Koch’s fourth and final postulate is that the microorganism must be re-isolated from this inoculated experimental diseased host.
Duesberg argues that vigorous efforts by HIV/AIDS proponents to satisfy the postulates have all failed.118 In Djamel Tahi’s 1996 documentary AIDS—The Doubt, Professor Luc Montagnier admitted that after years of trying, no one had succeeded: “There is no scientific proof.” Montagnier therefore concludes, “that HIV causes AIDS.”119 Koch’s principles are still taught to every student of epidemiology, but his name is now a source of embarrassment rather than admiration and affection among AIDS researchers.
From cases I have litigated, I know that entire court cases hinge on the capacity of the attorneys and scientists to persuade a fact finder that the proponent of causation has satisfied Koch’s postulates. It is the standard protocol for proving the causative relationship of a pathogen to a particular disease. Therefore, it came as a shocking revelation for me to learn that there remain possibly viable arguments that the HIV/AIDS hypothesis had consistently failed that standard. In the American judicial system, that evidence would normally be sufficient to close a case. I am not opining on the science here.
Viral Load Does Not Necessarily Correlate to Illness
Yet another acute embarrassment to Gallo’s hypothesis is the problem of viral load. With most bacteriological and viral illnesses, increased viral load correlates with the progression of the disease and declines the patient’s health. If HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, titers should be able to track an increase in viral loads as physical deterioration progresses. Traditional viruses such as herpes, influenza, smallpox, etc., only cause disease at very high titer—thousands or millions of infectious units per cubic millimeter of infected tissue. In contrast, HIV has proven barely to be found in AIDS patients even in the final throes of illness. HIV can be detected, but only with difficulty, because even the sickest AIDS patients simply don’t have much virus to be found. And even more baffling, neither Dr. Fauci nor Gallo has ever credibly explained the fact that viral load from HIV is always at its greatest in the days immediately following infection. Logically, it would be during this period that the virus is most likely to cause devastating illness. And yet, the onset of AIDS symptoms almost always arrive decades later (an average twenty years following exposure)—when viral loads are at their lowest.
In 2006, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) once again shook the foundation of the past decade of AIDS science to its core and incited apoplexy among many HIV/AIDS advocates.120 A US nationwide team of orthodox, mainstream AIDS researchers led by doctors Benigno Rodriguez and Michael Lederman of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland strongly challenged the claimed legitimacy of viral load testing—the standard method since 1996 for assessing patient health, predicting disease progression, and winning grant approval for new AIDS drugs. Their study of 2,800 positively tested people concluded, in over 90 percent of cases, viral load measures failed to predict or explain immune status.121
Today, 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.
The Lancet published a study 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.122 The multi-center study—the largest and longest of its kind— tracked the effects of Dr. Fauci’s antivirals on some 22,000 previously treated HIV positives between 1995 and 2003 at twelve locations in Europe and the United States. The study refutes popular claims that HIV meds extend life and improve health.123
Can a Retrovirus as Elusive and Rare as HIV Cause Deadly Illness?
Equally mysterious is the question of how an elusive, rare, difficult-to-find virus could be causing so much carnage. Peter Duesberg told me if HIV was causing infections, “You would never need a PCR, a machine that multiplies HIV segments a billion-fold, to ‘see’ whether a person is ‘infected.’ Infection would be as obvious as it is with active flu or active polio. The body would be swarming with microbes.”
Lauritsen argues, “The virus infects very, very few cells—as few as one in 100,000—and on top of that, it doesn’t even kill the cells it infects.”124
Since HIV typically infects so few cells,125 that means Dr. Fauci’s antiviral concoctions like AZT must kill many healthy T-cells in order to eliminate the few cells that are infected. It’s worth considering that Dr. Fauci endorses administration of AZT and other chemotherapy concoctions for months on end or for as many years as AIDS patients manage to survive.
Furthermore, I haven’t found any evidence that HIV ever actually kills a T-cell.126,127 They seem to instead get along quite well. For this reason, critics argue the collapse of the immune system cannot be plausibly explained merely by the presence of HIV.
Duesberg is not surprised at the gaps in the evidence. After all, he says, how can a virus be so destructive when it first enters the body, then turns around and plays dead for 10, 20, 30 years?128 Yet this is the orthodoxy. Dr. Jay A. Levy, MD, a leading UC AIDS researcher, posits: HIV is a kind of time-bomb virus that lies dormant in the body until—for some unknown and unexplainable reason—it modifies its own genetic structure and transforms into a fast-growing, virulent, deadly virus. Duesberg chuckles at this speculation: “What kind of virus one day, out of nowhere, springs into action to destroy a person’s immune system with no provocation?”
Gallo and Dr. Fauci originally claimed that HIV causes immunodeficiency by killing CD4+ T-cells. But even the most faithful acolytes no longer believe that HIV kills T-cells in any way. Instead, they make what might seem to an outsider like a desperate pitch, that HIV primes T-cells to commit mass suicide at some later date. Dr. Fauci’s followers have advanced this “Jim Jones” hypothesis to explain the lack of evidence for any cell-killing mechanism that can be attributed to HIV.
Duesberg laughs at this explanation: “No virus has ever behaved that way.” “There are many shortcomings in the theory that HIV causes all signs of AIDS,” admits Luc Montagnier.