In 1986, Dr. Lo announced that he had detected a previously unknown organism in cells taken from AIDS patients. Dr. Lo said that he believed the new organism, a bacterium-like creature known as a mycoplasma, worked with HIV to cause AIDS. Dr. Lo could not find the organism in any healthy individuals. When he injected his mycoplasma into four silvered leaf monkeys, three quickly developed low-grade fevers. All four lost weight and then died between seven and nine months of infection.153 During autopsy, Dr. Lo found mycoplasma in their brains, livers, and spleens. That does not happen with HIV.
Dr. Lo also found the mycoplasma, dubbed mycoplasma incognitus,154 in the damaged tissue of six HIV-negative human beings—perhaps CFS sufferers—who had died with suppressed immune systems after suffering from suspiciously AIDS-like symptoms.
For nearly three years, mainstream medicine and the captive mainstream and science media dutifully ignored Dr. Lo’s research. A dozen scientific journals turned down Shyh-Ching Lo’s studies for publication before the Journal of Tropical Medicine agreed to print his findings.155 Despite his impressive credentials and his prestigious post as a top military scientist, Dr. Lo’s attempts to find funding failed. Dr. Lo’s research posed a unique annoyance for Dr. Fauci. Because he was a top military doctor with his own laboratory, he could not be easily dismissed, bullied, or defunded.
Then, in December 1989, Dr. Fauci opted to meet this threat from the military with a direct frontal assault. NIAID dispatched a dozen of Dr. Fauci’s most skeptical specialists to investigate Dr. Lo’s data.156,157 Dr. Fauci flew his leading experts in AIDS and other infectious diseases to San Antonio, Texas, for the confrontation, expecting to obliterate Dr. Lo and to discredit his theory. Dr. Fauci’s panel members quizzed Dr. Lo mercilessly for three days before surrendering to the conclusion that Dr. Lo had made a momentous discovery.
“The documentation was absolutely solid,” said Joseph Tully, head of mycoplasma programs for NIAID.158,159 The newly converted NIAID participants formally recommended further study of the link between the mycoplasma and AIDS, and experiments with drugs that could kill the new microbe.
That recommendation apparently displeased Dr. Fauci. “We have not been pulled into the AIDS programs in any real way,” Tully complained in 1990. Thirty-five years after Dr. Lo’s initial announcement, NIAID has still funded no research on Dr. Lo’s mycoplasma hypothesis.
At the June 1990 San Francisco AIDS conference, Luc Montagnier made his tectonic announcement that “The HIV virus is harmless and passive, a benign virus.”160, 161 He added that he had discovered that HIV only becomes dangerous in the presence of a second organism. He described a tiny, bacteria-like bug called a mycoplasma. His laboratory had demonstrated that in culture with his new mycoplasma, HIV becomes a vicious killer. Montagnier declared that he now believes that HIV is “a peaceful virus” that becomes lethal only when combined with mycoplasma infertans.
As Montagnier spoke, Dr. Shyh-Ching Lo sat in the audience, basking in vindication. Dr. Lo’s important new ally, Montagnier, the Nobel laureate of AIDS, had independently discovered the same mycoplasma and concluded, like Lo, that it was the primary cause of the immune system collapse known as AIDS. The two had not shared their data. Separately, they had made the same earthshaking discovery four months apart.
In April of that year, Montagnier published his findings in Research in Virology, reporting that HIV and the microscopic pathogen react together, causing the body’s cells to burst.162 Even more exciting, he had discovered that in his test tubes, tetracycline stopped the mycoplasma’s destruction entirely in its tracks. Montagnier’s findings had transformative implications for AIDS treatment. They suggested that AIDS could be effectively treated and demolished with common patent-expired antibiotics instead of deadly and expensive chemotherapy concoctions.
At the San Francisco conference, Dr. Lo was almost the only person in the room who was excited. Of the twelve thousand people who attended the conference, only two hundred attended Montagnier’s talk, and almost half of them exited before he finished.163,164 Characteristically, the multibillion-dollar international research and development establishment opted to ignore his discovery.
Peter Duesberg: “There was Montagnier, the Jesus of HIV, and they threw him out of the temple.”165,166
“Who were these people who are so much wiser, so much smarter than Luc Montagnier?” asks Harry Rubin, the dean of American retrovirology. “He became an outlaw as soon as he started saying that HIV might not be the only cause of AIDS.167, 168
When asked for an interview concerning Dr. Lo’s work, NIAID director Anthony Fauci said through spokesperson Mary Jane Walker that he “will not talk about mycoplasma or any other AIDS cofactor.”169,170
In a film interview with Brent Leung in 2006, Tony Fauci said, “Cofactors are not necessary. The data that indicate that any different type of infection like mycoplasma or something like that is a necessary cofactor, I believe those theories have been debunked.”171 As usual, Dr. Fauci never cited the study that debunked the work of America’s top military AIDS researcher, or the Nobel laureate who discovered HIV.
Thirty-four years later, with over half a trillion dollars spent on AIDS research,172 Dr. Fauci has not budgeted one dollar to study the role of Lo’s and Montagnier’s mycoplasma or in Gallo’s, and Knox’s HHV-6 virus in the etiology of AIDS. Between 1981 and 2020, US taxpayers alone shelled out $640 billion for AIDS research173, 174 focused almost exclusively on developing drugs to address Dr. Fauci’s sketchy HIV hypothesis. Yet the growing list of medications hasn’t demonstrably extended the life of a single patient, and the cure for AIDS is still nowhere in sight.175
“The minute someone suggests that the orthodoxy might be wrong, the establishment starts to call him crazy or a quack,” Rubin continued. “One week you’re a great scientist; the next week, you’re a jerk. Science has become the new church of America and is closing off all room for creative, productive dissent.”176,177
After suggesting in print, two years earlier, that HIV might need a co-cofactor to cause AIDS, Gallo went dark. Gallo today refuses to discuss the matter. The normally loquacious and combative Gallo refused my request to talk about HHV6.
AIDS and Fear