74

175 Ibid., p. 71

176 Null, Gary; Dean, Caroly, Death by Medicine, December 2003, see www.mercola.com/2003/nov/26/death_by_medicine.htm

177 Null, Gary M. et al., Death by Medicine, Praktikos Books, 2010

178 Dubos, René, Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change, Harper&Brothers, 1959, p. 64

179 Lazarou, Jason, Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients: a meta-analysis of prospective studies, The Journal of the American Medical Association, 15 April 1998, pp. 1200-1205

180 Suh Dong-Churl, Clinical and economic impact of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients, The Annals of Pharmacotherapy, December 2000, pp. 1373-1379

181 US Food and Drug Administration, Antibiotic Resistance; see www.fda.gov/oc/opacom/hottopics/anti_resist.html

182 Lönnroth, Anna, Eindämmung der mikrobiellen Resistenz, FTE info—Magazin für die europäische Forschung, published by the European Commission, May 2003, pp. 32-34

183 Grayston, Thomas, Azithromycin for the Secondary Prevention of Coronary Events, New England Journal of Medicine, 21 April 2005, pp. 1637-1645

184 Dubos, René, Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change, Harper&Brothers, 1959, p. 75

185 Dubos, René, Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change, Harper&Brothers, 1959, pp. 75, 90-91

186 Maggots eat away need for wound surgery, ABC News Online, 13 May 2005

187 Website of the Institute Pasteur de Lille, see www.pasteur-lille.fr/fr/accueil/Nature_medicaments.htm

188 Golub, Edward, The Limits of Medicine: How Science Shapes Our Hope for the Cure, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 166

189 Ibid., pp. 160-173

190 Ibid., p. 169

191 Brandt, Allan, No Magic Bullet: A Social History Of Venereal Disease In The United States Since 1880, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 161

192 Strahm, Barbara, Vom Bioterror zum Thema gemacht. Jenseits von Hysterie und Panikmache: Ein sachlicher Blick in die Geschichte der Pockenerkrankung und Pockenimpfung, Die Tagespost, 22 February 2003

193 Dubos, René, Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change, Harper&Brothers, 1959, p. 90

194 Robert Koch Institut fordert dringende Vorbereitung auf Pocken-Impfungen, WELT.de, 13 January 2003

195 Miller, Neil, Vaccines: Are They Really Safe & Effective?, New Atlantean Press, 2005, p. 74

196 Shelton, Herbert, Vaccine and Serum Evils, Health Research, 1966, p. 23

197 Miller, Neil, Vaccines: Are They Really Safe & Effective?, New Atlantean Press, 2005, pp. 75-76

198 Ibid., pp. 76-77

199 Ibid., p. 80

200 Buchwald, Gerhard, Impfen. Das Geschäft mit der Angst, Knaur, 1997, pp. 24-27

201 Karberg, Sascha, Mit den spitzen Waffen eines Virus, Financial Times Deutschland, 3 May 2005

202 Engelbrecht, Torsten; Crowe, David, Avian Flu Virus H5N1: No Proof for Existence, Pathogenicity, or Pandemic Potential; Non-“H5N1” Causation Omitted, Medical Hypotheses, 4/2006; pp. 855-857

203 Houghton, Michael (Mit-Entdecker des HC-Virus): „Where is the hepatitis C virus? Has anybody seen it?,“ At the 8th International HCV Congress in Paris in 2001

204 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, A critique of the Montagnier evidence for the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, Medical Hypotheses, 4/2004, pp. 597-601

205 de Harven, Etienne, Problems with isolating HIV, Vortrag auf einem Symposium des EU-Parlaments in Brüssel am 8 December 2003, see: www.altheal.org/texts/isolhiv.htm

206 Personal e-mail communication

207 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, Is a Positive Western Blot Proof of HIV Infection?, Nature Biotechnology, June 1993, pp. 696-707

208 Brown, Terence, The Polymerase Chain Reaction, in: Genomes, chapter 4.3., Bios Scientific Publishers, 2002

209 See page 76 under http://www.tig.org.za/Parenzee_prosecution_transcripts/Gallo_complete.pdf

210 Einblick in den Bauplan des Menschen—Seite 2, Nationales Genomforschungsnetz, see www.ngfn.de/17_489.htm

211 Kremer, Heinrich, Die stille Revolution der Krebs- und AIDS-Medizin, Ehlers, p. 173

212 Buzás, Edit I. et al., Antibiotic-induced release of small extracellular vesicles (exosomes) with surface-associated DNA, Scientific Reports, 15 August 2017

213 Grolle, Johann, Siege, aber kein Sieg, Der Spiegel, 29/1995

214 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, Oxidative Stress, HIV and AIDS, Research in Immunology, February 1992, pp. 145-148

215 Meyerhans, Andreas, Temporal fluctuations in HIV quasispecies in vivo are not reflected by sequential HIV isolations, Cell, 8 September 1989, pp. 901-10

216 Burnet, Sir MacFarlane, Genes, Dreams and Realities, Medical and Technical Publishing, 1971, pp. 217-218

217 Geison, Gerald, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, Princeton University Press, 1995

218 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, pp. 69-71

219 Georgescu, Vlad, Lebensmittelverpackungen: Weichmacher könnte Hirngewebe schädigen, Spiegel Online, 13 December 2005

220 McClintock, Barbara, The Significance of Responses of The Genome to Challenge, Nobel speech, 8 December 1983

221 Scobey, Ralph, Is Human Poliomyelitis Caused By An Exogenous Virus?, Archives of Pediatrics, April 1954, Vol. 71, pp. 111-123

222 Kremer, Heinrich, Die stille Revolution der Krebs- und AIDS-Medizin, Ehlers, pp. 11-99, 169-208

223 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, Reappraisal of AIDS: Is the Oxidation caused by the risk factors the primary cause?, Medical Hypotheses, March 1988, pp. 151-162

224 Barbara McClintock, Wikipedia-Website, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Mc-Clintock

225 McClintock, Barbara, Letter from Barbara McClintock to J. R. S. Fincham, 16 May 1973, see profiles.nlm.nih.gov/LL/B/B/G/C/_/llbbgc.pdf

226 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, pp. 238-239

227 Rice, George, The structure of a thermophilic archaeal virus shows a double-stranded DNA viral capsid type that spans all doMayns of life, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 18 May 2004, pp. 7716-7720

228 Sogin, Mitchell, Microbial diversity in the deep sea and the underexplored “rare biosphere,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A., 8 August 2006, pp. 12115-12120

229 Ocean Microbe Census Discovers Diverse World of Rare Bacteria, news release from the Marine Biological Laboratory, 31 July 2006, pp. 1-2

230 Drehscheibe für Viren, Meldung des Wissenschaftlicher Informationsdienst des Europäischen Instituts für Lebensmittel- und Ernährungswissenschaften (EU.L.E.) e.V., 2/2000

231 Nickels, Stefan, Feindliche Übernahme, Financial Times Deutschland, 3 January 2006

232 Verner, Robinson, Rational Bacteriology, chapter 18: The Bacteriophage, H. Wolff, 1953

233 Postgate, John, Microbiology and me in 1952, Microbiology Today, February 2003, p. 5

234 van Helvoort, Ton, When Did Virology Start? Despite discoveries of nearly a century ago, the unifying concept underpinning this discipline dates more recently to the 1950s, American Society for Microbiology News, 3/1996, p. 144

235 Verner, Robinson, Rational Bacteriology, chapter 18: The Bacteriophage, H. Wolff, 1953

236 van Helvoort, Ton, When Did Virology Start? Despite discoveries of nearly a century ago, the unifying concept underpinning this discipline dates more recently to the 1950s, American Society for Microbiology News, 3/1996, p. 145

Chapter 2

The Microbe Hunters Seize Power

237 Handel, Ted, Thomas Edison Home & Laboratory (Ft. Meyers, Fl.), Besuchsbericht, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, see infohost.nmt. edu/~bridge/032298.html

238 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, p. 68

239 Enserink, Martin, Virology. Old guard urges virologists to go back to basics, Science, 6 July 2001, p. 24

240 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, p. 65

241 McCarthy, Michael, Lies, Damn lies, and scientific research (Rezension des Buches The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science von Horace Judson, Harcourt, 2004), Lancet, 6 November 2004, p. 1657

242 Verner, Robinson, Rational Bacteriology, chapter 56: Four False Dogmas Of Pasteur, H. Wolff, 1953

243 Moschocwitz, Eli, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Charles Pfizer, 1958, pp. 17-32

244 Langbein, Kurt; Ehgartner, Bert, Das Medizinkartell: Die sieben Todsünden der Gesundheitsindustrie, Piper, 2003, p. 27

245 de Kruif, Paul, Mikrobenjäger, 1941, Institut Orell Füssli, p. 94

246 Verner, Robinson, Rational Bacteriology, chapter 39: The Biont Cycle, H. Wolff, 1953

247 Wostmann, Bernard, Development of cecal distention in germ-free baby rats, American Journal of Physiology, December 1959, pp. 1345-1346

248 Verner, Robinson, Rational Bacteriology, chapter 39: The Biont Cycle, H. Wolff, 1953

249 O’Brien, Catheryn, The Mouse, Part 1, ANZCCART News insert, Winter 1993, p. 1

250 Wostmann, Bernard, Qualitative adequacy of a chemically defined liquid diet for reproducing germfree mice, Journal of Nutrition, May 1970, p. 498-508

251 National Research Council, Nutrient Requirements of Laboratory Animals, fourth revised edition, National Academy Press, 1995, p. 4

252 Wostmann, Bernard, Nutrition and metabolism of the germfree mammal, World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics, 1975, Vol. 22, pp. 40-92

253 Wostmann, Bernard, Development of cecal distention in germ-free baby rats, American Journal of Physiology, December 1959, pp. 1345-1346

254 Recessive Hairlessness: The “True Hairless” Rat, The Rat & Mouse Club of America, April 2003, see www.rmca.org/Articles/truehairless.htm

255 Snyder Sachs, Jessica, Are Anitbiotics Killing Us?, Discover, 10 October 2005

256 Langbein, Kurt; Ehgartner, Bert, Das Medizinkartell: Die sieben Todsünden der Gesundheitsindustrie, Piper, 2003, pp. 21-33

257 Geison, Gerald, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, Princeton University Press, 1995

258 Langbein, Kurt; Ehgartner, Bert, Das Medizinkartell: Die sieben Todsünden der Gesundheitsindustrie, Piper, 2003, S. 22

259 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, pp. 68-71

260 Ibid., p. 65

261 Geison, Gerald, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, Princeton University Press, 1995

262 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, p. 30

263 Ibid., p. 20

264 Ibid., p. 27

265 Engelbrecht, Torsten, „Die Industrie macht Druck,“ interview with Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, on editorial autonomy, fraud in science and the purpose of peer reviewing, Message, 3/2005, p. 69

266 Martinson, Brian, Scientists behaving badly, Nature, 9 June 2005, pp. 737-738

267 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, p. 39

268 McCarthy, Michael, Lies, Damn lies, and scientific research (Rezension des Buches The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science von Horace Judson, Harcourt, 2004), Lancet, 6 November 2004, p. 1658

269 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, pp. 244-286

270 Engelbrecht, Torsten, „Die Industrie macht Druck,“ interview with Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, on editorial autonomy, fraud in science and the purpose of peer reviewing, Message, 3/2005, pp. 68-69

271 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, p. 276

272 Smith, Richard, The Future of Peer Review, 1999, in: Godlee, Fiona; Jefferson, Tom, Peer Review in Health Sciences, BMJ Books, 2003

273 McCarthy, Michael, Lies, Damn lies, and scientific research (Rezension des Buches The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science von Horace Judson, Harcourt, 2004), Lancet, 6 November 2004, pp. 1657-1658

274 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, pp. 43-154, 191-243

275 Stollorz, Volker, Der große Irrtum des Doktor Koch, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 25 September 2005

276 Gradmann, Cristoph, Krankheit im Labor. Robert Koch und die medizinische Bakteriologie, Wallstein, 2005, pp. 134-135

277 Daniel, Thomas, Captain of Death. The Story of Tuberculosis, Rochester, 1997, p. 76

278 Langbein, Kurt; Ehgartner, Bert, Das Medizinkartell: Die sieben Todsünden der Gesundheitsindustrie, Piper, 2003, p. 67

279 Porter, Roy, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: a Medical History of Humanity, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997, p. 441

280 Langbein, Kurt; Ehgartner, Bert, Das Medizinkartell: Die sieben Todsünden der Gesundheitsindustrie, Piper, 2003, p. 68

281 Stollorz, Volker, Der große Irrtum des Doktor Koch, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 25 September 2005

282 Langbein, Kurt; Ehgartner, Bert, Das Medizinkartell: Die sieben Todsünden der Gesundheitsindustrie, Piper, 2003, p. 68

283 Stollorz, Volker, Der große Irrtum des Doktor Koch, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 25 September 2005

284 Langbein, Kurt; Ehgartner, Bert, Das Medizinkartell: Die sieben Todsünden der Gesundheitsindustrie, Piper, 2003, pp. 69-70

285 Williams, Robert, Toward the Conquest of Beriberi, Harvard University Press, 1961, p. 18

286 Golub, Edward, The Limits of Medicine: How Science Shapes Our Hope for the Cure, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 37-40

287 Ibid., pp. 150-151

288 Ibid., pp. 37-40

289 Ibid., p. 103

290 Langbein, Kurt; Ehgartner, Bert, Das Medizinkartell: Die sieben Todsünden der Gesundheitsindustrie, Piper, 2003, p. 51

291 Golub, Edward, The Limits of Medicine: How Science Shapes Our Hope for the Cure, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 97

292 Ibid., p. 100

293 Ibid., p. 99

294 Ibid., p. 103

295 Ibid., p. 109

296 Keller, Evelyn, Barbara McClintock. Die Entdeckerin der springenden Gene, Birkhäuser, 1995, pp. 202-203

297 Burnet, Sir Frank Macfarlane, Genes, Dreams and Realities, Medical and Technical Publishing, 1971, p. 145

298 Furger, Sonja, Mit Rohkost gegen die Degeneration. Vor 100 Jahren: Max Bircher-Benner gründet das Sanatorium „Lebendige Kraft“, Schweizerische Ärztezeitung, 5/2004, pp. 236-238

299 McClintock, Barbara, The Significance of Responses of The Genome to Challenge, Nobelpreisrede, 8 December 1983

300 Cannon, Walter, The Wisdom of the Body, Norton, 1932

301 Zajicek, Gershom, Wisdom of the body, Medical Hypotheses, May 1999, pp. 447-449

302 Doughty, Howard, The Limits of Medicine, Rezension des Buches The Limits of Medicine von Edward Golub (The University of Chicago Press, 1997), The Innovation Journal

303 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, pp. 137-141

304 Ibid., p. 134

305 Ibid., pp. 137-145

306 Ibid., pp. 137-138

307 Etheridge, Elizabeth, Sentinel for Health: History of the Centers for Disease Control, University of California Press, 1992, p. 334

308 Tracey, Michael, Mere Smoke of Opinion; AIDS and the making of the public mind, Continuum, Summer/Fall 2001

309 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 138

310 Lemonick, Michael, Return to the Hot Zone, Time International, 22 May 1995, p. 56-57

311 Signs that Ebola Virus Is Fading Away, San Francisco Chronicle, 24 May 1995, p. A6

312 Sandler, Benjamin, Vollwerternährung schützt vor Viruserkrankungen: Das Drama unserer Gesundheitspolitik am Beispiel Kinderlähmung, emu-Verlag, 1986

313 Miller, Neil, Vaccines: Are They Really Safe & Effective?, New Atlantean Press, 2005, p. 14

314 McCloskey, Bertram, The relation of prophylactic inoculations to the onset of poliomyletis, Lancet, 18 April 1950, pp. 659-663

315 Geffen DH, The incidence of paralysis occurring in London children within four weeks after immunization, Medical Officer, 1950, pp. 137–40

316 Martin JK, Local paralysis in children after injections, Archives of Disease in Childhood, 1950, pp. 1-14

317 Roberts, Janine, Polio: the virus and the vaccine, The Ecologist, May 2004, p. 36

318 West, Jim, Pesticides and Polio: A Critique of the Scientific Literature, The Weston A. Price Foundation

319 Scobey, Ralph, The Poison Cause of Poliomyelitis And Obstructions To Its Investigation. Statement prepared for the Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products, United States House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., Archives Of Pediatrics, April 1952, Vol. 69, pp. 172-173

320 Roberts, Janine, Polio: the virus and the vaccine, The Ecologist, May 2004, p. 36

321 Ibid., pp. 36-37

322 Chronological History of the Development of Insecticides and Control Equipment from 1854 through 1954, Clemson University Pesticide Information Program, see entweb.clemson.edu/pesticid/history.htm

323 Lovett, Robert, The Occurrence Of Infantile Paralysis In Massachusetts In 1908, Reported For The Massachusetts State Board Of Health, Boston Medical And Surgical Journal, 22 July 1909, p. 112

324 Roberts, Janine, Polio: the virus and the vaccine, The Ecologist, May 2004, p. 36

325 Landsteiner, Karl; Popper, Erwin, Übertragung der Poliomyelitis acuta auf Affen, Zeitschrift für Immunitätsforschung und experimentelle Therapie, number 4, 1909, pp. 377-390

326 Landsteiner, Karl; Popper, Erwin, Wiener Klinische Wochnschirift, Vol. 21, 1908, p. 1830

327 Milestones in Poliomyelitis Eradication, World Health Organization Europe, 12 August 2003, see www.euro.who.int/document/pol/eeurotime2003.pdf

328 Ibid., p. 37

329 Zell, Roland, Medizinische Virologie. Picornavirusinfektionen, lecture at the Medical Faculty of the University of Jena, see www.med.uni-jena.de/virologie/zell/lehre/Vorlesung_3-Picornavirusinfektionen.pdf

330 Dimercaprol (BAL), Krause & Pachernegg, see www.kup.at/db/antidota/dimercaprol.html

331 Scobey, Ralph, The Poison Cause of Poliomyelitis And Obstructions To Its Investigation. Statement prepared for the Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products, United States House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., Archives Of Pediatrics, April 1952, Vol. 69, pp. 172-193

332 Eskwith, Irwin, Empirical Administration of BAL In One Case of Poliomyelitis, American Journal of Diseases of Diseases of Children, May 1951, pp. 684-686

333 Ibid., p. 37

334 Eggers, Hans, Milestones in Early Poliomyelitis Research (1840 to 1949), Journal of Virology, June 1999, pp. 4533-4535

335 Landsteiner, Karl; Popper, Erwin, Übertragung der Poliomyelitis acuta auf Affen, Zeitschrift für Immunitätsforschung und experimentelle Therapie, number 4,1909

336 Flexner, Simon; Lewis, Paul, The transmission of acute poliomyelitis to monkeys, Journal of the American Medical Association, 13 November 1909, p. 1639

337 Comroe, Julius, How to Succeed in Failing without Really Trying, American Review of Respiratory Disease, 1976, Vol. 14, p. 630

338 Scobey, Ralph, The Poison Cause of Poliomyelitis And Obstructions To Its Investigation. Statement prepared for the Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products, United States House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., Archives of Pediatrics, April 1952, pp. 172-193

339 Flexner, Simon; Lewis, Paul, The transmission of acute poliomyelitis to monkeys, Journal of the American Medical Association, 13 November 1909, p. 1639

340 Landsteiner, Karl; Popper, Erwin, Übertragung der Poliomyelitis acuta auf Affen, Zeitschrift für Immunitätsforschung und experimentelle Therapie, number 4 1909, pp. 377-390

341 Scobey, Ralph, The Poison Cause of Poliomyelitis And Obstructions To Its Investigation. Statement prepared for the Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products, United States House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., Archives of Pediatrics, April 1952, Vol. 69, pp. 172-193

342 Scobey, Ralph, Is The Public Health Law Responsible For The Poliomyelitis Mystery?, Archives of Pediatrics, May 1951, Vol. 68, pp. 220-232

343 Ostrom, Neenyh, Will The Poliovirus Eradication Program Rid the World of Childhood Paralysis?, Chronic Illnet, 20 April 2001, see http://www.chronicillnet.org/articles/paralyticpolio.html

344 Roberts, Janine, Polio: the virus and the vaccine, The Ecologist, May 2004, p. 38

345 Scobey, Ralph, The Poison Cause of Poliomyelitis And Obstructions To Its Investigation. Statement prepared for the Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products, United States House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., Archives of Pediatrics, April 1952, Vol. 69, pp. 172-193

346 Organisationen fordern mehr Impfungen gegen Polio, Ärzte Zeitung (online), 28 October 2005

347 Roberts, Janine, Polio: the virus and the vaccine, The Ecologist, May 2004, p. 39

348 Spice, Byron, Developing a medical milestone: the Salk polio vaccine: The Salk vaccine: 50 years later, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (online), 3 April 2005

349 Bayly, Beddow, The Story of the Salk Anti-poliomyelitis Vaccine, Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society, 1956, chapters: Many Monkeys needed in Vaccine Production, Ban on Export by Indian Government?, see www.whale.to/vaccine/bayly.html#HUMAN-TISSUE%20VIRUS

350 Scobey, Ralph, The Poison Cause of Poliomyelitis And Obstructions To Its Investigation. Statement prepared for the Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products, United States House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., Archives of Pediatrics, April 1952, Vol. 69, p. 187

351 Roberts, Janine, Polio: the virus and the vaccine, The Ecologist, May 2004, p. 39

352 Ibid., p. 42

353 Bayly, Beddow, The Story of the Salk Anti-poliomyelitis Vaccine, Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society, 1956, capter “Claims for the Salk Vaccine”

354 Ibid., chapter: The Salk Vaccine Disaster

355 Roberts, Janine, Polio: the virus and the vaccine, The Ecologist, May 2004, p. 42

356 Bayly, Beddow, The Story of the Salk Anti-poliomyelitis Vaccine, Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society, 1956, chapter: The Salk Vaccine Disaster

357 Officer Profiles: Neal Nathanson, Website der Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC

358 Bayly, Beddow, The Story of the Salk Anti-poliomyelitis Vaccine, Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society, 1956, chapter: The Salk Vaccine Disaster

359 Miller, Neil, Vaccines: Are They Really Safe & Effective?, New Atlantean Press, 2005, p. 14

360 Biskind, Morton, Statement on clinical intoxication from DDT and other new insecticides, Journal of Insurance Medicine, March-May 1951, pp. 5-12

361 Biskind, Morton, Public Health Aspects of the New Insecticides, American Journal of Digestive Diseases, November 1953, Vol. 20, p. 334

362 Sabin, Albert, The Epidemiology of Poliomyelitis. Problems at Home and Among Armed Forces Abroad, Journal of the American Medical Association, 28 June 1947, pp. 754-755

363 Dichlordiphenyltrichlorethan (DDT), Wikipedia-Website, see de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

364 Russell, Edmund, The Strange Career of DDT: Experts, Federal Capacity, and Environmentalism in World War II, Technology and Culture, Vol. 40, Nummer 4, October 1999, pp. 770-796

365 Biskind, Morton, Public Health Aspects of the New Insecticides, American Journal of Digestive Diseases, November 1953, Vol. 20, pp. 331-341

366 Biskind, Morton; Bieber, Irving, DDT poisoning: a new syndrome with neuropsychiatric manifestations; American Journal Of Psychotherapy; April 1949, p. 261

367 Dichlordiphenyltrichlorethan (DDT), Wikipedia-Website, see de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

368 Zimmerman, Oswald; Lavine, Irvin DDT. Killer of Killers, Dover, N.H., Industrial Research Service, 1946

369 Dichlordiphenyltrichlorethan (DDT), Wikipedia-Website, see de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

370 West, Jim, Pesticides and Polio, Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, June 2000, pp. 68-75, see www.geocities.com/harpub/overview.htm?20056

371 Biskind, Morton, Public Health Aspects of the New Insecticides, American Journal of Digestive Diseases, November 1953, Vol. 20, pp. 331-341

372 Dresden, Daniel, Physiological Investigations Into The Action Of DDT, G.W. Van Der Wiel & Co., Arnhem, 1949

373 Harrison, Tinsley, Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, McGraw-Hill, 1983, p. 1130

374 Biskind, Morton, Public Health Aspects of the New Insecticides, American Journal of Digestive Diseases, November 1953, Vol. 20, p. 334

375 Biskind, Morton, Public Health Aspects of the New Insecticides, American Journal of Digestive Diseases, November 1953, Vol. 20, p. 332

376 Biskind, Morton; Bieber, Irving, DDT poisoning: a new syndrome with neuropsychiatric manifestations; American Journal Of Psychotherapy; April 1949, p. 261

377 Biskind, Morton, Public Health Aspects of the New Insecticides, American Journal of Digestive Diseases, November 1953, Vol. 20, p. 332

378 Roberts, Janine, Polio: the virus and the vaccine, The Ecologist, May 2004, p. 39

379 Busse, Franziska, Als erstes Land der Welt verbietet Schweden den Einsatz von DDT. Vor 35 Jahren, DeutschlandRadio Berlin, 27 March 2005

380 Roberts, Janine, Polio: the virus and the vaccine, The Ecologist, May 2004, p. 39

381 West, Jim, Pesticides and Polio: A Critique of the Scientific Literature, The Weston A. Price Foundation

382 West, Jim, Pesticides and Polio, see http://www.geocities.com/harpub/overview.htm?20056

383 Worse Than Insects? TIME, 11 April 1949, see http://scitech.quickfound.net/environment/insecticides_news_index.html

384 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, Houghton Mifflin, 1962

385 Daniel, Pete, Toxic Drift. Pesticides And Health In The Post-World War II South, Louisiana State University Press, 2005, p. 82

386 Daniel, Pete, Toxic Drift. Pesticides And Health In The Post-World War II South, Louisiana State University Press, 2005, pp. 2, 16, 20-21, 33

387 Ibid., p. 81

388 Cottam, Clarence, The Handbook of Texas Online, see www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/CC/fcoav_print.html

389 Daniel, Pete, Toxic Drift. Pesticides And Health In The Post-World War II South, Louisiana State University Press, 2005, p. 34

390 Ibid., p. 79

391 Ibid., p. 72

392 Ibid., p. 82

393 Scobey, Ralph, The Poison Cause of Poliomyelitis And Obstructions To Its Investigation. Statement prepared for the Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products, United States House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., Archives Of Pediatrics, April 1952, Vol. 69, pp. 172-173

394 de Harven, Etienne, The Recollections of an Electron Microscopist, Reappraising AIDS, November/December 1998

395 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 96

396 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Schuss auf den Matrosen, interview with US molecular biologist and cancer expert Peter Duesberg on anti-smoking campaigns, gene-mutations, aneuploidy, and the failure of the established cancer research, Freitag, 27 April 2005, p. 18

397 de Harven, Etienne, The Recollections of an Electron Microscopist, Reappraising AIDS, November/December 1998

398 Duesberg, Peter, The Enigma of Slow Viruses, review of the book “Facts and Artefactcs. Archives of Virology” from Pawel Liberski (published at Springer), Lancet, 18 September 1993, p. 720

399 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 99

400 Duesberg, Peter, Human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome: correlation but not causation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A, February 1989 Feb, pp. 755-764

401 Gajdusek, Carleton, Unconventional Viruses and the Origin and Disappearance of Kuru, Nobelpreisrede, 13 December 1976, see p. 316 at nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1976/gajdusek-lecture.pdf

402 Köhnlein, Claus, AIDS, Hepatitis C, BSE: Infectious or Intoxication Diseases?, Continuum, Fall 2001

403 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 77

404 Kolata, Gina, Anthropologists Suggest Cannibalism Is A Myth, Science, 20 June 1986, pp. 1497-1500

405 Scholz, Roland, Überlegungen zur Genese der bovinen spongiformen Encephalopathie (BSE), Biolab-Website, see http://www.biolab-muenchen.de/index.html?rightframe=http://www.biolab-muenchen.de/bse/scholz01.htm

406 Ibid.

407 See www.bigfootsurplus.com/bigfoot_tracker/03-0010.php

408 Hartlaub, Peter, Sasquatch: Kitsch of death, San Francisco Examiner, 7 August 2000

409 Stöcker, Christian, Kryptozoologie. Auf großem Fuß im Regenwald, Spiegel Online, 29 December 2005

410 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, A Brief History of Retroviruses, Continuum, Winter 1997/1998, p. 27

411 Beard, J. W., Physical methods for the analysis of cells, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 16 December 1957, pp. 530-544

412 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, A Brief History of Retroviruses, Continuum, Winter 1997/1998, p. 28

413 Sinoussi, Françoise; Cherman, Jean Claude. Purification and partial differentiation of the particles of murine sarcoma virus (M. MSV) according to their sedimentation rates in sucrose density gradients, Spectra 1973, Vol. 4, pp. 237-243

414 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, A Brief History of Retroviruses, Continuum, Winter 1997/1998, p. 29

415 Personal interview, 1 February 2006

416 de Harven, Etienne, Of Mice And Men; Viral Etiology Of Human Cancer: A historical perspective, Continuum, Summer/Fall 2001

417 On 12 July, 2005, we requested supporting studies from the German Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for the claims that (1) various viruses (SARS, Hepatitis C, HIV, Ebola, smallpox, polio) as well as the BSE-causing agent have been purified, fully characterized, and photographed by electron microscopy, that (2) these agents are transmissible and pathogenic to humans, and that (3) other possible causes for observed diseases (e.g., nutrition, pesticides, stress) can be ruled out. On 29 November, 2005, we also requested the same supporting studies from the German Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut (FLI) in relation to so-called H5N1—but we haven’t received any study yet delivering the clear-cut proofs for these claims, neither from the RKI nor from the FLI

418 Goodman, Jordan; Walsh, Vivien ,The Story of Taxol: Nature and Politics in the Pursuit of an Anti-Cancer Drug, Cambridge University Press, 2001

419 de Harven, Etienne, The Recollections of an Electron Microscopist, Reappraising AIDS, November/December 1998

420 Oberling, Charles, Krebs: das Rätsel seiner Entstehung, Rowohlt, 1959

421 de Harven, Etienne, Remarks on Viruses, Leukemia and Electron Microscopy, in: Methodological approaches to the study of leukemias; a symposium held at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, 5 and 6 April 1965, Defendi, Vittorio, The Wistar Institute Symposium Monograph, September 1965, pp. 147-156

422 Weihe, Wolfgang, Klinische Studien und Statistik: Von der Wahrscheinlichkeit des Irrtums, Deutsches Ärzteblatt, 26 March 2004, p. C681

423 Begley, Sharon, New Journals Bet. ‘Negative Results’ Save Time, Money, Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2006; p. B1

424 Sharav, Vera, Negative Research Results—Mostly Concealed in Journals, press release, Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), 26 Novembe 2006

425 Bernhard, W.; Leplus, R., Fine structure of the normal and malignant human lymph node, Pergamon Press, 1965

426 Bernhard, W.; Leplus, R., Fine structure of the normal and malignant human lymph node, Pergamon Press, 1964

427 de Harven, Etienne, The Recollections of an Electron Microscopist, Reappraising AIDS, November/December 1998

428 de Harven, Etienne, Structure of virus particles partially purified from the blood of leukemic mice, Virology, May 1964, pp. 119-124

429 de Harven, Etienne, Structure of critical point dried oncornaviruses, Virology, October 1973, pp. 535-540

430 de Harven, Etienne, The Recollections of an Electron Microscopist, Reappraising AIDS, November/December 1998

431 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, pp. 121-122

432 de Harven, Etienne, Of Mice And Men; Viral Etiology Of Human Cancer: A historical perspective, Continuum, Summer/Fall 2001

433 Wade, Nicholas, Scientists and the Press: Cancer Scare Story That Wasn’t, Science, Volume 1974, 1971, Vol. 174, pp. 679-680

434 Temin, Howard, RNA-dependent DNA polymerase in virions of Rous sarcoma virus, Nature, 27 June 1970, pp. 1211-1213

435 Baltimore, David, Viral RNA-dependent DNA polymerase, Nature, 27 June 1970, pp. 1209-1211

436 The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1975, Nobelprize.org, see nobelprize. org/medicine/laureates/1975/

437 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, p. 67

438 The Australian Perth Group commenting the paper written by Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier “The discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS” (New England Journal of Medicine, 11 December 2003, pp. 2283-2285): „… all the HIV experts including Gallo and Montagnier have proven the presence of the enzyme indirectly, that is, by transcription of the synthetic template-primer An.dT,” see www.theperthgroup.com/REJECTED/GalloMontagNEJM.html

439 de Harven, Etienne, The Recollections of an Electron Microscopist, Reappraising AIDS, November/December 1998

440 Montagnier, Luc; Barré-Sinoussi, Françoise; Cherman, Jean Claude, Isolation of a T-lymphotropic retrovirus from a patient at risk for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), Science, 20 May. 1983, pp. 868-71

441 Temin, Howard; Baltimore, David, RNA-directed DNA synthesis and RNA tumor viruses, Advances in Virus Research, 1972; Vol. 17, pp. 129-186

442 Sinoussi, Françoise; Chermann, Jjean Claude, Purification and partial differentiation of the particles of murine sarcoma virus (M. MSV) according to their sedimentation rates in sucrose density gradients, Spectra 1973, pp. 237-243

443 Enserink, Martin, Virology. Old guard urges virologists to go back to basics, Science, 6 July 2001, p. 24

444 H. pylori nicht der einzige Magenbewohner?—Hinweis auf weitere exotische Bakterien, Deutsches Ärzteblatt (online), 9 January 2006

445 Bik, Elisabeth, Molecular analysis of the bacterial microbiota in the human stomach, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 17 January 2006, pp. 732-737

446 Moss, Ralph, Fragwürdige Chemotherapie, . Entscheidungshilfen für die Krebsbehandlung, Haug, 1997, pp. 36-38

447 Miklos, George, The Human Cancer Genome Project—one more misstep in the war on cancer, Nature Biotechnology, May 2005, pp. 535-537

448 Epstein, Samuel, Losing the ”War Against Cancer”: A Need for Public Policy Reforms, International Journal of Health Services and Molecular Biology, 4 February 1992, pp. 455-469

449 Moss, Ralph, Fragwürdige Chemotherapie, . Entscheidungshilfen für die Krebsbehandlung, Haug, 1997, p. 35

450 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Aneuploidie. Paradigmenwechsel in der Krebstherapie, Co’Med, 8/2005, pp. 30-35

451 Miklos, George, Iconoclast to the Max, review of the book „Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS” von Harvey Bialy (published by North Atlantic), Nature Biotechnology, July 2004, pp. 815-816

452 Halter, Hans, „Wir müssen den steinigen Weg gehen,“ Der Spiegel, 18/1986

453 Wecht, Cyril, The Swine Flu Immunization Program: Scientific Venture or Political Folly?, Legal Medicine Annual, 1978, pp. 227-244

454 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, pp. 141-143

455 Red Cross Knew of AIDS Blood Threat, San Francisco Chronicle, 16 May 1994

456 Mullis, Kary, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Vintage Books, 1998, p. 177

457 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 124

458 Mullis, Kary, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Vintage Books, 1998, p. 177

Chapter 3

AIDS: From Spare Tire to Multibillion-Dollar Business

459 Mullis, Kary, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Vintage Books, 1998, pp. 171-174

460 Grolle, Johann, Siege, aber kein Sieg, Der Spiegel, 29/1995

461 Smith, Richard, Milton and Galileo would back the BMJ on free speech, Nature, 22 January 2004; p. 287

462 Kruse, Kuno; Schwarz, Birgit, Die Apokalypse wird abgesagt, Die Zeit, 15 June 1990

463 AIDS: Die Bombe ist gelegt, Der Spiegel, 45/1984

464 AIDS: eine neue Krankheit erschüttert Deutschland, Bild der Wissenschaft, 12/1985

465 Morganthau, Tom, AIDS: Grim Prospects, Newsweek, 10 November, 1986, pp. 20-21

466 HIV/AIDS in Deutschland: Eckdaten (at the end of 2005), Website of the Robert Koch Institute

467 Suspension of Disbelief??, Health Education AIDS Liaison (HEAL), Toronto, see http://healtoronto.com/aidsdrop.html

468 Marcus, Ulrich, Glück gehabt? Zwei Jahrzehnte AIDS in Deutschland, Blackwell, 2000, S. 10

469 Lang, Serge, Challenges; Springer, New York, 1998, p. 610

470 Fiala, Christian, Lieben wir gefährlich? Ein Arzt auf der Suche nach Fakten und Hintergründen von AIDS, Deuticke, 1997, p. 202

471 Keou, François-Xavier, World Health Organization clinical case definition for AIDS in Africa: an analysis of evaluations, East African Medical Journal, October 1992, pp. 550-553

472 Lang, Serge, Challenges; Springer, New York, 1998, pp. 610-611

473 de Harven, Etienne, Of Mice And Men; Viral Etiology Of Human Cancer: A historical perspective, Continuum, Summer/Fall 2001

474 Mbeki, Thabo, A synthesis report of the deliberations by the panel of experts invited by the President of the Republic of South Africa, chapter 2.2.1.: Visualisation and Isolation of the Virus, March 2001, see www.polity.org.za/html/govdocs/reports/aids/chapter2.htm#2.2.1

475 Tahi, Djamel, Did Luc Montagnier Discover HIV?, Interview mit Luc Montagnier, Continuum, Winter 1997/1998, pp. 31-35

476 de Harven, Etienne, Problems with isolating HIV, European Parliament in Brussels, 8 December 2003, see: www.altheal.org/texts/isolhiv.htm

477 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, A critique of the Montagnier evidence fort he HIV/AIDS hypothesis, Medical Hypotheses, 4/2004, pp. 597-601

478 Structure of most deadly virus in the world revealed, press release, University of Oxford, 23 January 2006

479 Briggs, John, The Mechanism of HIV-1 Core Assembly: Insights from Three Dimensional Reconstructions of Authentic Virions, Structure, January 2006, p. 16

480 Ibid., pp. 15-20

481 Structure of most deadly virus in the world revealed, press release, University of Oxford, 23 January 2006

482 Briggs, John, The Mechanism of HIV-1 Core Assembly: Insights from Three Dimensional Reconstructions of Authentic Virions, Structure, January 2006, p. 19

483 Metzler, Natasha, Generic AZT Hits the United States, Pharmexec.com, 10 October 2005

484 Hodgkinson, Neville, How Giant Drug Firm Funds The AIDS Lobby, Sunday Times (London), 30 May 1993

485 Briggs, John, The Mechanism of HIV-1 Core Assembly: Insights from Three Dimensional Reconstructions of Authentic Virions, Structure, January 2006, p. 16

486 Ibid.

487 Ibid.

488 Personal interview with Val Turner, 3 February 2006

489 Personal interview with Stepehn Fuller; 10 February 2006

490 Gallo, Robert; Fauci Anthony, The human retroviruses, in: Fauci, Anthony, Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, McGraw-Hill, 1994, pp. 808-814

491 Papadoupulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, The request reMayns the same and is still pure and simple, British Medical Journal (online), 12 June 2003, see http://www.rethinking.org/bmj/response_33236.html

492 HIV structure and Genome, Wikipedia-Website, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV_structure_and_genome

493 Briggs, John, The Mechanism of HIV-1 Core Assembly: Insights from Three Dimensional Reconstructions of Authentic Virions, Structure, January 2006, p. 16

494 Welker, Reinhold, Biochemical and Structural Analysis of Isolated Mature Cores of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1, Journal of Virology, February 2000, pp. 1168-1177

495 Bess, Julyan, Microvesicles are a source of contaminating cellular proteins found in purified HIV-1 preparations, Virology, 31 March 1997, pp. 134-144

496 Gluschankof, Pablo, Cell membrane vesicles are a major contaminant of gradient-enriched human immunodeficiency virus type-1 preparations, Virology, 31 March 1997, pp. 125-133

497 Hackenbroch, Veronika, „Der Optimismus ist verflogen.” Der Virologe, AIDS-Forscher und Leiter des Berliner Robert Koch Instituts, Reinhard Kurth, über die ersten HIV-Impfstoff-Tests in Deutschland, Der Spiegel, 9/2004, p. 153

498 Tahi, Djamel, AIDS—die großen Zweifel, Arte Television, 14 March 1996, see www. torstenengelbrecht.com/de/artikel_medien.html

499 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, A critique of the Montagnier evidence for the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, Medical Hypotheses, 4/2004, p. 584

500 Barré-Sinoussi, Françoise; Cherman, Jean Claude, Isolation of new lymphotropic retrovirus from two siblings with haemophilia B, one with AIDS, Lancet, 7 April 1984; pp. 753-757

501 Macilwain, Colin, AAAS criticized over AIDS sceptics’ meeting, Nature, 26 May 1994, p. 265

502 Lang, Serge, Challenges; Springer, New York, 1998, p. 609

503 Berger, Michael; Mühlhauser, Ingrid, Surrogatmarker: Trugschlüsse, Deutsches Ärzteblatt, 6 December 1996, pp. A-3280-A3283

504 ELISA Test-kit from Abbot Laboratories

505 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, Is a Positive Western Blot Proof of HIV Infection?, Nature Biotechnology, June 1993, pp. 696-707

506 Glücksspiel AIDS-Test, Die Woche, 5 August 1993, see AIDS-info.net/micha/hiv/AIDS/diewoche1.html

507 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, The Isolation of HIV—Has It Really Been Achieved? The Case Against, Continuum, September/October 1996, Supplement, pp. 1-24

508 Glücksspiel AIDS-Test, Die Woche, 5 August 1993, see AIDS-info.net/micha/hiv/AIDS/diewoche1.html

509 Essex, Max; Kashala, Oscar, Infection with human immonodificiency virus type 1 (hiv-1) and human t-cell lymphotropic viruses among leprosy patients and contacts: correlation between hiv-1 cross-reactivity and antibodies to lipoarabinomanna; Journal of Infectious Diseases, February 1994, pp. 296-304

510 Johnson, Christine, Whose Antibodies are they anyway?, Continuum, September/ October 1996, pp. 4-5

511 Hodgkinson, Neville, HIV diagnosis: a ludicrous case of circular reasoning, The Business online, 16 May 2004

512 Duesberg, Peter; Koehnlein, Claus; Rasnick, David, The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition, Journal of Biosciences, June 2003, p. 390

513 Hackenbroch, Veronika, „Der Optimismus ist verflogen.” Der Virologe, AIDS-Forscher und Leiter des Berliner Robert Koch Instituts, Reinhard Kurth, über die ersten HIV-Impfstoff-Tests in Deutschland, Der Spiegel, 9/2004, p. 153

514 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, HIV antibody tests and viral load—more unanswered questions and a further plea for clarification, Current Medical Research and Opinion, 3/1998, pp. 185-186

515 Rich, Josiah, Misdiagnosis of HIV infection by HIV-1 plasma viral load testing: a case series, Annals of Internal Medicine, 5 January 1999, pp. 37-39

516 Rodriguez, Benigno, Predictive value of plasma HIV RNA level on rate of CD4 T-cell decline in untreated HIV infection, Journal of the American Medical Association, 27 September 2006, pp. 1498-1506

517 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, A critical analysis of the HIV-T4-cell-AIDS hypothesis, Genetica, 1-3/1995; pp. 5-24

518 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, pp. 75, 109

519 Concorde Coordinating Committee, Concorde: MRCC/ANRS randomised double-blind controlled trial of immediate and deferred zidovudine in symptom-free HIV-infection, Lancet, 9 April 1994, 343: 871-881

520 Fleming, Thomas; DeMets, David, Surrogate end points in clinical trials: are we being misled?, Annals of Internal Medicine, 1 October 1996, pp. 605-613

521 Williams, Brian, HIV infection, antiretroviral therapy, and CD4+ cell count distributions in African populations, Journal of Infectious Diseases, 15 November 2006, pp. 1450-1458

522 Chargaff, Erwin, Das Feuer des Heraklit, Luchterhand, 1989, p. 232

523 Lichtblau, Eric, Settlement in Marketing of a Drug for AIDS, New York Times, 18 October 2005

524 Duesberg, Peter; Koehnlein, Claus; Rasnick, David, The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition, Journal of Biosciences, June 2003, pp. 383-412

525 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 419

526 Connor, Thomas, Methylenedioxymethamphetamine Suppresses Production of the Proinflammatory Cytokine Tumor Necrosis Factor-α Independent of a b-Adrenoceptor-Mediated Increase in Interleukin-10, Journal of Pharmacology And Experimental Therapeutics, January 2005, pp. 134-143

527 Dronda, Fernando, CD4 cell recovery during successful antiretroviral therapy in naive HIV-infected patients: the role of intravenous drug use, AIDS, 5 November 2004, pp. 2210-2212

528 Connor, Thomas, Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, ‘Ecstasy’): a stressor on the immune system, Immunology, April 2004, pp. 357-367

529 Duesberg, Peter; Koehnlein, Claus; Rasnick, David, The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition, Journal of Biosciences, June 2003, pp. 387-388

530 Jaffe, Harold, National case-control study of Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in homosexual men, Part 1. Epidemiologic results, Annals of Internal Medicine, August 1983, pp. 145-151

531 What are the medical consequences of inhalant abuse?, Website des National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), see www.drugabuse.gov/ResearchReports/Inhalants/Inhalants4.html

532 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; A Mitotic Theory, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 21 June 1982, pp. 741-57

533 Harrison, Tinsley, Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, McGraw-Hill, 1983, p. 1206

534 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, Oxidative Stress, HIV and AIDS, Research in Immunology, February 1992, pp. 145-148

535 Weiss, Robin, Induction of avian tumor viruses in normal cells by physical and chemical carcinogens, Virology, December 1971, pp. 920-38

536 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 149

537 Ibid., pp. 146-148

538 Tracey, Michael, Mere Smoke of Opinion; AIDS and the making of the public mind, Continuum, Summer/Fall 2001

539 Shilts, Randy, And the Band Played on, Penguin Books, 1987, p. 67

540 Gottlieb, Michael, Pneumocystis Pneumonia—Los Angeles, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 5 June 1981, pp. 250-252

541 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 148

542 Haverkos, Harry; Dougherty, John, Health Hazards of Nitrite Inhalants , Research Monograph Series 83, National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1988, p. 1, see www. drugabuse.gov/pdf/monographs/83.pdf

543 Ibid., p. 5

544 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, pp. 260-261

545 Labataille, Lorette, Amyl nitrite employed in homosexual relations, Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality, 1975; Vol. 9, p. 122

546 Haverkos, Harry; Dougherty, John, Health Hazards of Nitrite Inhalants , Research Monograph Series 83, National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1988, pp. 5, 87, see www. drugabuse.gov/pdf/monographs/83.pdf

547 Lauritsen, John, NIDA Meeting Calls For Research Into The Poppers-Kaposi’s Sarcoma Connection, New York Native 13 June 1994

548 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 377

549 Poppers advertising, see www.liquidaromas.com/ads.html

550 Lauritsen, John, The AIDS War. Propaganda, Profeteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex, Asklepios, 1993, pp. 108-110

551 Haverkos, Harry; Dougherty, John, Health Hazards of Nitrite Inhalants , Research Monograph Series 83, National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1988, p. 6, see www. drugabuse.gov/pdf/monographs/83.pdf

552 Ibid., pp. 6, 11

553 What are the medical consequences of inhalant abuse?, Website des National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), see www.drugabuse.gov/ResearchReports/Inhalants/Inhalants4.html

554 Haverkos, Harry; Dougherty, John, Health Hazards of Nitrite Inhalants , Research Monograph Series 83, National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1988, pp. 2-4, see www. drugabuse.gov/pdf/monographs/83.pdf

555 Lauritsen, John, The AIDS War. Propaganda, Profeteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex, Asklepios, 1993, p. 109

556 Haverkos, Harry; Dougherty, John, Health Hazards of Nitrite Inhalants , Research Monograph Series 83, National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1988, pp. 2-4, see www. drugabuse.gov/pdf/monographs/83.pdf

557 Haley, Thomas, Review of the physiological effects of amyl, butyl and isobutyl nitrites, Clinical Toxicology, May 1980, pp. 317-329

558 Masur, Henry, An outbreak of community-acquired Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia: initial manifestation of cellular immune dysfunction, New England Journal of Medicine, 10 December 1981, pp. 1431-1438

559 Siegal, Frederick, Severe acquired immunodeficiency in male homosexuals, manifested by chronic perianal ulcerative herpes simplex lesions, New England Journal of Medicine, 10 December 1981, pp. 1439-1444

560 Durack, David, Opportunistic infections and Kaposi’s sarcoma in homosexual men, New England Journal of Medicine, 10 December 1981, pp. 1465-1467

561 Adams, Jad, AIDS: The HIV Myth, St. Martin’s Press, 1989, p. 129

562 Shilts, Randy, And the Band Played on, Penguin Books, 1987, p. 81

563 Current Trends Update on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)—United States, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 24 September 1982, pp. 507-508

564 Lauritsen, John, The AIDS War; Propaganda, Profeteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex, Asklepios, 1993, pp. 11-14

565 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, pp. 49-50

566 Shilts, Randy, And the Band Played on, Penguin Books, 1987, p. 121

567 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, p. 55

568 Halter, Hans, Eine Epidemie, die erst beginnt, Der Spiegel, 23/1983

569 Duesberg, Peter; Koehnlein, Claus; Rasnick, David, The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition, Journal of Biosciences, June 2003, pp. 392-401

570 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, pp. 377-381

571 Lauritsen, John, Prickly Poppers. An AIDS activist wonders how a flammable drug become so popular among gay men, Xtra!, 23 March 2000

572 Lauritsen, John, NIDA Meeting Calls For Research Into The Poppers-Kaposi’s Sarcoma Connection, New York Native 13 June 1994

573 Lauritsen, John, The AIDS War. Propaganda, Profeteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex, Asklepios, 1993, p. 110

574 see www.allaboutpoppers.com

575 see www.bearcityweb.com

576 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, p. 23

577 Shilts, Randy, And the Band Played on, Penguin Books, 1987, p. 83

578 Etheridge, Elizabeth, Sentinel for Health: History of the Centers for Disease Control, University of California Press, 1992, p. 326

579 Tracey, Michael, Mere Smoke of Opinion; AIDS and the making of the public mind, Continuum, Summer/Fall 2001

580 Haverkos, Harry, Disease Manifestation among Homosexual Men with Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome: A Possible Role of Nitrites in Kaposi’s Sarcoma, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, October-December 1985, pp. 203-208

581 Krieger, Terry; Caceres, Cesar; The unnoticed Link in AIDS cases, Wall Street Journal, 24 October 1985

582 Tom Bethell, AIDS and Poppers, Spin, November 1994

583 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Sex, Blut und Tod, „HIV verursacht AIDS.“ An der Verfestigung dieses Theorems lässt sich zeigen, wie der Wissenschafts-Journalismus folgenreiche Widersprüche ausblendet und Zweifel wegdrückt, Message, 1/2005, pp. 39-40

584 Halter, Hans, Eine Epidemie, die erst beginnt, Der Spiegel, 23/1983

585 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Sex, Blut und Tod, „HIV verursacht AIDS.“ An der Verfestigung dieses Theorems lässt sich zeigen, wie der Wissenschafts-Journalismus folgenreiche Widersprüche ausblendet und Zweifel wegdrückt, Message, 1/2005, p. 40

586 Shilts, Randy, And the Band Played on, Penguin Books, 1987, p. 81

587 Köhnlein, Claus, Das neue “Super-AIDS”. Hysterie mit neuen Untertönen: Die Meinstream-Medien entdecken ganz nebenbei die „Co-Faktoren,“ Eigentümlich Frei, March 2005, p. 14

588 McMillan, Dennis, SF Responds To Media Hysteria About “Super-HIV,“ San Francisco Bay Times, 24 February 2005

589 Graham, Judith, Meth use adds to ravages of AIDS. The powerful, highly addictive drug is growing more popular among gays, and experts believe it’s undermining efforts to promote safe sex, Chicago Tribune, 13 March 2005

590 Duesberg, Peter; Koehnlein, Claus; Rasnick, David, The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition, Journal of Biosciences, June 2003, pp. 383-385

591 Cohen, Jon, Experts Question Danger of ”AIDS Superbug,” Science, 25 February 2005, p. 1185

592 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Sex and Drugs and Risk, interview with Jacques Normand, Director AIDS Research at the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, on New York’s “Super AIDS Virus,” and the link between highly toxic drugs like Poppers or Crystal Meth and AIDS, Freitag, 8 April 2005, p. 18

593 Lauritsen, John, The Poppers-Kaposi’s Sarcoma Connection, New York Native, 13 June 1994

594 Jaffe, Harold, Kaposi’s sarcoma among persons with AIDS: a sexually transmitted infection?, Lancet, 20 January 1990, pp. 123-128

595 Bittorf, Wilhelm, Die Lust ist da, aber ich verkneif’s mir, Der Spiegel, 11/1987

596 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, A critique of the Montagnier evidence for the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, Medical Hypotheses, 4/2004, p. 598

597 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, Oxidative Stress, HIV and AIDS, Research in Immunology, February 1992, pp. 145-148

598 Beral, Valerie, Kaposi’s sarcoma among persons with AIDS: a sexually transmitted infection? Lancet, 20 January 1990, pp. 123-128

599 Nancy Franklin, America, lost and found, The New Yorker, 8 December 2003

600 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Sex, Blut und Tod, „HIV verursacht AIDS.“ An der Verfestigung dieses Theorems lässt sich zeigen, wie der Wissenschafts-Journalismus folgenreiche Widersprüche ausblendet und Zweifel wegdrückt, Message, 1/2005, pp. 36-47

601 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, pp. 151-152

602 Fiala, Christian, Lieben wir gefährlich? Ein Arzt auf der Suche nach Fakten und Hintergründen von AIDS, Deuticke, 1997, p. 111

603 Die Bombe ist gelegt, Der Spiegel 45/1984

604 „Die Promiskuität ist der Motor der Seuche,“ Der Spiegel, 33/1985

605 Halter, Hans, Eine Epidemie, die erst beginnt, Der Spiegel, 23/1983

606 Noack, Hans-Joachim, „Plötzlich stirbst Du ein Stück weit,“ Der Spiegel, 5/1985

607 Bittorf, Wilhelm, Die Lust ist da, aber ich verkneif’s mir, Der Spiegel, 11/1987

608 Schille, Peter, „Vergnügt euch, aber seht euch vor,“ Der Spiegel 44/1985

609 Bittorf, Wilhelm, Die Lust ist da, aber ich verkneif’s mir, Der Spiegel, 11/1987

610 „Die Promiskuität ist der Motor der Seuche,“ Der Spiegel, 33/1985

611 Wiedemann, Erich, „In Afrika droht eine Apokalypse,“ Der Spiegel, 48/1986

612 Schille, Peter, „Vergnügt euch, aber seht euch vor,“ Der Spiegel, 44/1985

613 HIV and Its Transmission, Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC), Divisions of HIV/AIDS Prevention

614 Schille, Peter, „Vergnügt euch, aber seht euch vor,“ Der Spiegel, 44/1985

615 SPIEGEL-Leser wissen mehr, Spiegel-Website, see media.spiegel.de/internet/media.nsf/0/6d9edf6dadb75e51c1256ff1004584bc?OpenDocument

616 Mutter Natur verbessert, Der Spiegel, 26/1991

617 Grolle, Johann, Siege, aber kein Sieg, Der Spiegel, 29/1995

618 „AIDS hat ein neues Gesicht,“ Der Spiegel, 28/1996

619 Grolle, Johann, Sieg über die Seuche?, Der Spiegel, 2/1997

620 Hackenbroch, Veronika, „Der Optimismus ist verflogen.” Der Virologe, AIDS-Forscher und Leiter des Berliner Robert Koch Instituts, Reinhard Kurth, über die ersten HIV-Impfstoff-Tests in Deutschland, Der Spiegel, 9/2004, p. 153

621 Tracey, Michael, Mere Smoke of Opinion; AIDS and the making of the public mind, Continuum, Summer/Fall 2001

622 Bittorf, Wilhelm, Die Lust ist da, aber ich verkneif’s mir, Der Spiegel, 11/1987

623 Ibid.

624 Gray, Kevin, Some Realities about HIV/AIDS, Details, 13 February 2004

625 Duesberg, Peter; Koehnlein, Claus; Rasnick, David, The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition, Journal of Biosciences, June 2003, p. 391

626 Facts zu HIV und AIDS, 2. Nationale Dimension, Welt AIDS Tag 2005, see www. welt-AIDS-tag.de/?p=33

627 Duesberg, Peter; Koehnlein, Claus; Rasnick, David, The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition, Journal of Biosciences, June 2003, pp. 383-488

628 Bartholomäus Grill, Die tödliche Ignoranz, Die Zeit, 15 July 2004, p. 1

629 Gray, Kevin, Some Realities about HIV/AIDS, Details, 13 February 2004

630 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, A critique of the Montagnier evidence for the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, Medical Hypotheses, 4/2004, p. 598

631 Kamali, Anatoli, Syndromic management of sexually-transmitted infections and behaviour change interventions on transmission of HIV-1 in rural Uganda: a community randomised trial, Lancet, 22 February 2003, pp. 645-652

632 Gray, Ronald, Probability of HIV-1 transmission per coital act in monogamous, heterosexual, HIV-1-discordant couples in Rakai, Uganda, Lancet, 14 April 2001, pp. 1149-53

633 Padian, Nancy, Heterosexual transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in northern California: results from a ten-year study, American Journal of Epidemiology, 15 August 1997, pp. 350-57

634 Tracey, Michael, Mere Smoke of Opinion; AIDS and the making of the public mind, Continuum, Summer/Fall 2001

635 Problems with HIV vaccine research, Wikipedia-Website, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV_vaccine

636 Pahwa, Savita, Influence of the human T-lymphotropic virus/lymphadenopathy-associated virus on functions of human lymphocytes: evidence for immunosuppressive effects and polyclonal B-cell activation by Vol.ed viral preparations, in: Proceedings of the National Academyof Sciences, December 1985, pp. 8198-8202

637 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, p. 73

638 Ibid., p. 83

639 Ibid., p. 87

640 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Spitze des Eisbergs: Warum Journalisten auch den angesehenen Wissenschaftszeitschriften nicht blindlings vertrauen sollten, Message, 3/2005, pp. 70-71

641 Phillips, David, Importance of the lay press in the transmission of medical knowledge to the scientific community, New England Journal of Medicine, 17 October 1991, pp. 1180-1183

642 Kinsella, James, Covering the Plague. AIDS and the American Media, Rutgers University Press, 1989, pp. 88-89

643 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, pp. 93-95

644 Altman, Lawrence, Red Cross Evaluates Test To Detect AIDS In Donated Blood, New York Times, 15 May 1984

645 Altman, Lawrence, The Doctor’s World; How AIDS Researchers Strive For Virus Proof, New York Times, 24 October 1984

646 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, p. 93

647 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, pp. 135-136

648 Ibid., pp. 144-145

649 About EIS, Website der Epidemic Intelligence Service, see www.cdc.gov/eis/about/about.htm

650 Alumni, Website der Epidemic Intelligence Service, see www.cdc.gov/eis/alumni/alumni.htm

651 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, p. 72

652 Koch, Klaus, Ist Europa jetzt vor Seuchen sicher?, Interview mit Hans Wigzell vom Karoliska-Institut in Stockholm, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 22 March 2005, p. 10

653 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, pp. 135-136

654 Cohen, Jon, Doing Science in the Spotlight’s Glare, Science, 1992, Vol. 257, p. 1033

655 Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth, Die Schweigespirale: Öffentliche Meinung—unsere soziale Haut, Langen Müller, 2001, p. 322

656 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, pp. 105-106

657 Celia Farber, AIDS: Words from the Front, Spin, January 1988, pp. 43-44, 73

658 Penning, Randolph, Prävalenz der HIV-Infektion bei gerichtlich Obduzierten und speziell Drogentoten am Institut für Rechtsmedizin der Universität München von 1985 bis 1988, AIDS-Forschung, 4/1989, pp. 459—465

659 Booth, William, A Rebel without a cause of AIDS, Science, 25 March 1988, p. 1485

660 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, p. 113

661 see www.virusmyth.net/AIDS/index/cthomas.htm

662 Hodgkinson, Neville, AIDS: Can We Be Positive?, Sunday Times (London), 26 April 1992

663 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 244

664 Rapoport, Ron, AIDS: The Unanswered Questions, Oakland Tribune, 22 May 1989, pp. A1-A2

665 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 237

666 Boffey, Phillip, A Solitary Dissenter Disputes Cause of AIDS, New York Times, 12 January 1988, p. C-3

667 France, David, The HIV Disbelievers, Newsweek, 19 August 2000

668 „Filtern und zensieren,“ Interview with John Maddox, Der Spiegel, 7 November 1994, p. 229

669 Letter from John Maddox to Claus Köhnlein, 20 September 1995

670 Ho, David, Rapid turnover of plasma virions and CD4 lymphocytes in HIV-1 infection, Nature, 12 January 1995, pp. 123-126

671 Craddock, Mark, HIV: Science by press conference, in: AIDS: Virus- or Drug Induced? by Peter Duesberg (Ed.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996, pp. 127-130

672 Tahi, Djamel, AIDS—die großen Zweifel, Arte Television, 14 March 1996, see www. torstenengelbrecht.com/de/artikel_medien.html

673 Langbein, Kurt; Ehgartner, Bert, Das Medizinkartell: Die sieben Todsünden der Gesundheitsindustrie, Piper, 2003, p. 347

674 Wolthers, Katja, T Cell Telomere Length in HIV-1 Infection: No Evidence for increased CD4+ T Cell Turnover, Science, 29 November 1996, pp. 1543-1547

675 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Sex, Blut und Tod, „HIV verursacht AIDS.“ An der Verfestigung dieses Theorems lässt sich zeigen, wie der Wissenschafts-Journalismus folgenreiche Widersprüche ausblendet und Zweifel wegdrückt, Message, 1/2005, pp. 41-42

676 Cimons, Marlene, Bad Blood Two Groups of AIDS Researchers—One American, One French—Are Fighting More Than Just the Disease, Los Angeles Times, 25 May 1986, p. 16

677 Remnick, David, Robert Gallo Goes To War, Washington Post, 9 August 1987, W 10

678 Der lang erwartete Messias, tageszeitung, 24 December 1996, p. 11

679 Hoffmann, Christian, ART 2004. Historie, see hiv.net/2010/haart.htm

680 Chua-Eoan, Howard, 1996: David Ho, TIME, 30 December 1996

681 Lawrence, Altman, US Panel seeks Changes in Treatment of AIDS Virus, New York Times, 4 February, 2001

682 Berndt, Christina, Da-I, der Große, hat sich geirrt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 27 January 2004

683 Grolle, Johann, Sieg über die Seuche?, Der Spiegel, 2/1997

684 Connolly, Ceci, States Offering Less Assistance For AIDS Drugs, Washington Post, 20 May 2004, p. A04

685 Personal phone interview with Hans Halter

686 Prange, Astrid, Hoffnung kostet 140 Dollar, Rheinischer Merkur, 48/2005, p. 14

687 AIDS ist behandelbar, Schleswig-Holsteinisches Ärzteblatt, 2/2000, pp. 14-15

688 AIDS Drugs extend Survival Times Fourfold, Reuters NewMedia, 14 March 2001

689 Köhnlein, Claus, Die große Illusion. Das Dilemma der antiretroviralen Therapie/HAART aus einem kritischen Blickwinkel, see www.rethinkingaids.de/allg/koenl-2.htm

690 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 425

691 Duesberg, Peter; Koehnlein, Claus; Rasnick, David, The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition, Journal of Biosciences, June 2003, p. 402

692 Coghlan, Andy, Bid to solve riddle of ‘natural resistance’ to HIV, New Scientist, 15 August 2006

693 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 425

694 Köhnlein, Claus, Die große Illusion. Das Dilemma der antiretroviralen Therapie/HAART aus einem kritischen Blickwinkel, see www.rethinkingaids.de/allg/koenl-2.htm

695 HIV/AIDS-files, Robert Koch Institute, June 2003

696 Fleming, Thomas; DeMets, David, Surrogate end points in clinical trials: are we being misled?, Annals of Internal Medicine, 1 October 1996, pp. 605-613

697 Revision Of The Surveillance Case Definition For AIDS In Canada, in: Canada Communicable Disease Report, Health and Welfare Canada, 15 December 1993, p. 196

698 Koliadin, Vladimir, Some Facts behind de Expansion of the Definition of AIDS in 1993, March 1998; see www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/vknewdef.htm

699 CASCADE (Concerted Action on SeroConversion to AIDS and Death in Europe) Collaboration, Determinants of survival following HIV-1 seroconversion after the introduction of HAART, Lancet, 18 October 2003, pp. 1267-1274

700 Suspension of Disbelief??, Health Education AIDS Liaison (HEAL),Toronto, http:// healtoronto.com/aidsdrop.html

701 HIV treatment response and prognosis in Europe and North America in the first decade of highly active antiretroviral therapy: a collaborative analysis, Lancet, 5 August 2006, pp. 451-458

702 New Studies Shake AIDS World...and more interesting news from Alive & Well, news release from Christine Maggiore/Alive & Well, 30 November 2006

703 Fischl, Margaret, The toxicity of azidothymidine (AZT) in the treatment of patients with AIDS and AIDS-related complex. A double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, New England Journal of Medicine, 23 July 1987, pp. 192-197

704 Law, Jacky, Big Pharma. How the world’s biggest drug companies market illness, Constable & Robinson, 2006

705 The fool’s gold that heals, Guardian, 14 January 2006

706 Temple, Robert, Placebo-Controlled Trials and Active-Control Trials in the Evaluation of New Treatments. Part 1: Ethical and Scientific Issues, Annals of Internal Medicine, 19 September 2000, pp. 455-463

707 Ellenberg, Susan, Placebo-Controlled Trials and Active-Control Trials in the Evaluation of New Treatments. Part 2: Practical Issues and Specific Cases, Annuals of Internal Medicine, 19 September 2000, pp. 464-470

708 Evans, David; Smith, Mike; Willen, Liz, Drug Industry Human Testing Masks Death, Injury, Compliant FDA, Bloomberg.com, 2 November 2005

709 Sharav, Vera, New Evidence Uncovered About AIDS Drug/Vaccine Experiments on Foster Care Infants & Children, Alliance for Human Research Protection, 1 September 2005

710 Scheff, Liam, The House that AIDS built, see www.altheal.org/toxicity/house.htm

711 Montero, Douglas, AIDS Tots Used As ‘Guinea Pigs,’ New York Post, 29 February 2004, p. 1

712 Doran, Jamie, Guinea Pig Kids, 30 November 2004

713 Solomon, John, Feds: Some AIDS Drug Tests Violated Rules, Associated Press, 16 June 2005

714 Scott, Janny, Kaufman, Leslie, Belated Charge Ignites Furor Over AIDS Drug Trial, New York Times, 17 July 2005

715 E-mail an Janny Scott und Leslie Kaufman, 17 July 2005

716 Lewis, Linda, Lamivudine in children with human immunodeficiency virus infection: a phase I/II study, Journal of Infectious Diseases, July 1996, pp. 16-25

717 Brown, Hannah, Marvellous microbicides, Lancet, 27 March 2003, pp. 1042-1043

718 AIDS Chief says nonoxynol-9 not effective against HIV, July 2000, AIDS Weekly, pp. 2-3

719 Brown, Hannah, Marvellous microbicides, Lancet, 27 March 2003, p. 1042

720 Angell, Marcia, The Truth About the Drug Companies. How They Deceive Us And What To Do About It, Random House, 2004, p. 241

721 Lauritsen, John, The AIDS War. Propaganda, Profeteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex, Asklepios, 1993, pp. 381-397

722 Müller, Roger, Skepsis gegenüber einem Medikament [AZT], das krank macht, Weltwoche, 25 June 1992, pp. 55-56

723 John Lauritsen, The AIDS War. Propaganda, Profeteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex, Asklepios, 1993, p. 73

724 Personal e-mail communication with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 27 July 2004

725 Köhnlein, Claus, Die große Illusion. Das Dilemma der antiretroviralen Therapie/HAART aus einem kritischen Blickwinkel, see www.rethinkingaids.de/allg/koenl-2.htm

726 $95 billion a year spent on medical research, Associated Press, 20 September 2005

727 Larisch, Katharina, Vioxx®-Rückzug, Netdoktor.de, 8 November 2004

728 John Lauritsen, The AIDS War. Propaganda, Profeteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex, Asklepios, 1993, pp. 140-141

729 Ibid., p. 391

730 Ibid., pp. 381-397

731 Duesberg, Peter, HIV, AIDS, and zidovudine, Lancet, 28 March 1992, pp. 805- 806

732 John Lauritsen, The AIDS War. Propaganda, Profeteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex, Asklepios, 1993, p. 74

733 Ibid.

734 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, pp. 109, 119

735 John Lauritsen, The AIDS War. Propaganda, Profeteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex, Asklepios, 1993, pp. 59-69

736 Personal interview, 25 January 2006

737 Epstein, Steven, Impure Science—AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1996, p. 123

738 Questionnaires sent out by e-mail in July 2004

739 E-mail to Declan Butler, 19 December 2005

740 Butler, Declan, Medical journal under attack as dissenters seize AIDS platform, Nature, 20 November 2003, p. 215

741 Personal e-mail communication with John Moore, 16 February 2004

742 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, p. 6

743 Cohen, Sheila, Antiretroviral therapy for AIDS, New England Journal of Medicine, 3 September 1987, pp. 629-630

744 Bruce Nussbaum, Good Intentions: How Big Business and the Medical Establishment are Corrupting the Fight against AIDS, Alzheimer’s, Cancer, and More, Penguin Books, 1990, pp. 177-178

745 Duesberg, Peter, The toxicity of azidothymidine (AZT) on human and animal cells in culture at concentrations used for antiviral therapy, Genetica, 1-3/1995, pp. 103-109

746 See website of Treatment Information Group: www.tig.org.za

747 Kolata, Gina, Marrow suppression hampers AZT use in AIDS victims, Science, 20 March 1987, p. 1463

748 Payne, Brendan A. I. et al., Mitochondrial aging is accelerated by anti-retroviral therapy through the clonal expansion of mtDNA mutations, Nature Genetics, 26 June 2011, pp. 806-810

749 Buchholz, Bernd et al., HIV-Therapie in der Schwangerschaft Optimierung der Transmissionsverhinderung bei Minimierung unerwünschter Arzneimittelwirkungen, Deutsches Ärzteblatt, 14 June 2002, pp. A1674-A1683

750 Prestes-Carneir, Luiz Euribel, Antiretroviral therapy, pregnancy, and birth defects: a discussion on the updated data, HIV AIDS (Auckland/New Zealand), 1 August 2013, pp. 181-189

751 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Faust, 1. Teil, Insel, 1976, p. 51

752 Freddie Mercury, Wikipedia-Website, see de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Mercury

753 John Lauritsen, The AIDS War. Propaganda, Profeteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex, Asklepios, 1993, pp. 445-450

754 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, pp. 356-358

755 Ashe, Arthur, More Than Ever, Magical Things to Learn, Washington Post, 11 October 1992

756 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 357

757 Iyer, Pico, “It Can Happen to Anybody. Even Magic Johnson.” After testing positive for HIV, basketball’s most beloved star retires and vows to become a spokesman in the battle against AIDS, TIME, 18 November 1991

758 Elmer-Dewitt, Philip, How Safe Is Sex? When Magic Johnson announced he had the AIDS virus, he put the risk of heterosexual transmission squarely in center court, TIME, 25 November 1991

759 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 340

760 Nelson, J., Magic Reeling as Worst Nightmare Comes True—He’s Getting Sicker, National Enquirer, 10 December 1991, p. 6

761 Iyer, Pico, “It Can Happen to Anybody. Even Magic Johnson.” After testing positive for HIV, basketball’s most beloved star retires and vows to become a spokesman in the battle against AIDS, TIME, 18 November 1991

762 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 341

763 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, pp. 340-341

764 Polier, Alex, Ads are geared toward urban blacks, Associated Press, 21 January 2003

765 Darby, Sarah, Mortality before and after HIV infection in the complete UK population of haemophiliacs. UK Haemophilia Centre Directors’ Organisation, Nature, 7 September 1995, pp. 79-82

766 Duesberg, Peter; Koehnlein, Claus; Rasnick, David, The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition, Journal of Biosciences, June 2003, pp. 396-398

767 Philpot, Paul. Darby Debunked: Pro-HIV hemophiliac study actually points towards non-contagious AIDS, rethinkingaids.com, February 1996

768 Lang, Serge, Challenges, Springer, 1998, p. 687

769 Papdopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, HIV Seropositivity and Mortality in Persons with Heamophilia; Proof that HIV Causes AIDS?, see www.virus-myth.net/aids/data/epdarby.htm

770 Maddox, John, More Conviction on HIV and AIDS, Nature, 7 September 1995, Sep 7; p. 1

771 „Die Promiskuität ist der Motor der Seuche,“ Der Spiegel, 33/1985

772 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, pp. 445-451

773 HIV and Its Transmission, Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC), Divisions of HIV/AIDS Prevention, see www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/transmission.htm

774 Duesberg, Peter; Koehnlein, Claus; Rasnick, David, The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition, Journal of Biosciences, June 2003, p. 391

775 Rian Malan: Africa isn’t dying of AIDS, The Spectator, 13 December 2003

776 Duesberg, Peter; Koehnlein, Claus; Rasnick, David, The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition, Journal of Biosciences, June 2003, p. 385

777 Thielke, Thilo, “Streicht diese Hilfe”. Der kenianische Wirtschaftsexperte James Shikwati über die schädlichen Folgen der westlichen Entwicklungshilfe, korrupte Herrscher und aufgebauschte Horrormeldungen aus Afrika, Der Spiegel, 27/2005

778 Essex, Max; Kashala, Oscar, Infection with human immonodificiency virus type 1 (hiv-1) and human t-cell lymphotropic viruses among leprosy patients and contacts: correlation between hiv-1 cross-reactivity and antibodies to lipoarabinomanna; Journal of Infectious Diseases, February 1994, pp. 296-304

779 Tahi, Djamel, AIDS—The Doubt, Arte Television, 14 March 1996, see www.torstenengelbrecht.com/de/artikel_medien.html

780 Shenton, Joan, Positively False: Exposing the Myths Around HIV and AIDS, I.B. Tauris/St. Martin’s Press, 1998

781 Lang, Serge, Challenges; Springer, New York, 1998, pp. 616-617

782 Geshekter, Charles; Mhlongo, Sam; Köhnlein, Claus, AIDS, Medicine and Public Health: The Scientific Value of Thabo Mbeki’s Critique of AIDS Orthodoxy, Vortrag auf dem 47th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association New Orleans, Louisiana, 11 November 2004

783 Duesberg, Peter; Koehnlein, Claus; Rasnick, David, The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition, Journal of Biosciences, June 2003, pp. 385-386

784 Katzenellenbogen, Jonathan, Third of Africans Undernourished, Business Day (Johannesburg), 20 August 2004

785 Fenton, Lynda, Preventing HIV/AIDS through poverty reduction: the only sustainable solution?, Lancet, 2004, 25 September 2004, pp. 1186-1187

Chapter 4

Hepatitis C: Toxins Such As Alcohol, Heroin, and Prescription Drugs Suffice As Explanation

786 Köhnlein, Claus, Hepatitis C—the epidemic that never was?, British Medical Journal (online), 7 March 2002, see bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/324/7335/450

787 Larkin, Marylinn, Jay Hoofnagle: soldiering on against viral hepatitis, Lancet, 27 September 1997, p. 938

788 Intron-A, Rote Liste, 2005, p. 51025

789 Welche Nebenwirkungen haben Interferone?, Website of the Krebsinformationsdienst of the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum DKFZ (German Cancer Research Centre) in Heidelberg

790 Erstmals Vermehrung des Hepatitis C Virus im Labor möglich, press release of the Ruprechts-Karl-University in Heidelberg, 6 October 2004

791 Larkin, Marylinn, Jay Hoofnagle: soldiering on against viral hepatitis, Lancet, 27 September 1997, p. 938

792 Alter, Harvey, Transmissible agent in non-A, non-B hepatitis, Lancet, 4 March 1978, pp. 459-463

793 Houghton, Michael; Bradley, Daniel, Hepatitis C virus: the major causative agent of viral non-A, non-B hepatitis, British Medical Bulletin, April 1990, pp. 423-441

794 Chiron Advances Hepatitis C Vaccine Development Program, press release, Chiron Vaccines, 14 January 2004

795 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 84

796 Köhnlein, Claus, Hepatitis C—the epidemic that never was?, British Medical Journal (online), 7 March 2002, see bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/324/7335/450

797 Chiron Reports First-Quarter 2005 Pro-Forma Earnings of 4 Cents Per Share, GAAP Loss of 5 Cents Per Share, press release of the Chiron Corporation, 27 April 2005

798 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 84

799 Crowe, David, The ABCs of Hepatitis, Alive Magazine, May 2004

800 Chen, Zheng, Hepatitis C virus (HCV) specific sequences are demonstrable in the DNA fraction of peripheral blood mononuclear cells from healthy, anti-HCV antibody-negative individuals and cell lines of human origin, European Journal of Clinical Chemistry and Clinical Biochemistry, December 1997, pp. 899-905

801 Duesberg, Peter, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, 1996, pp. 84-85

802 Syringe Exchange Programs, CDC’s Website

803 Hagan, Holly, Syringe exchange and risk of infection with hepatitis B and C viruses, American Journal of Epidemiology, 1 February 1999, pp. 203-213

804 Crowe, David, The ABCs of Hepatitis, Alive Magazine, May 2004

805 Thomas, David, The natural history of hepatitis C virus infection: host, viral, and environmental factors, Journal of the American Medical Association, 26 July 2000, p. 450

806 Hoofnagle, Jay, Hepatic Failure and Lactic Acidosis Due to Fialuridine (FIAU), an Investigational Nucleoside Analogue for Chronic Hepatitis B, New England Journal of Medicine, 26 October 1995, pp. 1099-105

807 Castillo, Inmaculada, Occult hepatitis C virus infection in patients in whom the etiology of persistently abnormal results of liver-function tests is unknown, Journal of Infectious Diseases, 1 January 2004, pp. 7-14

808 Thomas, David, The natural history of hepatitis C virus infection: host, viral, and environmental factors, Journal of the American Medical Association, 26 July 2000, p. 450

809 Köhnlein, Claus, Virale Seuchen, die es gar nicht gibt. BSE/AIDS/Hepatitis C, Raum & Zeit, 111/2001, p. 23

810 Laufs, Rainer, Was bedeutet der Befund „HCV-Antikörper positiv“?, Deutsches Ärzteblatt, 4 February 1994, p. A286

811 Siegmund-Schultze, Nicola, Die stille Seuche. 500.000 Deutsche sind mit Hepatitis C infiziert—nun werden die Aussichten auf einen Impfstoff besser, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13 October 2004, p. 10

812 Laufs, Rainer, Was bedeutet der Befund „HCV-Antikörper positiv“?, Deutsches Ärzteblatt, 4 February 1994, p. A287

813 Hadziyannis, Stephanos, Interferon alpha therapy in HBeAg-negative chronic hepatitis B: new data in support of long-term efficacy, Journal of Hepatology, February 2002, pp. 280-282

814 Comment by the Deutsche Leberhilfe e.V. (German Liver Aid) to our book „Virus Mania“, published on the Amazon.de website on 16 June 2006, see www.amazon.de/gp/product/customer-reviews/3891891474/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/303-3787228-9015431?ie=UTF8&customer-reviews.sort%5Fby=-SubmissionDate&n=299956

815 Comment from the authors of this book to the comment by the Deutsche Leberhilfe e.V. (German Liver Aid) to this book, published on the website of Torsten Engelbrecht on 4 July, 2006, see www.torstenengelbrecht.com/de/buch_viruswahn.html

816 Seeff, Leonard, 45-year follow-up of hepatitis C virus infection in healthy young adults, Annals of Internal Medicine, January 2000, pp. 105-11

817 Schentke, Klaus-Ulrich, Leberschäden durch Medikamente, Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 1995, Vol. 120, pp. 923-925

818 Personal e-mail communication, December 2005

819 See www.drruhland.com

820 Pamela Anderson expects death in a decade, CNN.com, 22 October 2003

821 Pamela Anderson launches hepatitis campaign, CTV.ca, 17 November 2002

822 Pamela Anderson was the Grand Marshal of the American Liver Foundation, clubpam.com

Chapter 5

BSE: The Epidemic that Never Was

823 Scholz, Roland, Phantom BSE-Gefahr. Irrwege von Wissenschaft und Politik im BSE-Skandal, Berenkamp, 2005

824 Riebsamen, Hans, BSE ist vergessen: Rare, medium oder well-done?, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 17 November 2002, p. 6

825 Entwarnung: Creutzfeldt-Jakob-Krankheit fällt aus, Manager Magazin (online), 12 January 2005

826 Venters, George, New variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: the epidemic that never was, British Medical Journal, 13 October 2001, pp. 858-861

827 Ghani, Azra, Projections of the future course of the primary vCJD epidemic in the UK: inclusion of subclinical infection and the possibility of wider genetic susceptibility, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 22 March 2005, pp. 19-31

828 Riebsamen, Hans, BSE ist vergessen: Rare, medium oder well-done?, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 17 November 2002, p. 6

829 New Generation BSE test approved by CFIA, press release, Prionics AG, 16 June 2005

830 O’Brien, Jennifer, Prion finding offers insight into spontaneous protein diseases, News Release, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), 29 July 2004, see pub.ucsf.edu/newsservices/releases/200407274?print

831 Mayr, Anton, BSE und Creutzfeldt-Jakob-Krankheit (CJD): Falsche Begriffe und falsche Assoziationen, Journal Med, 57/2001, p. 6

832 Scholz, Roland, Überlegungen zur Genese der bovinen spongiformen Encephalopathie (BSE), Biolab-Website, see www.biolab-muenchen.de/index.html?rightframe=http://www.biolab-muenchen.de/bse/scholz01.htm

833 Parry, Herbert, Scrapie: a transmissible and hereditary disease of sheep, Heredity, February 1962, pp. 75-105

834 Koch, Klaus, Nobelpreis für Prionenforschung: Eine gewagte These wird geadelt, Deutsches Ärzteblatt, 17 October 1997

835 Scholz, Roland, Phantom BSE-Gefahr. Irrwege von Wissenschaft und Politik im BSE-Skandal, Berenkamp, 2005, pp. 11-12

836 Deutschland im BSE-Schock. In Großbritannien hat man seit Jahren Erfahrung. Was weiß man definitiv, woher kommt BSE?, interview with Zeit-correspondent Jürgen Krönig, SWR 2, 27 November 2000

837 Deutschland im BSE-Schock. In Großbritannien hat man seit Jahren Erfahrung. Was weiß man definitiv, woher kommt BSE?, interview with Zeit-correspondent Jürgen Krönig, SWR 2, 27 November 2000

838 Prusiner, Stanley, Frühtests auf Rinderwahn, Spektrum der Wissenschaft, February 2005, pp. 62-69

839 Ebringer, Alan, Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE): Comparison between the “prion” hypothesis and the autoimmune theory, Journal of Nutritional & Environmental Medicine, 8/1998, pp. 265-276

840 Ebringer, Alan, BSE as an autoimmune disease, Immunology News, 1997, Vol. 4, pp. 149-150

841 Scholz, Roland, Phantom BSE-Gefahr. Irrwege von Wissenschaft und Politik im BSE-Skandal, Berenkamp, 2005, p. 153

842 Legname, Giuseppe, Synthetic Mammalian Prions, Science, 30 July 2004, pp. 673-676

843 Aguzzi, Adrioano, vCJD tissue distribution and transmission by transfusion—a worst-case scenario coming true?, Lancet, 7 February 2004, p. 411

844 Scholz, Roland, Phantom BSE-Gefahr. Irrwege von Wissenschaft und Politik im BSE-Skandal, Berenkamp, 2005, pp. 12-13

845 Scholz, Roland, 25 Thesen gegen die Behauptung, BSE und vCJK seien oral übertragbare Infektionskrankheiten und BSE gefährdet die menschliche Gesundheit, Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 15 February 2002, pp. 341-342

846 Raine, Cedric, Chronic experimental allergic encephalomyelitis in inbred guinea pigs. An ultrastructural study, Laboratory Investigation, October 1974, pp. 369-380

847 Scholz, Roland, 25 Thesen gegen die Behauptung, BSE und vCJK seien oral übertragbare Infektionskrankheiten und BSE gefährdet die menschliche Gesundheit, Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 15 February 2002, p. 341

848 Scholz, Roland, Überlegungen zur Genese der bovinen spongiformen Encephalopathie (BSE), Biolab-Website, see www.biolab-muenchen.de/index.html?rightframe=http://www.biolab-muenchen.de/bse/scholz01.htm

849 Prusiner, Stanley, Novel proteinaceous infectious particles cause scrapie, Science, 9 April 1982, pp. 136-144

850 Scholz, Roland, Phantom BSE-Gefahr. Irrwege von Wissenschaft und Politik im BSE-Skandal, Berenkamp, 2005, pp. 27-28

851 Poser, Sigrid, Die neue Variante der Creutzfeldt-Jakob-Krankheit, Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 15 February 2002, p. 333

852 Anderson, Robert, Transmission dynamics and epidemiology of BSE in British cattle, Nature, 29 August 1996, p. 781

853 Köhnlein, Claus, BSE (Leserbrief zum Artikel von Sucharit Bhakdi: Prionen und der „BSE-Wahnsinn“: Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme), Deutsches Ärzteblatt, 13 September 2002, p. A2404

854 Köhnlein, Claus, Virale Seuchen, die es gar nicht gibt. BSE/AIDS/Hepatitis C, Raum & Zeit, 111/2001, pp. 23-24

855 Köhnlein, Claus, Virale Seuchen, die es gar nicht gibt. BSE/AIDS/Hepatitis C, Raum & Zeit, 111/2001, p. 24

856 Wucher, Petra; Ehlers, Hans-Joachim, BSE: Ein Pharma-Unfall?, Raum & Zeit, 84/1996, p. 90

857 Lüllmann, Heinz, Pharmakologie und Toxikologie, Thieme, 2003, p. 504

858 Jetzt wird das Pestizid als BSE-Auslöser diskutiert, Ärzte Zeitung, 15 April 1998

859 Whatley, Stephen, Phosmet induces up-regulation of surface levels of the cellular prion protein, Neuroreport, 11 May 1998, pp. 1391-1395

860 Personal interview, 8 February 2006

861 Köhnlein, Claus, Virale Seuchen, die es gar nicht gibt. BSE/AIDS/Hepatitis C, Raum & Zeit, 111/2001, pp. 24-25

862 Purdey, Mark, Ecosystems supporting clusters of sporadic TSEs demonstrate excesses of the radical-generating divalent cation manganese and deficiencies of antioxidant co-factors Cu, Se, Fe, Zn, Medical Hypotheses, 2/2002, pp. 278-306

863 Scholz, Roland, Phantom BSE-Gefahr. Irrwege von Wissenschaft und Politik im BSE-Skandal, Berenkamp, 2005, pp. 38-40

864 Bergmann, Werner; Beringer, Helmut, Kupfermangel. Ein möglicher BSE-auslösender Faktor?, Journal of Plant Nutrition and Soil Science, April 2001, pp. 233-235

865 Scholz, Roland, Phantom BSE-Gefahr. Irrwege von Wissenschaft und Politik im BSE-Skandal, Berenkamp, 2005

Chapter 6

SARS: Hysteria on the Heels of AIDS and BSE

866 Watzlawick, Paul, Wie wirklich ist die Wirklichkeit? Wahn, Täuschung, Verstehen, Piper, 2005, pp. 66-67

867 Schuh, Hans, Unheimliche Keime. Die Lungenkrankheit SARS infiziert Mensch und Börse, ist aber nur selten tödlich, Die Zeit, 15/2003

868 Nagy, Ursula, SARS in der Provinz—das Beispiel Ningbo, China Fokus, 28 May 2003

869 China ‘laundering money’ over SARS fears, breakingnews.com, 29 April 2003

870 Brost, Marc; Heuser, Uwe Jan, Die infizierte Weltwirtschaft, Die Zeit, 20/2003

871 Volksrepublik China, Wikipedia, see de.wikipedia.org/wiki/China

872 Summary of probable SARS cases with onset of illness from 1 November 2002 to 31 July 2003, World Health Organization, see www.who.int/csr/sars/country/table2003_09_23/en/

873 Zylka-Menhorn, Vera, SARS: Hysterie, Deutsches Ärzteblatt, 18 April.2003

874 Neue Erreger von Atemwegserkrankungen werden oft unterschätzt, Ärzte Zeitung, 10 July 2006

875 Schuh, Hans, Unheimliche Keime. Die Lungenkrankheit SARS infiziert Mensch und Börse, ist aber nur selten tödlich, Die Zeit, 15/2003

876 SARS-Hysterie: Uni Berkely sperrt Asiaten aus, Spiegel Online, 6 May 2003

877 Schuh, Hans, Unheimliche Keime. Die Lungenkrankheit SARS infiziert Mensch und Börse, ist aber nur selten tödlich, Die Zeit, 15/2003

878 Foreman, William, Flutwelle schadet der Wirtschaft weniger als SARS, Financial Times Deutschland (online), 8 January 2005

879 Watzlawick, Paul, Wie wirklich ist die Wirklichkeit? Wahn, Täuschung, Verstehen, Piper, 2005, pp. 84-85

880 Köhnlein, Claus, Die SARS-Hysterie. SARS auf den Spuren von AIDS und BSE, Eigentümlich Frei, July 2003, p. 40

881 Reilley, Brigg, SARS and Carlo Urbani, New England Journal of Medicine, 15 May 2003, p. 1951

882 Wenzel, Richard, Managing SARS admist Uncertainty, New England Journal of Medicine, 15 May 2003, pp. 1947-1948

883 Altman, Lawrence, Lessons of AIDS, Applied to SARS, New York Times, 6 May 2003

884 Reilley, Brigg, SARS and Carlo Urbani, New England Journal of Medicine, 15 May 2003, p. 1951

885 Wenzel, Richard, Managing SARS admist Uncertainty, New England Journal of Medicine, 15 May 2003, pp. 1947-1948

886 Altman, Lawrence, Lessons of AIDS, Applied to SARS, New York Times, 6 May 2003

887 Peiris, Malik, Coronavirus as a possible cause of severe acute respiratory syndrome, Lancet, 19 April, pp. 1319-1325

888 New England Journal of Medicine, 15 May 2003

889 Winn, Washington, Legionnaires’ Disease: Historical Perspective, Clinical Microbiology Review, January 1988, p. 60

890 Winn, Washington, Legionnaires’ Disease: Historical Perspective, Clinical Microbiology Review, January 1988, p. 61

891 Ibid., p. 72

892 Ibid., p. 71

893 Haley, Charles, Nosocomial Legionnaires’ disease: a continuing common-source epidemic at Wadsworth Medical Center, Annals of Internal Medicine, April 1979, pp. 583-586

894 England III, Albert, Sporadic and epidemic nosocomial legionellosis in the United States. Epidemiologic features, American Journal of Medicine, March 1981, pp. 707-711

895 Zovirax, Rote Liste, 2005, p. 10487

896 Tolzin, Hans, SARS: Wie ein Mythos entsteht, 25 May 2003, impfkritik.de, see www.impfkritik.de/sars/

897 Zylka-Menhorn, Vera, Schweres akutes respiratorisches Syndrom: Erregernachweis durch weltweite Kooperation, Ärzte Zeitung, 4 April 2003, p. C701

898 Wenzel, Richard, Managing SARS admist Uncertainty, New England Journal of Medicine, 15 May 2003, p. 1947

899 Harrison, Pamela, Major International Conference a Landmark in Battle Against SARS: Presented at SARS-Toronto, docguide.com

900 Zylka-Menhorn, Vera, Schweres akutes respiratorisches Syndrom: Erregernachweis durch weltweite Kooperation, Ärzte Zeitung, 4 April 2003, p. C701

901 Fouchier, Ron, Aetiology: Koch’s postulates fulfilled for SARS virus, Nature, 15 May 2003, p. 240

902 Kuiken, Thijs, Newly discovered coronavirus as the primary cause of severe acute respiratory syndrome, Lancet, 26 July 2003, pp. 263-70

903 Feldmeier, Hermann, Die Welt atmet auf, Tagesspiegel, 30 June 2003, p. 24

904 WHO SARS Scientific Research Advisory Committee concludes its first meeting, WHO-Website, 22 October 2003

905 Kuiken, Thijs, Newly discovered coronavirus as the primary cause of severe acute respiratory syndrome, Lancet, 26 July 2003, p. 263

906 SARS: Angebliche Erfüllung der Koch-Postulate voller Fehler?, Impf-Report, 19 November 2003

907 Kuiken, Thijs, Newly discovered coronavirus as the primary cause of severe acute respiratory syndrome, Lancet, 26 July 2003, p. 264

908 Ibid., p. 266

909 Ketamin, Rote Liste, 2005, p. 65011

910 SARS: Angebliche Erfüllung der Koch-Postulate voller Fehler?, Impf-Report, 19 November 2003

911 Personal communication with Francsico Guarner, 20 January 2005

912 Guarner, Francisco, Gut flora in health and disease, Lancet, 8 February 2003, pp. 512-519

913 Eckburg, Paul, Diversity of the human intestinal microbial flora, Science, 10 June 2005, pp. 1635-1638

914 Tannock, Gerald, New Perspectives of the gut microbiota: implications for future research, Gastroenterology Clinical North America, September 2005, pp. 361-382

915 Kuiken, Thijs, Newly discovered coronavirus as the primary cause of severe acute respiratory syndrome, Lancet, 26 July 2003, pp. 264

916 Wenzel, Richard, Managing SARS admist Uncertainty, New England Journal of Medicine, 15 May 2003, pp. 1947-1947

917 Schuh, Hans, Unheimliche Keime. Die Lungenkrankheit SARS infiziert Mensch und Börse, ist aber nur selten tödlich, Die Zeit, 15/2003

918 Puckett, Jim, Exporting Harm. The High-Tech Trashing of Asia, Report der Basel Action Network und Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, 25 February 2002

919 Personal interview with Jim Puckett, 23 February 2006

920 Chea, Terence, American Electronic Waste Contaminates China and India, Associated Press, 17 August 2005

Chapter 7

H5N1: Avian Flu and Not a Glimmer of Proof

921 Wetlands International’s Position Statement, November 2005

922 Albrecht, Harro, Der Tod auf leisen Schwingen. Die Vogelgrippe ist im Anmarsch— höchste Zeit, dass Deutschland Impfstoffe und genügend Medikamente kauft, Die Zeit, 35/2005

923 Grippe-Pandemie: Uno rechnet mit 150 Millionen Tote, Spiegel Online, 30 September 2005

924 Schwägerl, Christian, „Die Gefahr wird unterschätzt”, Interview mit Reinhard Kurth, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 August 2005

925 George, Lianne, Forget SARS, West Nile, Ebola and avian flu. The real epidemic is fear, Macleans.ca, 29 September 2005

926 Siegel, Marc, Why we shouldn’t fear bird flu, Ottawa Citizen, 19 September 2005, p. A15

927 Siegel, Marc, An epidemic of overreaction, Los Angeles Times, 11 October 2005

928 Siegel, Marc, Alive and well: The fear epidemic, USA Today, 19 October 2005

929 Baureithel, Ulrike, Am Anfang steht die Angst. Aus dem Rollenbuch einer Seuche: Killervögel, Menschenzüge und vorsorglich Verdächtige, Freitag, 20 January 2006, p. 1

930 Krönig, Jürgen, Die Panikindustrie, Berliner Republik, 6/2005

931 Engelbrecht, Torsten; Crowe, David; West, Jim; Vormarsch der Killer-Enten. Schenkt man manchen Medien Glauben, so wird die Welt in naher Zukunft von einer Epidemie heimgesucht, ausgelöst durch Mutation eines Vogelgrippevirus mit dem faszinierend-schaurigen Namen H5N1. Auf welchen Fakten basieren die Horrormeldungen? Eine Recherche, Journalist, 11/2005, pp. 35-36

932 Zimmermann, Kurt, Piep, piep, piiiiiiiep, Weltwoche, 27 October 2005, p. 29

933 E-mails sent out to the managing science editors at Spiegel, Spiegel Online, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 6 October 2005; keine Antworten erhalten

934 E-mail to the science desk of Die Zeit, 6 October 2005; answer received at the same day

935 Lieberman, Trudy, Bitter Pill, Columbia Journalism Review, July 2005

936 Siegel, Marc, Why we shouldn’t fear bird flu, Ottawa Citizen, 19 September 2005, p. A15

937 Avian Flu Pandemic Could Cost World 2 Trillion Dollars, Medical News Today, 18 September 2006

938 Engelbrecht, Torsten; Crowe, David; West, Jim; Vormarsch der Killer-Enten. Schenkt man manchen Medien Glauben, so wird die Welt in naher Zukunft von einer Epidemie heimgesucht, ausgelöst durch Mutation eines Vogelgrippevirus mit dem faszinierend-schaurigen Namen H5N1. Auf welchen Fakten basieren die Horrormeldungen? Eine Recherche, Journalist, 11/2005, pp. 35-36

939 German National Consumer Protection Ministry (Bundesministerium für Verbraucherschutz, Ernährung und Landwirtschaft, BMVEL), Vogelgrippe, press release for the press conference on 19 August 2005

940 E-mail from the German National Consumer Protection Ministry (Bundesministerium für Verbraucherschutz, Ernährung und Landwirtschaft, BMVEL), 23 August 2005

941 Bundesministerium für Verbraucherschutz, Ernährung und Landwirtschaft (BMVEL), Vogelgrippe. Presss release, 19 August 2005

942 Hulse-Post, Diane; Webster, Robert, Role of domestic ducks in the propagation and biological evolution of highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza viruses in Asia, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 26 July 2006, pp. 10682-10687

943 Hatta, Mochammad, Molecular basis for high virulence of Hong Kong H5N1 influenza A viruses, Science, 7 September 2001, pp. 1840-1842

944 Hulse, Diane; Webster, Robert, Molecular determinants within the surface proteins involved in the pathogenicity of H5N1 influenza viruses in chickens, Journal of Virology, September 2004, pp. 9954-9964

945 Uiprasertkul, Mongkol, Influenza A H5N1 replication sites in humans, Emerging Infectious Diseases, July 2005, pp. 1036-1041

946 Subbarao, Kanta, Characterization of an avian influenza A (H5N1) virus isolated from a child with a fatal respiratory illness, Science, 16 January 1998, pp. 393-396

947 Engelbrecht, Torsten; Crowe, David, Avian Flu Virus H5N1: No Proof for Existence, Pathogenicity, or Pandemic Potential; Non-‘H5N1’ Causation Omitted, Medical Hypotheses, 4/2006; pp. 855-857

948 Ibid.

949 Brandis, Henning; Pulverer, Gerhard, Lehrbuch der Medizinischen Mikrobiologie, Gustav Fischer, 1988, p. 633

950 Engelbrecht, Torsten; Crowe, David, Avian Flu Virus H5N1: No Proof for Existence, Pathogenicity, or Pandemic Potential; Non-‘H5N1’ Causation Omitted, Medical Hypotheses, 4/2006; pp. 855-857

951 Hulse-Post, Diane; Webster, Robert, Role of domestic ducks in the propagation and biological evolution of highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza viruses in Asia, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 26 July 2006, pp. 10682-10683

952 Gen-Veränderung: H5N1-Virus passt sich dem Menschen an, Spiegel Online, 13 January 2006

953 E-mails sent to the press department of the WHO and and its virologist Mike Perdue on 13, 19 und 27 January 2006

954 Klassische Geflügelpest (Hochpathogene Form der Aviären Influenza), Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, p. 2

955 Ibid., p. 4

956 Engelbrecht, Torsten; Crowe, David, Avian Flu Virus H5N1: No Proof for Existence, Pathogenicity, or Pandemic Potential; Non-‘H5N1’ Causation Omitted, Medical Hypotheses, 4/2006; pp. 855-857

957 Robbins, John, The Food Revolution, 2001 p. 196

958 Turner, Jacky; Garcés, Leah; Smith, Wendy, The Welfare Of Broiler Chickens In The European Union, Compassion in World Farming Trust, 2003, p. 2

959 Julian, Richard, Rapid Growth Problems: Ascites and Skeletal Deformities in Broilers, Poultry Science, December 1998, pp. 1773-1780

960 Turner, Jacky; Garcés, Leah; Smith, Wendy, The Welfare Of Broiler Chickens In The European Union, Compassion in World Farming Trust, 2003, p. 11

961 Scientific Committee on Animal health and Animal Welfare (SCAHAW), The Welfare of Chickens Kept for Meat Production (Broilers), European Commission, Health and Consumer Protection Directorate-General, March 2000

962 Turner, Jacky; Garcés, Leah; Smith, Wendy, The Welfare Of Broiler Chickens In The European Union, Compassion in World Farming Trust, 2003, p. 2

963 Ibid., p. 18

964 Scientific Committee on Animal health and Animal Welfare (SCAHAW), The Welfare of Chickens Kept for Meat Production (Broilers), European Commission, Health and Consumer Protection Directorate-General, March 2000

965 Julian, Richard, Rapid Growth Problems: Ascites and Skeletal Deformities in Broilers, Poultry Science, December 1998, pp. 1773-1780

966 Tolzin, Hans, Die Vogelgrippe und das Tabu der Massentierhaltung. Der merkwürdige Tunnelblick der Gesundheitsbehörden am Beispiel der holländischen Epidemie von 2003, Impf-Report, July/August 2005, p. 29

967 Klassische Geflügelpest (Hochpathogene Form der Aviären Influenza), Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, p. 5

968 Tolzin, Hans, Die Vogelgrippe und das Tabu der Massentierhaltung. Der merkwürdige Tunnelblick der Gesundheitsbehörden am Beispiel der holländischen Epidemie von 2003, Impf-Report, July/August 2005, p. 29

969 Knierim, Ute, Studie zur Tiergerechtheit von Haltungssystemen für Legehennen im Auftrag des Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz e.V. (BUND), 11/2003, p. 12

970 Ibid., p. 9

971 Hirt, Helen; Zeltner, Esther; Bapst, Bea, Arbeitsbericht: Fachgruppe Tierhaltung und Tierzucht. Forschungsarbeiten 2000-2004, Forschungsinstitut für Biologischen Landbau (FiBL)

972 Knierim, Ute, Studie zur Tiergerechtheit von Haltungssystemen für Legehennen im Auftrag des Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz e.V. (BUND), 11/2003, p. 9

973 Hirt, Helen; Zeltner, Esther; Bapst, Bea, Arbeitsbericht: Fachgruppe Tierhaltung und Tierzucht. Forschungsarbeiten 2000-2004, Forschungsinstitut für biologischen Landbau (FiBL)

974 Legehennenauslauf: tiergerecht und nachhaltig, Forschungsinstitut für Biologischen Landbau (FiBL)

975 Rätselraten über Herkunft des Virus, Spiegel Online/AP/dpa, 15 February 2006

976 Bundesministerium für Verbraucherschutz, Ernährung und Landwirtschaft (BMVEL), Vogelgrippe. Press release, 19 August 2005

977 Tolzin, Hans, Die Vogelgrippe und das Tabu der Massentierhaltung. Der merkwürdige Tunnelblick der Gesundheitsbehörden am Beispiel der holländischen Epidemie von 2003, Impf-Report, July/August 2005, p. 27

978 Rathke, Martina, Vogelgrippe, ein uralter Begleiter, Stern (online), 16 September 2005

979 Albrecht, Harro, Der Tod auf leisen Schwingen. Die Vogelgrippe ist im Anmarsch— höchste Zeit, dass Deutschland Impfstoffe und genügend Medikamente kauft, Die Zeit, 35/2005

980 Tolzin, Hans, Die Vogelgrippe und das Tabu der Massentierhaltung. Der merkwürdige Tunnelblick der Gesundheitsbehörden am Beispiel der holländischen Epidemie von 2003, Impf-Report, July/August 2005, pp. 28-29

981 Virus In BC Duck Confirmed As Low Pathogenic North American Strain, press release, Canadian Food Inspection Agency, 20 November 2005

982 Wild Bird Survey Detects Avian Influenza In Ducks—No New Threat To Human Health, press release from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, 31 October 2005

983 Branswell, Helen, Heightened climate of bird flu fear made B.C. slaughter inevitable: experts, Canada.com, 23 November 2005

984 Vogelgrippeverdacht: Tote Gänse bei Koblenz und Göttingen, N24.de, 25 October 2005

985 Gänse bei Neuwied an Gift verende, ZDFheute.de, 26 October 2005

986 Routes of infection of highly pathogenic avian influenza in Japan, Food Safety and Consumer Bureau, Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry & Fisheries, Japan, 30 June 2004, p. 16

987 Massonnet, Philippe, Chinas Wunderwirtschaft. Land der vergifteten Flüsse, Spiegel Online/AFP, 25 November 2005

988 Wetlands International’s Position Statement, November 2005

989 Stop Ducking Hard Facts And Though Policy Options On Bird Flu, Says New Scientific Task Force, press release from the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals und des United Nations Environment Programme, 24 October 2005

990 Khabir, Ahmad, Infectious diseases high on agenda under new WHO leadership, Lancet Infectious Diseases, September 2003, p. 524

991 Avian influenza frequently asked questions, World Health Organization (online), 5 December 2005

992 Cumulative Number of Confirmed Human Cases of Avian Influenza A/(H5N1) Reported to WHO, 13 November 2006

993 Methylprednisolone: Who should not take methylprednisolone?, Drugs.com

994 Subbarao, Kanta, Characterization of an avian influenza A (H5N1) virus isolated from a child with a fatal respiratory illness, Science, 16 January 1998, pp. 393-396

995 Töpfer, Carolina, Reye-Syndrom bei Baby & Kind, Netdoctor.de

996 Reye’s Syndrome, National Reye’s Syndrome Foundation, see www.reyessyndrome.org

997 Hurwitz, Eugene, Public Health Service study of Reye’s syndrome and medications. Report of the Mayn study, Journal of the American Medical Association, 10 April 1987, pp. 1905-1911

998 Reye’s Syndrome: Facts, National Reye’s Syndrome Foundation; see www.reyessyndrome.org/facts.htm

999 Subbarao, Kanta, Characterization of an avian influenza A (H5N1) virus isolated from a child with a fatal respiratory illness, Science, 16 January 1998, pp. 396

1000 Herbermann, Jan, Der Doktor und das böse Vieh. Der Deutsche Klaus Stöhr letiet das Anti-Influenza-Programm der WHO. Er ist der oberste Kämpfer gegen die Vogelgrippe—ein Blick in seinen unterirdischen War-Room, Handelsblatt, 18 January 2006, p. 10

1001 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Kollaps. Im Gespräch: Der Leipziger Infektionsmediziner Bernhard Ruf zum Influenza-Virus H5N1, Freitag, 21 January 2005, p. 18

1002 E-mail from the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, 22 September 2005

1003 Macfarlane, John, Bird flu and pandemic flu. What’s the message for GPs and hospital doctors?, British Medical Journal, 29 Oktober 2005, pp. 975-976

1004 Otto, Alexander, Bird flu threat not so grave, CDC chief says, The News Tribune (online), 17 April 2006

1005 UNO-Erhebung. Vogelgrippe tötete bisher 100 Menschen, Spiegel-Online, 27 April 2006

1006 Vogelgrippe-Schutz. Züchterselbstmorde—Bauern wettern gegen Stallpflicht, Spiegel Online, 27 April 2006

1007 Albrecht, Harro, Der Tod auf leisen Schwingen. Die Vogelgrippe ist im Anmarsch— höchste Zeit, dass Deutschland Impfstoffe und genügend Medikamente kauft, Die Zeit, 35/2005

1008 Franzen, Christof, Angst-Geschäft, Rundschau, 19 October 2005

1009 Roche: Weltweite Grippe-Vorsorge beschert Gewinnsprung, FTD.de/Reuters, 20 July 2005

1010 Vogelgrippe wird Milliarden-Geschäft, Handelsblatt, 2 February 2006, p. 14

1011 Albrecht, Harro, Der Tod auf leisen Schwingen. Die Vogelgrippe ist im Anmarsch— höchste Zeit, dass Deutschland Impfstoffe und genügend Medikamente kauft, Die Zeit, 35/2005

1012 Flu pill ads make some uneasy, Boston Globe (online), 1 November 2006

1013 Mrusek, Konrad, Vom Ladenhüter zum Welterfolg, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 January 2005, p. 3

1014 Franzen, Christof, Angst-Geschäft, Rundschau (Swiss newscast), 19 October 2005

1015 Outbreak! Tamiflu “useless” against avian flu. Doctor who has treated 41 victims of virus says “we place no importance on this drug,“ Worldnetdaily.com, 4 December 2005

1016 Chugai says two deaths have possible Tamiflu link, Chinadaily.com/Reuters, 14 November 2005

1017 Grippemittel Tamiflu unter Verdacht, FAZ.net/AFP/Reuters, 18 November 2005

1018 Health Canada warns of hallucinations among Tamiflu users, CBS News (online), 30 November 2006

1019 Bhattacharya, Shaoni, FDA considers Tamiflu safety in children, Newscientist.com, 18 November 2005

1020 FDA Probes Tamiflu’s Effect on Kids, Consumeraffairs.com, 18 November 2005

1021 Bhattacharya, Shaoni, FDA considers Tamiflu safety in children, Newscientist.com, 18 November 2005

1022 Patient Information: Tamiflu (oseltamivir phosphate), Roche

1023 Hartmann, Gunther, Querschnittsbereich Klinische Pharmakologie/Allgemein-medizin: Neue Arzneimittel, Tamiflu, Universitätsklinikum Bonn

1024 Rokuro, Hama et al., Oseltamivir and early deterioration leading to death: a proportional mortality study for 2009A/H1N1 influenza, International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, 2011, pp. 201-215

1025 Tamiflu: Side effects, ratings, and patient comments, Askapatient.com

1026 Engelbrecht, Torsten; Crowe, David; West, Jim; Vormarsch der Killer-Enten. Schenkt man manchen Medien Glauben, so wird die Welt in naher Zukunft von einer Epidemie heimgesucht, ausgelöst durch Mutation eines Vogelgrippevirus mit dem faszinierend-schaurigen Namen H5N1. Auf welchen Fakten basieren die Horrormeldungen? Eine Recherche, Journalist, 11/2005, p. 36

1027 Nicholson, Karl, Effectiveness of neuraminidase inhibitors in treatment and prevention of influenza A and B: systematic review and meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials, British Medical Journal, 7 June 2003, p. 1239

1028 House of Commons Health Committee, The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry, Forth Report of Session 2004-05, Volume 1, 22 March 2005, p. 53

1029 Association between industry funding and statistically significant pro-industry findings in medical and surgical randomized trials, Canadian Medical Association Journal, 17 February 2004, pp. 477-480

1030 Smith, Richard, Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies, Plos Medicine, May 2005, p. e138

1031 Drazen, Jeffrey, Financial Associations of Authors, New England Journal of Medicine, 13 June 2002, pp. 1901-1902

1032 Moynihan, Ray, Who pays for the pizza? Redefining the relationships between doctors and drug companies, British Medical Journal, 31 May 2003, p. 1190

1033 Sharav, Vera, NIH Conflict of Interest Rules, “Option of Corruption,“ children victimized, press release from the Allicance for Human Researach Protection (AHRP), 18 May 2004

1034 Willman, David, Lawmakers Assail NIH Conflict Rules, Los Angeles Times, 13 May 2004

1035 Vogelgrippe. Bush will Milliarden für Seuchenbekämpfung, Spiegel Online, 2 November 2005

1036 Mercola, Joseph, Rumsfeld To Profit From Bird Flu Hoax, Mercola.com

1037 Cole, Andrew, Experts question wisdom of stockpiling oseltamivir, British Medical Journal, 5 November 2005, p. 1041

1038 Schwartz, Nelson, Rumsfeld’s growing stake in Tamiflu, CNN.com, 31 October 2005

1039 Tolzin, Hans, Tamiflu—Eine Erfolgsgeschichte aus Seilschaften und Korruption, Impf-Report, September/October 2005, p. 20

1040 Schwartz, Nelson, Rumsfeld’s growing stake in Tamiflu, CNN.com, 31 October 2005

1041 Sucher, Jörn, Rumsfeld profitiert vom Tamiflu-Boom, Spiegel Online, 1 November 2005

1042 Rumsfeld’s growing stake in Tamiflu, Schwartz, Nelson, CNN.com, 31 October 2005

1043 Krüger, Frank, Von Tamiflu zu ”Rummy Flu”: Vogelgrippe lässt Rumsfelds Kasse sprudeln, Saar-Echo, 31 October 2005

1044 Tolzin, Hans, Tamiflu—Eine Erfolgsgeschichte aus Seilschaften und Korruption, Impf-Report, September/October 2005, pp. 21-22

1045 Schmiester, Carsten, Versorgung der Truppen im Irak. Neuer Auftrag für Halliburton trotz Betrugsverdachts, Tagesschau.de, 11 February 2006

1046 Pleming, Sue, Army gives $5 bln of work to Halliburton, 6 July 2005, Reuters

1047 O’Harrow, Robert, Waxman Raises New Questions on Cheney, Washington Post, 14 June 2004; p. A04

1048 Waxman, Henry, Fact Sheet. Halliburton’s Iraq Contracts Now Worth Over $10 Billion, Committee on Government Reform, US House of Representatives, 9 December 2004

1049 Jarecki, Eugene, Why we fight—Amerikas Kriege, documentary (USA 2003), aired on Arte television, 31 January 2006, 20.40 Uhr

1050 Wetzel, Hubert, Bush legt Milliardenprogramm gegen Vogelgrippe auf, Financial Times Deutschland, 2 November 2005

1051 Sharav, Vera, Biodefense Vaccine /Drug Development Act--S. 1873, press release, Alliance for Human Research Protection, 2 November 2005

1052 Congressional Set To Pass Law Eliminating Liability For Vaccine Injuries, press release, National Vaccine Information Center, 19 October 2005

1053 Wetzel, Hubert, Bush legt Milliardenprogramm gegen Vogelgrippe auf, Financial Times Deutschland, 2 November 2005

1054 Becker; Markus, Kampf gegen Vogelgrippe. US-Forscher beleben altes Killervirus, Spiegel Online, 5 October 2005

1055 Engelbrecht, Torsten; Crowe, David; West, Jim; Vormarsch der Killer-Enten. Schenkt man manchen Medien Glauben, so wird die Welt in naher Zukunft von einer Epidemie heimgesucht, ausgelöst durch Mutation eines Vogelgrippevirus mit dem faszinierend-schaurigen Namen H5N1. Auf welchen Fakten basieren die Horrormeldungen? Eine Recherche, Journalist, 11/2005, p. 36

1056 Taubenberger, Jeffrey, Characterization of the 1918 influenza virus polymerase genes, Nature, 6 October 2005, pp. 889-293

1057 Kelly, Thaddeus, Mucolipidosis I (acid neuraminidase deficiency). Three cases and delineation of the variability of the phenotype, American Journal of Diseases of Children, August 1981, pp. 703-708

1058 Taubenberger, Jeffery, Characterization of the Reconstructed 1918 Spanish Influenza Pandemic Virus, Science, 7 October 2005, pp. 77-80

1059 Becker, Markus, US-Forscher beleben altes Killervirus, Spiegel Online, 5 October 2005

1060 Kolata, Gina, Influenza. Die Jagd nach dem Virus, Fischer, 2003, p. 18

1061 Tolzin, Hans, Die Spanische Grippe, Impf-Report, July/August 2005, pp. 21-22

1062 Ibid., p. 23

1063 Kolata, Gina, Influenza. Die Jagd nach dem Virus, Fischer, 2003, pp. 75-77

1064 Kratzer, Hans, Seuchen: „Niemand ist in Familien zur Pflege da, an die Kartoffelernte ist nicht zu denken,“ sueddeutsche.de, 16 April 2020

1065 Ibid., p. 78

1066 Kolata, Gina, Influenza. Die Jagd nach dem Virus, Fischer, 2003

1067 Crosby, Alfred, Epidemic and Peace, 1918, Greenwood Press, 1976

1068 Collier, Richard, Plague of the Spanish Lady: Influenza Pandemic, October 1918 to Januaryy 1919, Macmillan, 1974

1069 Hoehling, Adolph, The Great Epidemic, Little, Brown & Company, 1961

1070 Interview with David Crowe, 12 February 2006

1071 Gemma, Simonetta, Metabolism of Chloroform in the Human Liver and Identification of the Competent P450s, Drug Metabolism And Disposition, March 2003, p. 266

1072 Fernandez, Humberto, Heroin, Hazelden Information & Educational Services,1998

1073 Formaldehyd, Stoffbezogene Betriebsanweisungen, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

1074 Herrlich, Andreas, Die Pocken. Erreger, Epidemiologie und klinisches Bild, Thieme, 1960, pp. 162-163

1075 MacBean, Eleanora, The Spanish Influenza Epidemic of 1918 Was Caused By Vaccinations, chapter 2 of her work Swine Flu Expose, 1977, see www.whale.to/a/mcbean2.html#CHAPTER%202

1076 Hale, Annie, The Medical Voodoo, Gotham House, 1935

1077 Tolzin, Hans, Die Spanische Grippe, Impf-Report, July/August 2005, p.20

1078 Kolata, Gina, Influenza. Die Jagd nach dem Virus, Fischer, 2003, pp. 65-66

1079 Ibid., p. 70

Chapter 8

Cervical Cancer and Other Vaccinations: Policy vs. Evidence

1080 Burnet, Sir Frank Macfarlane, Genes, Dreams and Realities, Medical and Technical Publishing, 1971, p. 144

1081 Sharav, Vera, Addendum: Theory suggests that a shortage of vitamin D triggers outbreaks of flu, press release from the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), 28 November 2006

1082 Simonsen, Lone, Impact of influenza vaccination on seasonal mortality in the US elderly population. Archives of Internal Medicine, 14 February 2005, pp. 265-272

1083 Thompson, William, Mortality Associated With Influenza and Respiratory Syncytial Virus in the United States, Journal of the American Medical Association, 8 January 2003, pp. 179-186

1084 Kennedy Townsend, Kathleen; Kennedy II, Joseph P.; McKean Kennedy, Maeve, RFK Jr. Is Our Brother and Uncle. He’s Tragically Wrong About Vaccines, politico. com, May 08, 2019

1085 Thompson, William, Mortality Associated With Influenza and Respiratory Syncytial Virus in the United States, Journal of the American Medical Association, 8 January 2003, pp. 179-186

1086 Doshi, Peter, Are US flu death figures more PR than science?, British Medical Journal, 10 December 2005, pp. 1412-1413

1087 Jefferson, Tom, Influenza vaccination: policy versus evidence, British Medical Journal, 28 October 2006, pp. 912-915

1088 Yazback, Edward, Influenza Vaccination of Children: A Useless Risk, Red Flags, 28 November 2006

1089 Sharav, Vera, Addendum: Theory suggests that a shortage of vitamin D triggers outbreaks of flu, press release from the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), 28 November 2006

1090 Influenza data from the seasonal final report 2004/2005 from the AGI, Robert Koch Institute (online)

1091 Kögel-Schauz, Angelika, Influenza-Viropoly. Das globale Spiel um Milliarden-Gewinne, Impf-Report, September/October 2005, pp. 5-7

1092 Haas, Walter, Why do official statistics of “influenza deaths” underestimate the real burden?, British Medical Journal (online), 2 January 2006

1093 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Can we trust blindly the figures of CDC, RKI, etc.? Part 2, British Medical Journal (online), 4 January 2006, http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/331/7529/1412#125243

1094 Inquiry sent to the Robert Koch Institute, 13 Decmber 2005

1095 Haas, Walter, Why do official statistics of “influenza deaths” underestimate the real burden?, British Medical Journal (online), 2 January 2006

1096 E-mail from the Robert Koch Institute, 13 December 2005

1097 Influenza data from the seasonal final report 2004/2005 from the AGI, Robert Koch Institute (online)

1098 Influenza-Schutzimpfung jetzt!, press release from the Robert Koch Institute, 4 October 2004

1099 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Can we trust blindly the figures of CDC, RKI, etc.?, British Medical Journal (online), 11 December 2005, see http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/331/7529/1412#123609

1100 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Can we trust blindly the figures of CDC, RKI, etc.? Part 2, British Medical Journal (online), 4 January 2006, see http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/331/7529/1412#125243

1101 Website der Stiftung Präventive Pädiatrie, see www.stiftung-praeventive-paediatrie.de/ueberuns.html

1102 Website der Stiftung Präventive Pädiatrie; see www.stiftung-praeventive-paediatrie.de/kooperation.html

1103 Website of the organisation “Gesundes Kind,“ see www.gesundes-kind.de/gsk/home/impressum.htm

1104 Ibid.

1105 Desselberger, Axel; Krischer, Markus, Als Geldquelle genutzt. Ein Gesundheitsbeamter hat das ehrwürdige Robert-Koch-Institut offenbar zu seinem privaten Vorteil ausgebeutet, Focus, 14/2006, pp. 52-53

1106 Müller, Thomas, Ein Pandemie-Impfstoff im nächsten Jahr? Davon kann Ulla Schmidt nur träumen, Äzte Zeitung, 27 March 2006

1107 Sleegers, Anna, Impfstoff gegen Vogelgrippe. Große Pharmakonzerne arbeiten an schnelleren Produktionsverfahren für den Fall einer Pandemie, Handelsblatt, 31 March 2006, p. 19

1108 Engelbrecht, Torsten; Crowe, David, Avian Flu Virus H5N1: No Proof for Existence, Pathogenicity, or Pandemic Potential; Non-‘H5N1’ Causation Omitted, Medical Hypotheses, 4/2006; pp. 855-857

1109 Jahrbuch Korruption 2006: Schwerpunkt Korruption im Gesundheitswesen, Transparency International, Parthas Verlag, 2006

1110 Müller-Jung, Joachim, Impfen gegen Krebs—in der Apotheke wird ein Traum wahr, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 October 2006, p. N1

1111 E-mails to the German Cancer Research Centre (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ), 11 and 12 October 2006

1112 E-Mail from the DKFZ, 11 October 2006

1113 Bosch, Xaver, The causal relation between human papillomavirus and cervical cancer, Journal of Clinical Pathology, 28 November 2006, pp. 245

1114 Tolzin, Hans, Erster Krebsimpfstoff im Zulassungsverfahren, Impf-Report, January/ February 2006, p. 32

1115 Hein, Thomas, Impfungen bei Gebärmutterhalskrebs. Eine neue Attacke auf Patientinnen, Raum&Zeit, 144/2006, p. 11

1116 zur Hausen, Harald, A papillomavirus DNA from a cervical carcinoma and its prevalence in cancer biopsy samples from different geographic regions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, June 1983, pp. 3812-3815

1117 zur Hausen, Harald, A new type of papillomavirus DNA, its presence in genital cancer biopsies and in cell lines derived from cervical cancer, EMBO Journal, 3 May 1984, pp. 1151-1157

1118 E-Mails to the DKFZ (Sibylle Kohlstädt) on 28 November and 1 December 2006

1119 Hein, Thomas, Impfungen bei Gebärmutterhalskrebs. Eine neue Attacke auf Patientinnen, Raum&Zeit, 144/2006, p. 11

1120 Ibid., p. 12

1121 Raffle, Angela, Outcomes of screening to prevent cancer: analysis of cumulative incidence of cervical abnormality and modelling of cases and deaths prevented, British Medical Journal, 26 April 2003, pp. 901-904

1122 Koch, Klaus, Mythos Krebsvorsorge, Eichborn 2003, p. 187

1123 Burnet, Sir Frank Macfarlane, Genes, Dreams and Realities, Medical and Technical Publishing, 1971, pp. 139-140, 144

1124 Sharav, Vera, National Vaccine Info Center Calls Merck & FDA “Not Completely Honest” about pre-adolescent HPV Vaccine Safety, press release from the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), 29 June 2006

1125 HPV-Impfstoff Gardasil, Arznei-Telegramm, 12/2006, p. 118

1126 Hein, Thomas, Impfungen bei Gebärmutterhalskrebs. Eine neue Attacke auf Patientinnen, Raum&Zeit, 144/2006, p. 15

1127 www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/DES

1128 HPV-Impfstoff Gardasil, Arznei-Telegramm, 12/2006, p. 118

1129 Impfen gegen Krebs: Impfstoff gegen Gebärmutterhalskrebs soll 2007 auch in Europa erhältlich sein, Deutsches Grünes Kreuz, see www.dgk.de

1130 Merck’s Gardasil Vaccine Not Proven Safe for Little Girls, press release from the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), 27 June 2006

1131 Brower, Vicki, Cancer vaccine field gets shot of optimism from positive results, Nature Medicine, April 2005, p. 360

1132 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Sailor-Shooting, interview with US molecular biologist Peter Duesberg on anti-smoking campaigns, gene-mutations, aneuploidy, and the failure of the established cancer research, Freitag, 27 May 2005, p. 18

1133 Hein, Thomas, Impfungen bei Gebärmutterhalskrebs. Eine neue Attacke auf Patientinnen, Raum&Zeit, 144/2006, p. 16

1134 Sharav, Vera, Addendum: Theory suggests that a shortage of vitamin D triggers outbreaks of flu, press release from the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), 28 November 2006

Chapter 9

The Big Swine Flu Hoax

1135 Schweinegrippe: Streit um „Zwei-Klassen-Impfung“, fr-online.de, October 18, 2009

1136 Blaylock, Russell, Swine Flu—One of the Most Massive Cover-ups in American History, Mercola.com, November 3, 2009

1137 Hoffmeister, Johannes (Hrsg.), Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, Volume 1: Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, Hamburg, 1994, p. 19

1138 Tolzin, Hans, Die Fakten zur „Schweinegrippe“, impf-report, July/August 2009, p. 2

1139 Photo exhibition of the Robert Koch-Institut for the Diagnosis of Influenza Viruses, Robert Koch-Institut, first published May 2006, updated June 2009

1140 De Jone, Jørgen et al., Cellular gene transfer mediated by influenza virosomes with encapsulated plasmid DNA, Biochemical Journal, 1. July 2007, pp. 41-49

1141 Tolzin, Hans, Die Ursprünge des Schweinegrippe-Mythos, impf-report, July/August 2009, p. 21

1142 siehe http://www.cdc.gov/flu/

1143 Attkisson, Sharyl, Swine Flu Cases Overestimated? CBS News Exclusive: Study Of State Results Finds H1N1 Not As Prevalent As Feared, CBSnewp.com, October 21, 2009

1144 Spelsberg, Angela, Das Geschäft mit der Grippe, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 11/2009, p. 23

1145 Finland downgrades swine influenza, Newsroom.finland.fi, 23. July 2009

1146 Mercola, Joseph, Vaccine Doctor Given at Least $ 30 Million Dollars to Push Vaccines, Mercola.com, June 25, 2009

1147 Dougherty, Jon, Feds’ conflict of interest over vaccines? Committee eyes ‚incestuous‘ ties between drug-makers, FDA, CDC, wnd.com, June 16, 2000

1148 Spelsberg, Angela, Das Geschäft mit der Grippe, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 11/2009, p. 25

1149 Nähe zur Pharmaindustrie: Pandemie-Beauftragter der Regierung hat umstrittenen Beraterjob, Spiegel Online, October 24, 2009

1150 see Coordination gegen Bayer-Gefahren, www.cbgnetwork.org

1151 Historiker-Bericht: Die dunkle Vergangenheit des Robert-Koch-Instituts, Spiegel Online, October 1, 2008

1152 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Im Fake-News-Fieber: Spiegel & Co. haben die Schweinegrippe-Pandemie bis heute nicht aufgearbeitet—und verbreiten nun erneut Pharma-Propaganda, rubikon.news, 12 April 2020

1153 Hackenbroch, Veronika; Traufetter, Gerald, Immun gegen die Impfung, Spiegel, 19 October 2009, p. 140

1154 Spelsberg, Angela, Das Geschäft mit der Grippe, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 11/2009, p. 25

1155 Pinzler, Jutta; Schwalfenberg, Steganie, Profiteure der Angst—das Geschäft mit der Schweinegrippe, Arte, October 21, 2009

1156 Bartens, Werner, Schweinegrippe: Zu früh, zu unsicher, zu teuer?, Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 14, 2009

1157 Thelen, Peter, Schweinegrippe: Vertrag mit Risiken und Nebenwirkungen. Bund und Länder haben Impfstoff gegen die Schweinegrippe bestellt—und haften nun für fast alles, tagesspiegel.de, November 23, 2009

1158 Hackenbroch, Veronika; Traufetter, Gerald, Immun gegen die Impfung, Spiegel, October 19, 2009, p. 141

1159 Engelbrecht, Torsten et al., Die Zukunft der Krebsmedizin: Klassische und alternative Therapien, Impfungen und Krebsgene: Was ist Fakt und was Fiktion?, naturaviva, 2009

1160 Hackenbroch, Veronika; Traufetter, Gerald, Immun gegen die Impfung, Spiegel, October 19, 2009, p. 141

1161 Spelsberg, Angela, Das Geschäft mit der Grippe, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 11/2009, p. 24

1162 Wegen Schweinegrippe: In Frankreich wird das Küssen verboten, Bild.de, September 7, 2009

1163 Schweinegrippe im Karneval: Närrisches Treiben: Küssen verboten!, Abendblatt. de, November 8, 2009

1164 Blaylock, Russell, Swine Flu—One of the Most Massive Cover-ups in American History, Mercola.com, November 3, 2009

1165 Interview von Brent Leung, maker oft he documentary „House of Numbers“, with Luc Montagnier

1166 Peric, Mark et al., Vitamin D Analogs Differentially Control Antimicrobial Peptide/ „Alarmin“ Expression in Psoriasis, PLoS One, July 2009, p. E634

1167 Melamed, Michal et al., 25-Hydroxyvitamin D Levels and the Risk of Mortality in the General Population, Archives of Internal Medicine, August 11, 2008; pp. 1629-1637

1168 Rickmann, A., „Ich wäre fast an Schweinegrippe gestorben“, bild.de, 16. October 2009

1169 Blaylock, Russell, Swine Flu—One of the Most Massive Cover-ups in American History, Mercola.com, November 3, 2009

1170 Nature Insight: Obesity and Diabetes, Nature, December 14, 2006, Supplement, pp. 839-888

1171 Thun, Michael et al., Overweight, Obesity, and Mortality from Cancer in a Prospectively Studied Cohort of U.P. Adults, New England Journal of Medicine, 24. April 2003, pp. 1625-1638

1172 The ANZIC Influenza Investigators, Critical Care Services and 2009 H1N1 Influenza in Australia and New Zealand, New England Journal of Medicine, November 12, 2009, pp. 1925-1934

1173 Le Ker, Heike, Schweinegrippe: Gesundheitliche Probleme nicht immer Folge der Impfung, Spiegel Online, November 2, 2009

1174 Tolzin, Hans, Editorial, impf-report, July/August 2009, p. 2

1175 Ema, Makoto et al., Evaluation of developmental neurotoxicity of polysorbate 80 in rats, Reproductive Toxicology, January 2008, p. 89-99

1176 Gajdová, M. et al., Delayed effects of neonatal exposure to Tween 80 on female reproductive organs in rats, Food and Chemical Toxicology, March 1993, pp. 183-190

1177 Shoenfeld, Yehuda; Rose, Noel (Hrsg.), Infection and Autoimmunity, Elsevier Science & Technology, 2004, pp. 87-104

1178 Carlson, Barbro et al., The endogenous adjuvant squalene can induce a chronic T-cell-mediated arthritis in rats, American Journal of Pathology, June 2000, pp. 2057-2065

1179 A study overview of squalene can be found at http://www.whale.to/vaccine/squalene_c.html

1180 Engelbrecht, Torsten et al., Die Zukunft der Krebsmedizin: Klassische und alternative Therapien, Impfungen und Krebsgene: Was ist Fakt und was Fiktion?, naturaviva, 2009

1181 Spiess, Heinz; Heiniger, Ulrich (Hrsg.), Impfkompendium, Thieme Verlag, 2005

1182 Tolzin, Hans, Illegal & gefährlich für Schwangere?, impf-report, July/August 2009, p. 6

1183 Tonne, Dominic, Death link to swine flu vaccine, Sunday Times, August 16, 2009

1184 Leitner, Michael, Verstärkerimpfstoffe in Impfungen—Terror gegen unser Immunsystem, impf-report, July/August 2009, pp. 8-10

1185 Hackenbroch, Veronika; Traufetter, Gerald, Immun gegen die Impfung, Spiegel, October 19, 2009, p. 142

1186 Kinder oft stärker mit Chemikalien belastet als ihre Mütter: WWF-Test findet 73 bedenkliche Schadstoffe im Blut europäischer Familien, World Wide Fund for Nature, October 16, 2005

1187 Mutter, Joachim, Is dental amalgam safe for humans? The opinion of the scientific committee of the European Commission, Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology, January 13, 2011

1188 Drasch, Gustav, et al.: Mercury burden of human fetal and infant tissues, European Journal of Pediatrics, August 1994, pp. 607-610

1189 Hartmann, Klaus, Stuttgarter Impfsymposium 2009, DVD

1190 Hackenbroch, Veronika; Traufetter, Gerald, Immun gegen die Impfung, Spiegel, October 19, 2009, p. 141

1191 „Solchen Wissenschaftlern würde ich gerne Kamera oder Mikrofon entziehen“, Interview mit dem Gesundheitsstatistiker Gerd Bosbach zur Corona-Debatte, nachdenkseiten.de, March 26, 2020

1192 Engelbrecht, Torsten, Im Fake-News-Fieber: Spiegel & Co. haben die Schweinegrippe-Pandemie bis heute nicht aufgearbeitet—und verbreiten nun erneut Pharma-Propaganda, Rubikon, April 12, 2020

Chapter 10

Postscript to Chapter 3 about AIDS

1193 Interview by Brent Leung, Director oft he 2009 documentary „House of Numbers“, mit Luc Montagnier, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKyIBYKoT20

1194 Research on AIDS virus and cancer wins Nobel Medicine Prize, AFP, October 6, 2008

1195 Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Eleni; Turner, Valendar, A critique of the Montagnier evidence fort he HIV/AIDS hypothesis, Medical Hypotheses, Volume 63, Issue 4, 2004, p. 597-601

1196 Montagnier, Luc et al., Molecular cloning of lymphadenopathy-associated virus, Nature, 20. December 1984, pp. 757-760

1197 Tahi, Djamel, Did Luc Montagnier discover HIV? „I repeat, we did not pur ify!“, Continuum, Winter 1997/1998, pp. 31-35

1198 Sponsorship Shadow Over Medicine Prize, Sverige Radio, December 8, 2008

1199 Sharav, Vera, Another Nobel Foundation member is being investigated, press release of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), December 22, 2008

1200 Moniz develops lobotomy for mental illness 1935, see www.pbp.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dh35lo.html

1201 Diefenbach, Gretchen, Portrayal of Lobotomy in the Popular Press: 1935 - 1960, Journal of the History of Neurosciences, April 1999, pp. 60-69

1202 Laurence, William, Lobotomy banned in Soviet Union as Cruel; Brain Operation in the Insane is Inhumane, Russian Tells Vienna Health Session, New York Times, August 22, 1953

1203 Breggin, Peter, Elektroschock ist keine Therapie, 1989, Urban & Schwarzenberg, p. 175

1204 Sharav, Vera, Another Nobel Foundation member is being investigated, press release of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), December 22, 2008

1205 see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomie

1206 Valenstein, Elliot, The psychosurgery debate, W. H. Freeman, San Francisco 1980

1207 Jonathan Ned Katz: Gay American History, Avon Books, 1978, pp. 129-207

1208 Mark, Vernon et al., Role of Brain Disease in Riots and Urban Violence, Journal of the American Medical Association, September 11, 1967, p. 895

1209 see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomie

1210 Sharav, Vera, Another Nobel Foundation member is being investigated, press release of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), December 22, 2008

1211 see http://www.houseofnumberp.com/

1212 see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKyIBYKoT20

1213 see http://nymag.com/health/features/61740/

1214 O’Brien, Stephen et al. Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups influence AIDS progression, AIDS, November 30, 2008, pp. 2429-2439

1215 Aids: Mitochondrien könnten Erkrankungszeitpunkt beeinflussen, Spiegel Online, December 15, 2008

1216 Kruis, Wolfgang. Informationen über eine Therapiestudie: Rezidivprophylaxe bei Patienten mit Colitis ulcerosa durch Mutaflor im Vergleich zu Mesalazin, Der Bauchredner, 3/1996, pp. 64-68

1217 Mai, Volker; Draganov, Peter, Recent advances and remaining gaps in our knowledge of associations between gut microbiota and human health, World Journal of Gastroenterology, Januar 7, 2009, pp. 81-85

1218 Bjorksten, Bengt, Effects of intestinal microflora and the environment on the development of asthma and allergy, Springer Seminars in Immunopathology, February 25, 2004, pp. 257-270

1219 Knight, David, Gut flora in health and disease, Lancet, May 24, 2003, p. 1831

1220 Tannock, Gerald. Medical Importance of the Normal Microflora, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999

1221 Langosch, Angelika, Einfluss der Ernährung insbesondere der Rohkost auf die Darmflora und Infektabwehr, Institut für Medizinische Balneologie und Klimatologie der Universität München, 1984 (dissertation)

1222 Lance, Tony, GRID = Gay Related Intestinal Dysbiosis? Explaining HIV/AIDS Paradoxes in Terms of Intestinal Dysbiosis, http://www.heallondon.org, December 14, 2008

1223 Koliadin, Vladimir, Destruction of normal resident microflora as the main cause of AIDS, see http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/vkmicro.htm

1224 Koliadin, Vladimir, What causes a positive test for HIV-antibodies?, see http:// www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/vktest.htm431

1225 Anukam, Kingsley et al., Yogurt containing probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus GR-1 and L. reuteri RC-14 helps resolve moderate diarrhea and increases CD4 count in HIV/AIDS patients, Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology. March 2008, pp. 239-243

1226 Mutter, Joachim, Gesund statt chronisch krank! Der ganzheitliche Weg: Vorbeugung und Heilung sind möglich, fit fürs Leben Verlag, 2009, p. 388

1227 Reduced glutathione-L-cysteine-anthocyanins gel, NCI Drug Dictionary, Website of the U. P. National Cancer Institute

1228 Ohlenschläger, Gerhard, Glutathionsystem, Ordnungs- und informationserhaltende Grundregulation lebender Systeme, Verlag für Medizin Dr. Ewald Fischer, Heidelberg 1991

1229 Zachara, Bronislaw et al., Decreased selenium concentration and glutathione peroxidase activity in blood and increase of these parameters in malignant tissue of lung cancer patients, Lung, September 1, 1997, pp. 321-332

1230 Qiu, Fa-Bo et al., Predominant expression of Th1-type cytokines in primary hepatic cancer and adjacent liver tissues, Hepatobiliary & Pancreatic Diseases International, February 2007, pp. 63-66

1231 Locigno, Roberto; Castronovo, Vincent, Reduced glutathione system: role in cancer development, prevention and treatment (review), International Journal of Oncology, August 2001, pp. 221-236

1232 Mutter, Joachim, Gesund statt chronisch krank! Der ganzheitliche Weg: Vorbeugung und Heilung sind möglich, fit fürs Leben Verlag, 2009, p. 392

1233 Bianchini, Franba; Vainio, Harri, Allium vegetables and organosulfur compounds: do they help prevent cancer?, Environmental Health Perspectives, September 2001, pp. 893-902

1234 Pinto, John et al., Effects of garlic thioallyl derivatives on growth, glutathione concentration, and polyamine formation of human prostate carcinoma cells in culture, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, August 1997, pp. 398-405

1235 Olivieri, Gianfranco et al., The effects of beta-estradiol on SHSY5Y neuroblastoma cells during heavy metal induced oxidative stress, neurotoxicity and be-ta-amyloid secretion, Neuroscience, September 10, 2002, pp. 849-855

1236 Mutter, Joachim, Gesund statt chronisch krank! Der ganzheitliche Weg: Vorbeugung und Heilung sind möglich, fit fürs Leben Verlag, 2009, p. 394

1237 ibid., pp. 253-255

1238 Galon, Jérôme et al., Coordination of intratumoral immune reaction and human colorectal cancer recurrence, Cancer Research, March 15, 2009, pp. 2685-2693

1239 Deer, Brian, Death by denial: The campaigners who continue to deny HIV causes Aids, The Guardian, Februar 21, 2012

1240 Schweinsburg, Brian et al., Brain mitochondrial injury in human immunodeficiency virusseropositive (HIV+) individuals taking nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, Journal of NeuroVirology, August 2005, pp. 356-364

1241 Payne, Brendan A. I. et al., Mitochondrial aging is accelerated by anti-retroviral therapy through the clonal expansion of mtDNA mutations, Nature Genetics, June 26, 2011, pp. 806-810

1242 Barnes, Martik K.; Engelbrecht, Torsten, Stricken Heroine Rethinkers Died from Toxic Drugs, Not AIDS: Christine Maggiore, Karri Stokely, Maria Papagiannidou, rethinkingaids.com

1243 de Fries, Felix, Therapieempfehlungen für HIV-Test-Positive und AIDS-Patienten, ummafrapp.de

1244 see the Facebook site of Eneko Llandaburu

Chapter 11

10 Reasons against Measles Vaccination

1245 Mawson, Anthony R., Special Issue „Vaccination and Health Outcomes,“ International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, July 15, 2018

1246 Dubos, René, Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change, Rutgers University Press, 1987, p. 102

1247 Impfkalender (Vaccination Calendar) 2019/2020 on www.rki.de

1248 Alm, Johan et al., Atopy in children of families with an anthroposophic lifestyle; Lancet, May 1999, pp. 1485-1488

1249 Kass, Edward H., Infectious Diseases and Social Change, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, January 1971, pp. 110-114

1250 Mawson, Anthony R., Special Issue „Vaccination and Health Outcomes,“ International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, July 15, 2018

1251 Berndt, Christina, Urteil gegen Impfgegner: 100 000 Euro für ein “Hirngespinst”, www.sueddeutsche.de, March 12, 2015

1252 E-mail from Süddeutsche Zeitung editor Christina Berndt from April 7, 2015

1253 Gerß, Wolfgang, Das Ende der DDR als konsequente mathematische Katastrophe, Duisburger Beiträge zur Soziologischen Forschung, No. 1/2008 (University of Duisburg-Essen)

1254 We answered to the e-mail from Süddeutsche Zeitung editor Christina Berndt from April 7, 2018 (see endnote 8) on April 15 an 29 and on May 5, 2015 and asked for comments

1255 Miller, Neil Z., Vaccines: Are They Really Safe & Effective? New Atlantean Press, 2005, p. 26

1256 Buchwald, Gerhard, Impfen: Das Geschäft mit der Angst, emu-Verlag, 1994

1257 De Serres, Gaston et al., Largest Measles Epidemic in North America ina Decade—Quebec, Canada, 2011: Contributionof Susceptibility, Serendipity, andSuperspreading Events, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, March 15, 2013, pp. 990-998

1258 Prikazsky, Vladimir et al., An increase in the number of mumps cases in the czech republic, 2005-2006, Eurosurveillance, April 17, 2008

1259 Schönberger, Katharina et al., Epidemiology of Subacute Sclerosing Panencephalitis (SSPE) in Germany from 2003 to 2009: A Risk Estimation, PLOS One, July 9, 2013

1260 Angelika Müller, Tod nach Masern? Der Fall Aliana, impf-report, issue 106/1st quarter 2015, pp. 43-45

1261 Weber, Nina, „Unspezifische Effekte“: Wie eine provokante These die Sicht aufs Impfen ändern könnte, www.spiegel.de, September 11, 2018

1262 E-mail from August 27, 2018

1263 Kennedy Jr., Robert F., Americans Can Handle an Open Discussion on Vaccines— RFK, Jr. Responds to Criticism from His Family, childrenshealthdefese.org, August 15, 2019

1264 Trial of BCG vaccines in south India for tuberculosis prevention, Indian Journal of Medical Research, September 1979

1265 Cowling, Benjamin J. et al., Increased risk of non-influenza respiratory virus infections associated with receipt of inactivated influenza vaccine, Clinical Infectious Diseases, June 2012, pp. 1778-83

1266 Turner, Louise, Flu Vaccine Causes 5.5 Times More Respiratory Infections: Study, Yournewswire.com, January 10, 2015

1267 Hooker, Brian S.; Miller, Neil Z., Analysis of health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children: Developmental delays, asthma, ear infections and gastrointestinal disorders, SAGE Open Medicine, May 27, 2020

1268 Vaxxed Unvaxxed: The Science, Full-Presentation-Parts-I-VII, childrenshealthdefense.org,

1269 Miller, Neil Z.; Goldman, Gary S., Relative trends in hospitaliza-tions and mortality among infants by the number of vaccine doses and age, based on the VAERS, 1990-2010, Human & Experimental Toxicology, October 2012, pp. 1012-1021

1270 Miller, Neil Z.; Goldman, Gary S., Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity?; Human & Experimental Toxicology, September 2011, pp. 1420-1428

1271 ibid.

1272 Martin Hirte et al., Impfzeitpunkt von Bedeutung, Deutsches Ärzteblatt, October 14, 2011, pp. 696-697

1273 McDonald, Karla L. et al., Delay in Diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus vaccination is associated with a reduced risk of childhood asthma; Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, March 2008, pp. 626-631

1274 E-Mail from August 27, 2018

1275 Fisher, Barbara Loe, The Vaccine Culture War in America: Are You Ready?, www. mercola.com, March 17, 201

1276 Bryant, Alison, 20 Top-selling Vaccines--H1 2012, www.fiercevaccines.com, September 25, 2012

1277 Global vaccine market revenues from 2014 to 2020 (in billion U.S. Dollars), www. statista.co

1278 Demicheli, Vittorio et al., Vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella in children, The Cochrane Database Systematic Reviews, February 15, 2012

1279 Mawson, Anthony R., Special Issue „Vaccination and Health Outcomes,“ International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, July 15, 2018

1280 impf-report, 1st quarter 2015, p. 36

1281 see www.impfkritik.de/antikoerpertiter

1282 Tolzin, Hans U. P., Das Ansteckungs-Experiment von 1911: Wirklich ein Meilenstein der Forschung?, impf-report, 1st quarter 2016, pp. 28-31

1283 Pressemitteilung: Anderthalbjähriges Kind an Masern verstorben, www.berlin.de, Februar 23, 2015

1284 Bergmann, Jörg et al., Masern-Angst: Wie viele Sorgen muss ich mir um mein Kind machen?, www.bild.de, Februar 25, 2015

1285 Bartens, Werner, Masern-Impfung: Gefährliche Ignoranz, www.sueddeutsche.de , March 1, 2015

1286 Rabe, Steffen. Masern in Berlin: zwei Arten Schweigepflicht?, www.individuelle-impfentscheidung.de, February 26, 2015

1287 Lanka, Stefan, Der Bundesgerichtshof hat entschieden: Wir haben den Masern-Virus-Prozess endgültig gewonnen!, www.wissenschaftplus.de

Chapter 12

Total Corona Mania: About Worthless PCR Tests and Lethal Medication

1288 ”Solchen Wissenschaftlern würde ich gerne Kamera oder Mikrofon entziehen“, Interview mit dem Gesundheitsstatistiker Gerd Bosbach zur Corona-Debatte, nachdenkseiten.de, March 26, 2020

1289 Corona-Krise: Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi erklärt warum die Maßnahmen sinnlos und selbstzerstörerisch sind, www.youtube.com, March 19, 2020

1290 Hager, Angelika, Interview mit Gerd Gigerenzer ”Angst ist ein Markt“, Profil, March 8, 2020

1291 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Aphorismus 224

1292 Judson, Horace, The Great Betrayal. Fraud in Science, Harcourt, 2004, p. 6

1293 Red Cross Knew of AIDS Blood Threat, San Francisco Chronicle, May 16, 1994

1294 Engelbrecht, Torsten; Köhnlein, Claus. Das trügerische AIDS-Erbe von Rock Hudson, www.rubikon.news, December 1, 2017

1295 Pascal, Mathilde et al., The mortality impacts of fine particles in France, The Science of the Total Environment, November 15, 2016, pp. 416-425

1296 Neue Ergebnisse: Studie: Feinstaub verursacht deutlich mehr Todesfälle als angenommen, www.stern.de, January 18, 2019

1297 Air pollution costs France € 100 billion per year, www.euractiv.com, July 16, 2015

1298 Schmid, Fred, Der Rüstungs-Rekord: Die weltweiten Rüstungausgaben haben ein neues Rekordhoch erreicht, www.rubikon.news, June 8, 2019

1299 Jean Ziegler über Hunger in Afrika: „Es gibt genügend Nahrungsmittel“, www.taz.de, April 19, 2017

1300 Quick facts: What you need to know about global hunger, mercycorps.org, October 1, 2018

1301 see www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

1302 Thomma, Norbert, Aktivist Jean Ziegler: „Ich bin so radikal, weil ich die Opfer kenne“, www.tagesspiegel.de, January 7, 2013

1303 Viner, Russell et al.. School closure and management practices during coronavirus outbreaks including COVID-19: a rapid systematic review, Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, Mai 2020, pp. 397-404

1304 USA mit Abstand Spitzenreiter: Globale Rüstungsausgaben auf höchstem Stand seit 30 Jahren, www.tagesspiegel.de, April 29, 2019

1305 Besser Spitze bei Hungerbekämpfung statt bei Aufrüstung, www.newsroom.de, April 29, 2020

1306 Wolff, Reinhard, Kommentar Rüstungsausgaben: Ein halbes Prozent für den Hunger, www.taz.de, December 4, 2012

1307 Brandt, Willy. Der organisierte Wahnsinn: Wettrüsten und Welthunger, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1985

1308 D’Souza, Frances, Democracy as a Cure for Famine, Journal of Peace Research, November 1994, pp. 369-373

1309 Wodarg, Wolfgang, Lösung des Corona-Problems: Panikmacher isolieren, Flensburger Tageblatt, Februar 29, 2020, p. 29

1310 Schmidt, Tobias, 280 000 Tote in Deutschland denkbar. Charité-Virologe Drosten über das Coronavirus: „Wir stehen erst am Anfang“, www.noz.de, March 6, 2020

1311 Gøtzsche, Peter C., Corona: an epidemic of mass panic, Deadly Medicine & Organized Crime—a blog about drugs, March 21, 2020

1312 Ioannidis, John P. A., A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data, www.statnews.com, March 17, 2020

1313 Statistikwissenschaftler John Ioannidis, Daten-Fiasko bei Corona-Krise: Stanford-Professor warnt vor Blindflug bei Maßnahmen, www.focus.de, March 21, 2020

1314 Millionen Tote: WHO hält globale Seuche für unvermeidbar, Spiegel Online, November 26, 2004

1315 „Solchen Wissenschaftlern würde ich gerne Kamera oder Mikrofon entziehen“, Interview mit dem Gesundheitsstatistiker Gerd Bosbach zur Corona-Debatte, nachdenkseiten.de, March 26, 2020

1316 Gøtzsche, Peter C., Our prescription drugs kill us in large numbers, Polskie Archiwum Medycyny Wewnetrznej, Epub October 30, 2014

1317 Drosten warnt nach Studie: Viele Infizierte stecken andere an, bevor sie sich selbst krank fühlen, www.focus.de, March 24, 2020

1318 Xuhua Guan et al., Pneumonia Incidence and Mortality in Mainland China: Systematic Review of Chinese and English Literature, 1985-2008, PLoS ONE, July 23, 2010, e11721

1319 Qun Li et al., Early Transmission Dynamics in Wuhan, China, of Novel Coronavirus—Infected Pneumonia, New England Journal Medicine, January 29, 2020

1320 Huang, Chaolin et al., Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China, Lancet, January 24, 2020, pp. 497-506

1321 Chen, Nanshan et al., Epidemiological and clinical characteristics of 99 cases of 2019 novel coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan, China: a descriptive study, Lancet, February 15, 2020, pp. 507-513

1322 Crowe, David, Is the 2019 Coronavirus Really a Pandemic?, www.theinfectiousmyth.com

1323 Kolata, Gina, Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t, New York Times, January 22, 2007

1324 Schmitt, Peter-Philipp, Virologe Hendrik Streeck: „Wir haben neue Symptome entdeckt, www.faz.net, March 16, 2020

1325 Prof. Dr. med. Thomas Löscher geht in den Ruhestand … aber nicht ganz!, www. klinikum.uni-muenchen.de

1326 Kotlar, Kerstin, Er behandelte erste deutsche Patienten. Mehr als 52 000 Geheilte: Professor sagt, wie das Immunsystem den Erreger bekämpft, www.focus.de, March 6, 2020

1327 E-mail von Prof. Thomas Löscher from March 6, 2020

1328 Nickbakhsh, Sema et al., Virus-virus interactions impact the population dynamics of influenza and the common cold, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 26, 2019, pp. 27142-27150

1329 Wodarg, Wolfgang, Lösung des Corona-Problems: Panikmacher isolieren, Flensburger Tageblatt, February 29, 2020, p. 29

1330 Phone call on March 8, 2020

1331 Hohmann-Jeddi, Christina, Coronavirus-Diagnostik: Roche erhält Notfall-Zulassung der FDA für Hochdurchsatztest, www.pharmazeutische-zeitung.de, March 14, 2020

1332 Wildermuth, Volkart, Neues Coronavirus Diagnostischer Test aus Berlin weltweit gefragt, www.deutschlandfunk.de, January 23, 2020

1333 Hohmann-Jeddi, Christina, Coronavirus-Diagnostik: Roche erhält Notfall-Zulassung der FDA für Hochdurchsatztest, www.pharmazeutische-zeitung.de, March 14, 2020

1334 Phone Call on March 8, 2020

1335 Berndt, Christina, Coronavirus: Zu schön, um wahr zu sein, www.sueddeutsche.de, March 24, 2020

1336 SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Multiplex RT-qPCR Kit, CD Creative Diagnostics

1337 Berndt, Christina, Coronavirus: Zu schön, um wahr zu sein, www.sueddeutsche.de, March 24, 2020

1338 Gorguner, Metin; Akgun, Metin, Acute Inhalation Injury, The Eurasian Journal of Medicine, April 2010, pp. 28-35

1339 Laporte, Joan-Ramon, In the midst of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemia, caution is needed with commonly used drugs that increase the risk of pneumonia, www. rxisk.org, April 2, 2020

1340 Susan Payne, Viruses: From Understanding to Investigation, Academic Press, 2017

1341 White/Fenner, Medical Virology, San Diego Academic Press, 1986, p. 9

1342 Na Zhu et al., A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China, 2019, New England Journal of Medicine, March 5, 2020, pp. 727-733

1343 Oh, Myoung-don et al., Virus Isolation from the First Patient with SARS-CoV-2 in Korea, Journal of Korean Medical Science, February 24, 2020

1344 Buzás, Edit I. et al., Antibiotic-induced release of small extracellular vesicles (exosomes) with surface-associated DNA, Scientific Report, August 15, 2017

1345 McClintock, Barbara, The Significance of Responses of The Genome to Challenge, Nobelpreisrede, December 8, 1983

1346 SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Multiplex RT-qPCR Kit, CD Creative Diagnostics

1347 de Mendoza, C. et al., False positive for HIV using commercial viral load quantification assays. AIDS, October 22, 1998, pp. 2076-2077

1348 Rich, Josiah D. et al., Misdiagnosis of HIV infection by HIV-1 plasma viral load testing: a case series, Annals of Internal Medicine, January 5, 1999, S. 37-39

1349 Crowe, David, Is the 2019 Coronavirus Really a Pandemic?, www.theinfectiousmyth.com

1350 Feng, Coco; Hu, Minghe, Race to diagnose coronavirus patients constrained by shortage of reliable detection kits, scmp.com, February 11, 2020

1351 Koop, Fermin, A startling number of coronavirus patients get reinfected Patients in the Guangdong province were tested positive again with the virus, www.zmescience.com, February 26, 2020

1352 Crowe, David, Is the 2019 Coronavirus Really a Pandemic?, www.theinfectiousmyth.com

1353 Ioannidis, John P. A., A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data, www.statnews.com, March 17, 2020

1354 Müller-Jung, Joachim, Forscher für härtere Maßnahmen: Kurve abflachen? Das reicht nicht mehr, www.faz.net, March 20, 2020

1355 Schmitt, Peter-Philipp, Rock Hudson: Er gab Aids ein Gesicht, www.faz.net, September 30, 2010

1356 Italien: Priester spendet sein Beatmungsgerät und verstirbt, www.vaticannews.va, March 24, 2020

1357 Berndt, Christina, Coronavirus: Zu schön, um wahr zu sein, www.sueddeutsche.de, March 24, 2020

1358 “Solchen Wissenschaftlern würde ich gerne Kamera oder Mikrofon entziehen“, Interview mit dem Gesundheitsstatistiker Gerd Bosbach zur Corona-Debatte, nachdenkseiten.de, March 26, 2020

1359 Ravizza, Simona, l’emergenza: Milano, terapie intensive al collasso per l’influenza: già 48 malati gravi molte operazioni rinviate, www.milano.corriere.it, January 10, 2018

1360 Newey, Sarah, Why have so many coronavirus patients died in Italy?, www.telegraph.co.uk, March 23, 2020

1361 Ebhardt, Tommaso et al., World 99 % of Those Who Died From Virus Had Other Illness, Italy Says, www.bloomberg.com, March 18, 2020

1362 Sawicki, Peter, Palliativmediziner zu COVID-19-Behandlungen: „Sehr falsche Prioritäten gesetzt und alle ethischen Prinzipien verletzt“, www.deutschlandfunk.de, April 11, 2020

1363 Sen. Dr. Jensen’s Shocking Admission About Coronavirus, www.valleynewslive.com, April 7, 2020

1364 Gøtzsche, Peter C., Our prescription drugs kill us in large numbers, Polskie Archiwum Medycyny Wewnetrznej, Epub October 30, 2014

1365 Hüttemann, Daniela, Lungeninfektionen: Wie wird eine Coronavirus-Infektion behandelt?, www.pharmazeutische-zeitung.de, January 28, 2020

1366 Lopinavir / Ritonavir, www.aidsinfo.niv.gov

1367 Hüttemann, Daniela, Lungeninfektionen: Wie wird eine Coronavirus-Infektion behandelt?, www.pharmazeutische-zeitung.de, January 28, 2020

1368 Stockman, Lauren J. et al., SARS: Systematic Review of Treatment Effects, PLoS Medicine, September 12, 2006, e343

1369 Gebauer, Thomas, Die Macht des Geldes, Dr. med. Mabuse, September/October 2011

1370 Hofmann, Siegfried, HIV- und Tuberkulose-Impfstoffe Bill und Melinda Gates investieren in deutsche Biotechfirma Biontech, www.handelsblatt.com, September 4, 2019

1371 Hartmann, Kathrin, Interview mit Medizinexperten McCoy: “Die Gates-Stiftung ist ein Mittel, um Macht auszuüben“, www.spiegel.de, July 27, 2014

1372 Demeter, Konstantin; Engelbrecht, Torsten, Die Corona-Korruption: Die Lockdown-Entscheidungen vieler Länder wurden auf Empfehlung eines Wissenschaftlers forciert, der von massiven Interessenkonflikten betroffen ist, rubikon.news, 10. Mai 2020

1373 van Dongen, Johan, Why The World Health Organization Treats Bill Gates Like A President, www.modernghana.com, February 14, 2019

1374 Schlak, Martin, Impfstoff gegen Coronavirus: Das riskante Wettrennen der Pharmakonzerne, www.spiegel.de, March 14, 2020

1375 Stüwe, Christian, Virologe Drosten: „Wir müssen schauen, wo wir einen Impfstoff herzaubern“, gmx.net, March 19, 2020

1376 Xu, Zhe et al., Pathological findings of COVID-19 associated with acute respiratory distress syndrome, The Lancet, February 18, 202

1377 Demeter, Konstantin; Engelbrecht, Torsten, Fatale Therapie: Die Behandlung einer Coronavirus-Infektion mit hochtoxischen Medikamenten und lebensgefährlichen Intubationen kann tödlich sein., rubikon.news, May 28, 2020

1378 Huang, Chaolin et al., Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China, Lancet, February 15, 2020, pp. 497-506

1379 Chen, Nanshan et al., Epidemiological and clinical characteristics of 99 cases of 2019 novel coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan, China: a descriptive study, Lancet, February 15, 2020, pp. 507-513

1380 Istituto Superiore de Sanita, Report sulle caratteristiche die pazienti deceduti positivi a COVID-19 in Italia: Il presente report è basato sui dati aggiornati al 17 Marzo 2020

1381 Mehra, Mandeep R. et al., Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis, Lancet, May 22, 2020, pp. 31180-31186

1382 Corona-Pandemie: Trump nimmt Hydroxychloroquin, dw.com, May 18, 2020

1383 Dunleavy Brian P., Zinc might boost effectiveness of malaria drug against COVID-19, experts say, upi.com, May 13, 2020

1384 Coronavirus: Pharmaindustrie testet mehr als 140 Wirkstoffe, futurezone.at, May 1, 2020

1385 Demeter, Konstantin; Engelbrecht, Torsten, Fatale Therapie: Die Behandlung einer Coronavirus-Infektion mit hochtoxischen Medikamenten und lebensgefährlichen Intubationen kann tödlich sein., rubikon.news, May 28, 2020

1386 Wodarg, Wolfgan, Ärztliches und Wissenschaftliches: Therapie tödlicher als das Virus?, www.wodarg.com, April 17, 2020

1387 COVID-19: Beatmung—und dann? Wird ein COVID-19-Patient beatmungspflichtig, sind seine Überlebenschancen nach derzeitiger Studienlage schlecht. Auch wer überlebt, muss mit Folgeschäden rechnen, DocCheck, March 31, 2020

1388 Yam, Loretta et al., Non-invasive versus invasive mechanical ventilation for respiratory failure in severe acute respiratory syndrome, Chinese Medical Journal, September 5, 2005, pp. 1413-1421

1389 Stobbe, Mike, Some doctors moving away from ventilators for virus patients, www.apnews.com, April 8, 2020

1390 Yang, Xiaobo et al., Clinical course and outcomes of critically ill patients with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia in Wuhan, China: a single-centered, retrospective, observational study, The Lancet, February 24 2020

1391 Cvorak, Monika, Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy dies from coronavirus—video obituary, guardian.com, May 9, 2020

1392 Roy Horns letztes Geheimnis: Seit vier Jahren kämpfte er gegen Hautkrebs, bild. de, May 11, 2020

1393 Roy Horn (†75): Er soll an Hautkrebs erkrankt gewesen sein, bunte.de, May 12, 2020

1394 Ebola-Mittel gegen Corona Warum konnte Remdesivir Magier Roy nicht retten?, bild.de, May 9, 2020

1395 Parry, Ryan, EXCLUSIVE: Legendary Vegas star Roy Horn briefly woke from a coma to ‘wave goodbye’ to his partner Siegfried - who stayed with him in the hospital day and night—moments before he died of coronavirus complications, dailymail. co.uk, May 11, 2020

1396 Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update: FDA Issues Emergency Use Authorization for Potential COVID-19 Treatment, fda.gov, May 1, 2020

1397 Remdesivir Approval Status, drugs.com

1398 What Are the Side Effects of Remdesivir?, heavy.com

1399 Remdesivir (RDV), rxlist.com

1400 Hautkapp, Dirk, Coronavirus in den USA: Hat Trump die Gefahr verkannt?, wr.de, March 15, 2020

1401 Ibid.

1402 Davey, Melissa, Remdesivir: the antiviral drug is being touted as a possible coronavirus treatment—but will it work?, theguardian.com, April 30, 2020

1403 NIH Clinical Trial Shows Remdesivir Accelerates Recovery from Advanced COVID-19, niaid.nih.gov, April 29, 2020

1404 Fauci’s Promotional Hype Catapults Gilead’s Remdesivir, Alliance for Human Research Protection, May 6, 2020

1405 Rappoport, Jon, Bill Gates, HR6666, Remdesivir, Deaths in Italy, blog.nomorefakenews.com, May 12, 2020

1406 “Solchen Wissenschaftlern würde ich gerne Kamera oder Mikrofon entziehen“, Interview mit dem Gesundheitsstatistiker Gerd Bosbach zur Corona-Debatte, nachdenkseiten.de, March 26, 2020

Epilog

Rock Hudson Gave „AIDS“ a Face—and His Fallacious Story Gave the Virus Hunters Godlike Status

1407 How One Test Changed HIV: March 2nd marks 30 years since an Abbott breakthrough: the first licensed test for HIV, Abbott press release, March 2, 2015

1408 Cowley Geoffrey, The day they discovered the AIDS virus, www.msnbc.com, April 23, 2014

1409 Ely, Elizabeth; Crilly, Cal, How „We All“ Came to „Have AIDS“: Rock Hudson’s False „Legacy“, www.omsj.org, March 5, 2014

1410 Schock, Axel, „Möge Gott verhüten, dass Rock vergebens gestorben ist“, Deutsche AIDS-Hilfemagazin.hiv, 2. Okt. 2015

1411 see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Hudson#Illness_and_death

1412 „Die Promiskuität ist der Motor der Seuche“, Spiegel, 33/1985

1413 Yarbrough, Jeff, Rock Hudson: On Camera and Off, www.people.com, August 12, 1985 (revised on February 12, 2011)

1414 Armistead Maupin tells Patrick Gale how he took the rap for outing Rock Hudson. „A friend rang me and said how could I do that to such a beautiful, beautiful man?“, www.guardian.com, June 24, 1999

1415 Gavilanes, Grace, 10 Secrets of Rock Hudson’s Heartbreaking Final Days, www. people.com, October 2, 2015

1416 „Tense“ Rock Hudson continues smokig despite heart surgery, Lakeland Ledger, October 1, 1982

1417 One Year After Heart Surgery, Rock Hudson Is Rolling Again, but His „Devlin Connection“ Is Ailing, www.people.com, November 15, 1982

1418 Doris Day & Rock Hudson—forever friends, www.youtube.com/watch?v=z21shqPRTP8

1419 Rock Hudson is Ill With Liver Cancer in Paris Hospital, Associated Press/New York Times, April 23, 1985

1420 Ely, Elizabeth; Crilly, Cal, How „We All“ Came to „Have AIDS“: Rock Hudson’s False „Legacy“, omsj.org, March 5, 2014

1421 Bittorf, Wilhelm, Die Lust ist da, aber ich verkneif’s mir, Spiegel, 11/1987

1422 Schock, Axel, „Möge Gott verhüten, dass Rock vergebens gestorben ist“, Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe magazin.hiv, October 2, 2015

1423 Ely, Elizabeth; Crilly, Cal, How „We All“ Came to „Have AIDS“: Rock Hudson’s False „Legacy“, www.omsj.org, March 5, 2014

1424 Altman, Lawrence. The Doctor’s World; Search for an AIDS Drug is Case History in Frustration, New York Times, July 30, 1985

1425 Jon, Van, Hudson Aids Case Turns Spotlight On Drug Approval Process, Chicago Tribune, August 4, 1985

1426 Schille, Peter, „Vergnügt euch, aber seht euch vor“, Spiegel, 44/1985

1427 Ely, Elizabeth; Crilly, Cal, How „We All“ Came to „Have AIDS“: Rock Hudson’s False „Legacy“, www.omsj.org, March 5, 2014

1428 Moskovitz, Bruce L., Clinical Trial of Tolerance of HPA-23 in Patients with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Animicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, September 1988, pp. 1300-1313

1429 Woo, Elaine, Marc Christian MacGinnis dies at 56; Rock Hudson’s ex-lover, Los Angeles Times, December 5, 2009

1430 Schock, Axel, „Möge Gott verhüten, dass Rock vergebens gestorben ist“, Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe magazin.hiv, October 2, 2015

1431 Rock Hudson, victim of Aids, dies aged 59, Guardian, October 3, 1985

1432 Ely, Elizabeth; Crilly, Cal, How „We All“ Came to „Have AIDS“: Rock Hudson’s False „Legacy“, www.omsj.org, March 5, 2014

2nd English Edition, 2020

Original German Title: Virus-Wahn

Published by emu-Verlag, Lahnstein

© Torsten Engelbrecht, Claus Köhnlein

All rights reserved

Translation: Estelle Laure Kamwa, Carina Hahn, Megan Chapelas, Danielle Egan

Editing: Torsten Engelbrecht, Carina Hahn, Danielle Egan, David Crowe

Printing, production and layout: BoD–Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt, Germany

Cover: Heike Müller, Robin Hahn

Photos (cover): Gürsoy Dogtas

ISBN: 978-3-7526-9267-9