“Most people consider it blasphemous when you point out AIDS is not a disease, it’s a syndrome,”37 Paul Philpott, MS, Editor, Rethinking AIDS, explained. “It’s a collection of diseases and those diseases get called AIDS if they occur in a patient that the doctor somehow concludes is HIV-positive.”38 “All of the diseases in the category called AIDS occur to people who are HIV-negative. None of them are exclusive to people who test HIV-positive. And all of them have causes and treatments that are well-known; they’re completely unrelated to HIV. So any of the diseases, when they happen to somebody who tested HIV-negative, are called by their old name; but when they occur in someone who tested HIV-positive, then they’re called AIDS.”39
In the hands of Dr. Fauci’s opportunistic PIs, AIDS became an amorphous malady subject to ever-changing definitions, encompassing a multitude of old diseases in hosts who test positive for HIV.
Asked to define AIDS in a 2009 documentary, Fauci said, “When your CD4 count falls below a certain arbitrary level, by definition you have AIDS.”40 But how do we explain the many individuals who have low CD4 counts and no HIV?
The growth of the AIDS pandemic was predictably explosive. Using PCR and expanded diagnosis, WHO estimates that HIV has infected 78 million people and caused 39 million deaths. Today, 35 million people live with HIV with over 2 million new infections each year.41,42
This loose diagnostic system and the gravy train of financial incentives for finding AIDS everywhere guaranteed riches for institutions and individuals who signed on to Dr. Fauci’s gold rush. The pharmaceutical multinationals, like GlaxoSmith-Kline, minting enormous profits marketing antivirals to kill HIV, had little incentive to challenge Dr. Fauci’s orthodoxy.
Africa’s AIDS Bonanza
With grants from Tony Fauci, intrepid researchers quickly found that the contagion had somehow reached Africa and infected up to 25 million Africans, with no one having taken notice. Researchers, extrapolating from small cohorts with positive PCR results, used murky statistical models to report HIV had infected nearly half the adult population in some nations—and forecast widespread depopulation of the African continent. None of the shrilly predicted depopulation has ever occurred, and most HIV-infected Africans showed no sign of illness. In those who were sick, the infirmities looked very much like the illnesses that doctors had previously diagnosed as malaria, pneumonia, malnutrition, leprosy, bilharzia, anemia, tuberculosis, dysentery, or infection with a grim inventory of pathogens and parasites familiar to doctors in Africa.
Because HIV antibody tests are too costly for widespread use in Africa, the World Health Organization has since 1985 used the “Bangui definition”43,44 to diagnose AIDS, based on clinical symptoms. WHO’s enthusiasm for this loose, all-encompassing definition may reflect the early revelation that the AIDS plague loosened purse strings like no other crisis on Africa’s beleaguered landscapes.
The statistical picture of AIDS in Africa, consequently, is a sketchy projection based on very rough computer-generated estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), built on a highly questionable data pool, dubious assumptions, and grotesque exaggeration. Uncertainty prevails, even in those extremely rare cases when doctors actually performed HIV tests on Africans; many diseases that are endemic to Africa, such as malaria, TB, flu, and simple fevers, trigger false positives. Duesberg and many other critics accused Dr. Fauci, and an opportunistic pharmaceutical industry, of taking this long inventory of ancient afflictions and recasting them as AIDS.
It’s undeniable that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS. Whereas AIDS in Western countries continued to be a disease of drug addicts and homosexuals—with women reporting only 19 percent of US and European AIDS cases—in Africa, 59 percent of AIDS cases are in women, with 85 percent of cases occurring in heterosexuals, and the remaining 15 percent in children. No one has ever explained how a disease largely confined to male homosexuals in the West is a female heterosexual disease in Africa.
“AIDS in Africa looks nothing like AIDS in North America or Europe,” observed Duesberg to me. “Africans were rarely tested with expensive PCR tests, so every unexplained death became ‘AIDS.’”
The clinical symptoms of African AIDS are high fever, a persistent cough, loose stools for thirty days, and a 10 percent loss of body weight over a two-month period. By that definition, a large percentage of Western tourists have AIDS while in Africa. The simple cure is to get on a plane back to New York, where no doctor would dream of bestowing an AIDS diagnosis based on that symptomology alone.
After 1993, WHO added tuberculosis to the definition. Duesberg told me, “It became a garbage pail definition applied to anyone sick with an uncertain diagnosis.”
“Due to compelling financial drivers, in Africa, AIDS is nearly always a presumptive diagnosis, applied without any ‘positive’ reaction to HIV tests,” science journalist Celia Farber told me. “Big Pharma, researchers, clinics, international health agencies beginning with WHO, and local governments conspire to keep this stunningly broad and generic clinical definition of AIDS in Africa,” she explains. “From the beginning it was a signal for funding. They are all in on the joke, because they are all helping themselves by skimming the unprecedented international funding streams that flow to African AIDS relief.”
“AIDS is huge business, possibly the biggest in Africa,” says James Shikwati in a 2005 interview with Der Spiegel. Shikwati is founder of the Inter Region Economic Network, a society for economic promotion in Nairobi (Kenya). “Nothing else gets people to fork out money like shocking AIDS figures. AIDS is a political disease here: we should be very skeptical.”45
Former epidemiological director of WHO, Professor James Chin, in his 2006 book, The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology and Political Correctness, admits unambiguously that the AIDS case figures for developing countries were massively manipulated in order to maintain the flow of billions of dollars.46
Dr. Rebecca Culshaw, PhD, a former HIV researcher and professor of Mathematical Biology and Population Dynamics at the University of Texas at Tyler, admits that “The paradox of how a disease could cause both vastly different epidemiologies and symptomatic progressions in the First and Third World”47 was one of the irreconcilable problems that sowed her initial disillusionment with the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy: “The African epidemic looks suspiciously nothing like the American and European epidemic, and closer inspection reveals it likely that this African epidemic is pure fabrication.”48