It was often unclear that the new viruses they found in ailing tissues were actually causing the diseases, whether the tiny microbes were free riders colonizing decayed tissue, or altogether innocent bystanders. Harvard’s Jim Watson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering the molecular structure of DNA, fretted that the “gold rush” mentality was likely to “scare off the sensible and leave the field to a combination of charlatans and fools.”58 In 2001, alarmed by the precipitous decline in scientific discipline, fourteen renowned virologists of the “old guard” published an appeal to the young high-technology–focused generation of researchers in Science. The gray-beards warned the young scientists against attributing culpability to a microbe based upon correlation without first understanding how a newly discovered virus actually causes the disease:
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.59
Moreover, the evidence linking specific viruses to probable diseases was often subjective and not reproducible. The specific tests that researchers used to detect HIV had their own manner of additional deficiencies.
The most significant diagnostic tools that doctors use to determine if someone is infected with HIV or not, and therefore, whether they have AIDS are:
1. HIV antibody tests
2. PCR viral load tests
3. Helper cell counts (T-cells, or rather the T-cell subgroup CD4)
Antibody Test
Gallo used an “antibody” test of his own invention to detect the presence of the HIV virus in several gay men. But what did his test actually prove?
Gallo based his test on an antigen-antibody theory, which assumes the immune system fights against foreign viruses, by generating targeted antibodies specific to that virus. In order to calibrate a test to recognize that specific antibody, the inventor must isolate the target virus and expose it to human cells in a petri dish, which then generate the specific antibodies responsive to that virus. However, since it is unclear whether Gallo or any other researcher was ever able to isolate HIV,60 he took from his AIDS patients a sample of antibodies that he found in great abundance in their blood and made a leap of faith that they were HIV antibodies. Geneticists have pointed out that these antibodies may have been associated with tuberculosis or herpes, or any of the many other pathogenic illnesses that multiply in collapsing immune systems.61 Indeed, Gallo’s HIV antibody test also reacts to people with fever, pregnant women, and individuals who have overcome a tuberculosis infection.62 Therefore, it is unclear if the antibodies detected by his kit are really HIV antibodies.63 Neither Gallo’s test nor any of the later-developed antibody tests have ever proven that these proteins they identify as HIV antibodies have anything to do with HIV, or any other retrovirus.
The antibody test manufacturers recognize this deficiency with a caveat on their inserts: “There is no recognized standard for establishing the presence or absence of antibodies to HIV-1 and HIV-2 in human blood.”64
The same also holds true for the quantitative PCR-based HIV diagnostic test. “It’s not even a test for HIV,” protested Kary Mullis, who invented the DNA amplification technique commonly used to diagnose AIDS infection. “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron. PCR is intended to identify substances qualitatively, but by its very nature is unsuited for estimating numbers. Although there is a common misimpression that the viral load tests actually count the number of viruses in the blood, these tests cannot detect free, infectious viruses at all; they can only detect proteins that are believed, in some cases wrongly, to be unique to HIV. The tests can detect genetic sequences of the virus, but not the viruses themselves.”65
In 1986, Thomas Zuck of the FDA warned that the HIV antibody tests were not actually designed specially to detect HIV. “Rather, numerous other germs or contaminants, including TB, pregnancy, or simple flu, also produce false positives.” Zuck made that admission at a World Health Organization meeting but conceded that stopping the use of these HIV tests was “simply not practical.” He explained that “Now that the medical community has identified HIV as an infectious sexually transmitted virus, public pressure for an HIV test was just too strong.”66
Finally, and most importantly, critics point out that Gallo’s HIV antibody tests flipped traditional immunology on its head. Throughout all of medical history, a high antibody level indicated that a person had already successfully battled against an infectious pathogen and was now protected from the disease. With all other viral diseases, the presence of antibodies signals a welcomed immunity from the disease. But Gallo and Dr. Fauci’s PIs suddenly began informing people that the positive antibody test was a death sentence. How could this be so? Dr. Fauci has never explained this inexplicable paradox.
It gets even weirder when one contemplates Dr. Fauci’s $15 billion-dollar HIV vaccine enterprise.67 Usually, regulators measure a vaccine’s success by its ability to produce robust and durable antibodies. Now, for the first time in history, Dr. Fauci and Bob Gallo were asking the world to believe that antibodies were a sign of active, deadly disease. This begs the question, “What is the HIV vaccine supposed to do?”
Mulling this conundrum, Reinhard Kurth, former director of the Robert Koch Institute, shrugged his shoulders in bewilderment during a 2004 interview with Der Spiegel: “To tell the truth, we really don’t know exactly what has to happen in a vaccine so that it protects from AIDS.” Perhaps that is the dilemma that has frustrated Dr. Fauci’s AIDS vaccine project for thirty-six years.
PCR Testing Deficiencies
The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technique does not measure the actual, live virus in the body, but the amplified fragments of DNA that are thought to be similar to HIV.68 But even if those fragments are amplified from the authentic HIV DNA, they could be from an old exposure—from a long-dead virus genetically similar to HIV, left over from an infection that has been suppressed by antibodies, perhaps decades earlier.
“The HIV test has never been validated,” said Kary Mullis. “It doesn’t show infection; it shows viral particles that may exist in millions of people.” In the late 1980s, the biting and sardonic Mullis became Gallo and Fauci’s most fierce critic—in fact, ridiculer. Mullis added, “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.”69
Heinz Ludwig Sanger, 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 test as the standard for giving evidence of HIV”70 (“Misdiagnosis of HIV infections by HIV-1 viral load testing: a case series,” a 1999 paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine).71
Knowing the above, it’s not surprising that every PCR kit includes a manufacturer’s warning, “Do not use this kit as the sole basis for detecting HIV infection” or similar labeling.
Gallo’s leap from correlation to causation troubled Mullis from the outset: “PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV, and some of those people came down with symptoms of AIDS, but that doesn’t begin, even, to answer the question: Does HIV cause it? Human beings are full of retroviruses.”72