CD4 Tests
Similar deficiencies plague tests that count CD4+ “helper T cells.” AIDS doctors look at low CD4 cell counts as the key marker for AIDS diagnoses. However, not a single study confirms this most important principle of the HIV only theory: that HIV destroys CD4 cells by means of an infection. Furthermore, even the most significant of all AIDS studies, the 1994 Concorde study,73 questions using helper cell counts as a diagnostic test for AIDS. The problem is the use of a surrogate endpoint, which is notoriously im-precise. Many studies corroborate the skepticism. One of these is the 1996 paper “Surrogate Endpoints in Clinical Studies: Are We Being Misled?”74 Published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the paper concludes that CD4 T cell count in the HIV setting is as uninformative as “a toss of a coin”—in other words, not at all.75
Mullis added, “Now, is there a test that can definitively tell you if you’re infected with the virus? What is that test?”76
The Party Line—At All Costs—Or Else
Critics of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis invariably cite Koch’s Postulates as the most profound embarrassment for Gallo’s theory. In 1884, Nobel Laureate Robert Koch, the father of bacteriology, first outlined the classical methodologies for proving causation between a pathogen and a disease. Summarizing Koch’s postulates for The Journal of Investigative Dermatology, Julia A. Segre wrote:
As originally stated, the four criteria are: (1) The microorganism must be found in diseased but not healthy individuals; (2) The microorganism must be cultured from the diseased individual; (3) Inoculation of a healthy individual with the cultured microorganism must recapitulate the disease; and finally (4) The microorganism must be re-isolated from the inoculated, diseased individual and matched to the original microorganism. Koch’s postulates have been critically important in establishing the criteria whereby the scientific community agrees that a microorganism causes a disease.77
Virologists—and every trial lawyer and judge—consider Koch’s four criteria the gold standard for proof that a particular microorganism causes a particular malignancy.
The Problem of AIDS without HIV
Koch’s first postulate requires that a truly pathogenic virus can be found in large quantities in every patient suffering from the disease. The failure of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis to meet this critical threshold remains one of Dr. Fauci’s most exasperating dilemmas. For starters, Gallo claimed that he found HIV virus in fewer than half of the ailing AIDS patients from whom he drew blood.78,79 Furthermore, every one of the thirty discrete illnesses we now call AIDS occurs also in persons uninfected by HIV.
In fact, AIDS commonly occurs in people who test HIV negative. If HIV is truly the only cause of AIDS, this should not be possible.
Soon after Robert Gallo’s historic announcement, doctors around the country and CDC officials started seeing patients with low CD4 counts and signature AIDS diseases like PCP and immune system dysfunction, but who tested negative for HIV. Many of the victims were white heterosexual women. Dr. Fauci and the CDC kept this awkward information secret. Fauci-funded AIDS researchers—Dr. Fauci’s PIs— also kept mum when they encountered such patients.
By 1992, media science writers also knew about these HIV-free AIDS cases, but they dutifully self-censored while awaiting signals from Dr. Fauci and the medical cartel. Lawrence Altman, the chief medical writer for the New York Times, confessed to Science magazine that he did not break the story because he didn’t think it was his paper’s place to announce something without the CDC’s go-ahead.80
Then, in the first days of the 1992 Amsterdam AIDS Conference, a naive young Newsweek reporter, Geoffrey Cowley, innocently reported a cascade of cases of non-HIV AIDS that he uncovered during quiet confessional conversations with Dr. Fauci’s AIDS researchers. Several scientists confided to Cowley their bewildered alarm at the large number of AIDS patients who were uninfected with HIV. Cowley’s report almost precipitated the collapse of Dr. Fauci’s entire carefully fortified HIV-only theology.
“The patients are sick or dying, and most of them have risk factors,” Cowley reported in Newsweek.81 He described a dozen such cases of non-HIV patients with AIDS-like symptoms, including brain lesions, corresponding cognitive deficits, chronic aggravation of herpes viruses, depleted C4 cells, PCP pneumonia, and immune system collapse. “What they don’t have is HIV.”82
The Newsweek article shattered the taboo. Conferees took the public disclosure as a signal that they could now discuss the previously verboten subject of AIDS patients without HIV. Dr. Fauci’s researchers, gathered in Amsterdam an ocean away from his heavy hand, suddenly began sharing their own stories of AIDS without HIV across the United States and Europe.
With the floodgates opened by Newsweek threatening to sweep away Dr. Fauci’s official orthodoxy, Dr. Fauci raced out to Andrews Air Force Base with CDC AIDS Task Force Director James Curran and flew to the Netherlands on Air Force 2 on a mission to quell the uprising.83 (Curran, the head of the CDC’s AIDS division, had famously conspired with Gallo to take the antibody patent from the French.) But by the time the two bureaucrats arrived, the horse had left the stable. Dr. Fauci and Curran had to sit through a series of rollicking conference sessions as mobs of reporters, mutinous scientists, and enraged activists besieged them with case studies and unanswerable questions. Public health regulators, physicians, and researchers expressed indignation that Dr. Fauci hadn’t come clean with them. Many physicians caring for AIDS patients were furious that the government agency had not informed them about the non-HIV AIDS cases. Curran confessed that the CDC had known about these cases for years.