by Clark Henderson

The entry into the age of aids was quiet. Perhaps in 1976 the virus, carried by some foreigner, arrived in America. It is not my purpose to discuss the spread of the AIDS epidemic; that has already been done in books like And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts and History of AIDS by Mirko Grmek. My focus is the hidden side of AIDS, which has not been exposed in any book to my knowledge.

PREPARING FOR AN EPIDEMIC

There is documented evidence that a disease which could be recognized as AIDS has been worked on for years. Testimony before a sub-committee of the House Appropriations Committee, in Washington, D.C., in 1969, for Department of Defense appropriations for 1970, stated:

Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective micro-organism which could differ in certain important respects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease. (R. Harris and J. Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, 1982, p. 241)

The money was approved! By 1972, this potential new micro-organism was described so clearly that there is little doubt that it is AIDS:

An attempt should be made to ascertain whether viruses can in fact exert selective effects on immune function, e.g., by . . . affecting T cell function as opposed to B cell function. The possibility should also be looked into that the immune response to the virus itself may also be impaired if the infecting virus damages more or less selectively the cells responding to the viral antigens.

This is beyond question a clinical description of the function of the AIDS virus! But it appeared, of all places, in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Vol. 47, pp. 257-74, in 1972.

DELIBERATE MISINFORMATION

The ground was carefully prepared beforehand. Sexual promiscuity was encouraged by slogans, such as "There is nothing to be afraid of; there never was," meaning that all sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) could now be cured. The effectiveness of this propaganda can be judged by Michael Callen's remark in Surviving AIDS: ". . . Gee! Every time I get the clap [gonorrhea] I'm striking a blow for the sexual revolution!"

WITHHOLDING INFORMATION ON THE NEW DISEASE

This policy would prove the most effective of all in facilitating the spread of AIDS. Even when people began to come down with AIDS, nothing was done! The Center for Disease Control (CDC) alone reacted, but was hampered in its efforts to realize that an entirely new disease had appeared on the scene.

This should be contrasted with the reaction to another disease which occurred in the same time frame: Legionaire's Disease. When the first outbreak of this happened in a Philadelphia hotel, nobody had the faintest idea what it was. There were even speculations that it was caused by a poisonous gas. But in six months, the disease was found to be caused by a bacterium.

Does anyone suppose that AIDS could not have been determined earlier? Granted, it is far more difficult to identify a virus, but there have been several outbreaks of tropical hemorrhagic fevers in this country which were isolated and identified quickly.

THE PROPAGANDA OF HOPELESSNESS

This has been well described by Michael Callen in Surviving AIDS. All this propaganda is based on the claim that AIDS has a 100% mortality rate. Granted, it has a high mortality rate, about 85-90%. But a "Guaranteed-to-Die-or-Your-Money-Back" policy was pursued. A formula, AIDS = Death, was used, and the media used it to spread the gloom and doom scenario. Also, one might speculate on the connection of the immune system and the mental state; those who are convinced they are going to die may well die more easily.

LIES AND RIDICULE OF THOSE AFFLICTED

Again, this is well covered by Michael Callen. People who developed symptoms of AIDS were subjected to endless distortion in the press. One headline about a female doctor who had AIDS was: "Dying AIDS Doc's Agony," although the woman concerned, a Dr. Veronica Prego, seemed quite healthy.

According to Callen, the words "dying," and "deadly" appeared five times in the brief article! Why the overkill? Why is it so important that people with AIDS must be depicted as being in agony when they are not? Can one imagine a cancer patient being treated in this manner? Those taking photographs of people with AIDS would refuse to take them if the person did not have the lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma visible enough, or if the person was not considered wasted away enough! Does not this suggest a covert propaganda campaign that AIDS = Death?

DELIBERATE REFUSAL OF DRUGS IN GOVERNMENT AIDS STUDIES

The best example of this is the refusal to provide prophylaxis against pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) of people who had AIDS. The drug sulfamethoxazole (Bactrim) can prevent PCP appearing in immunocompromised individuals, but as of early 1989, more than 30,000 Americans died of AIDS-associated PCP. More importantly, in May 1987, when AIDS activists met with Dr. Anthony Fauci to beg him to issue interim guidelines to physicians for patients at high risk for PCP, he refused. Why? His reason-no data. At that time some 13,600 people had died of PCP; subsequently, another 17,000 died by February 1989. And no doubt many more have died since.

I do not have to look too hard to see the signs of a deliberate extermination policy.

CHARACTER ASSASSINATION OF PEOPLE WITH AIDS

This was done partly by ignoring such people, so that they could not be heard by the public, and partly by ridiculing them. Michael Callen relates the tale of what happened when People With AIDS (PWA) tried to set up an organization apart from the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC): "Ultimately, GMHC succeeded in destroying the first organized incarnation of PWA self-empowerment in New York through a two-pronged strategy of alternately ignoring us and ridiculing us." He observes that GMHC failed to put a person with AIDS on its board of directors until 1987, until the disease was really widespread. Why?

COPING UP DR. KOOP

In the United States of America, there is one man designated to inform the public of the presence of infectious diseases: the Surgeon General. Working under the Secretary of Health, his job is to issue reports on epidemics, particularly new epidemics that affect the public health. In this way, no new disease can arise in the United States without the Surgeon General being aware of it and alerting the public in news conferences.

Thus the public should have been informed about AIDS in 1981 by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, M.D., who was fearless, outspoken, and honest. Koop was originally chosen by the Reagan administration because he was opposed to abortion; much too late that administration realized that he was an honest man who would not fail to speak out on AIDS just because it was then regarded as a "gay disease."

What they did to prevent him speaking out is best told in Koop's own words:

By August 1981, I and others who were paying attention to the unusual news from the CDC (Center for Disease Control) learned that there were 108 cases of AIDS reported with 43 dead. I knew we were in big trouble. And there was nothing I could do about it. I was not yet the Surgeon General, and all through the summer and autumn of 1981 I was preoccupied by my long struggle to win confirmation. But I realized that if ever there was a disease made for a Surgeon General, it was AIDS. The Surgeon General is mandated by Congress to inform the American people about the prevention of disease and the promotion of health. If ever there was a public in need of education and straight talk about AIDS, it was the American people.

But for an astonishing five and a half years I was completely cut off from AIDS. I was told by the Assistant Secretary for Health, my immediate boss, that I would not be assigned to cover AIDS. The department took its cue from him. Even though the Centers for Disease Control commissioned the first AIDS task force as early as June 1981, I, as Surgeon General, was not allowed to speak about AIDS publicly until the second Reagan term. Whenever I spoke on a health issue at a press conference or on a network morning TV show, the government public affairs people told the media in advance that I would not answer questions on AIDS, and I was not to be asked any questions on the subject. I have never understood why these peculiar restraints were placed on me. And although I have sought to find the explanation, I still don't know the answer. (C. Everett Koop, The Memoirs of America's Family Doctor, pp 195-96)

SQUELCHING DR. LOGAN

One other person who might have stopped the spread of AIDS was also effectively dealt with. He had rediscovered hyperthermia, a technique of heating a person's blood to temperatures produced by tropical fevers such as malaria. The technique was employed early in the twentieth century to treat syphilis and cancer, but later in the century fell into disuse. Hyperthermia works by fooling the body into thinking it is faced with a deadly tropical fever, and under those circumstances it will produce substances that will combat such diseases and also effectively work on cancer cells. More recently in the 1990s, hyperthermia has been used as a treatment for Lyme disease.

In the first half of 1990 Dr. William Logan, a heart surgeon at Atlanta Hospital in Georgia, treated two AIDS patients with hyperthermia; one of them had visible improvement in his condition and proclaimed himself cured of AIDS; the other one was largely unchanged following the treatment. Dr. Logan heated the blood to 108°F for five hours in these two cases and proposed to treat fifty other patients with AIDS, using hyperthermia.

But when Dr. Logan told the Georgia AIDS Task Force in August 1990 of his plans, and indicated that two university medical centers were in negotiations to test fifty people with AIDS, he was "sat on." Investigators from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)-a leading government AIDS research agency-blasted his ideas. They said that hyperthermia "appears to have offered no clinical, immunologic or virological benefits." They implied that the one person wasn't suffering from Kaposi's sarcoma, and that there was no reason "for further human experimentation in this area at this time."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, accused Dr. Logan of raising false hopes in AIDS-infected individuals. Dr. Logan could scarcely hide his anger: "I am totally flabbergasted," he said, adding that the report would almost certainly prevent any more work in the field of hyperthermia. He added, "This is why I am so terribly upset . . . I'm going to fight this every way I can, but I don't know what we're going to do."

If Dr. Logan had been allowed to go ahead with his proposed tests, we might have a treatment for AIDS, a treatment that is simple and does not require high technology. But Dr. Logan had been squelched, firmly and completely.

The American government's lack of action concerning AIDS is incomprehensible-unless it is a deliberate policy to spread the disease. I suspect that is the case because of information that came to me quite accidentally many years ago. Here is the story:

COVERT AGENCY RESEARCH

In the summer of 1955 I was invited to spend an evening with "Raymond," a French mining engineer who had spent his entire professional life in Africa. At that time he was about 63-65 years old.

During the course of the evening's discussion, Raymond suddenly asked me if I believed in the stories of "germ warfare" in Korea during that conflict. When I asked for proof, he showed me a 1/4 inch thick, typed manuscript, part of which had been copied from the original source, and part abstracted. At the end of that manuscript was a few pages of work on the "skinny disease" from which people wasted away and died. A table of hyperthermia tests indicated that heating the blood to 110° for 4 hours would arrest the disease.

"Where did this material come from," I asked. Raymond answered that he had worked in West Africa when young, then moved to South Africa and spent at least 25 years working in a gold mine there. In 1950, after the British lost political control in South Africa, he moved to take a consulting job in Kolwezi, a copper-mining town in what is now Zaire.

Shortly after arriving there he was approached by two people. The first person, an American of German descent (very likely Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA's resident expert on toxins, poisons, and diseases) did almost all of the talking. The other fellow said very little at the time. The first person said he wanted Raymond to translate medical scientific research papers into English, using as an inducement, fees well above normal and payable in advance-highly unusual. Raymond spoke English and French perfectly and also knew German as well as other languages, including African. Although he did not like this person of German descent (this was only 5 years after WW II), Raymond agreed to do the work. All of it was done well in advance of the deadline, neatly typed. He did not see the person who assigned him his work again. New papers, brought three times a year by the second person, were so processed, paid for each time in advance. All of them were from European medical publications.

This continued for five years until early in 1955. At that time the courier made an unexpected visit. He was upset and distraught, and did not stay long. He just picked up the metal box with translated papers, put another down, and left in a hurry. When Raymond opened the metal box, he found the new medical research papers to be translated, but he also found other things too. One in particular, about two centimeters thick, contained what can best be described as a proposal for the "cold war," written or printed between February and June, 1948. The other important material was a "progress report," apparently written late in 1954.

Raymond realized that these were highly classified materials, and disliking both people associated with them, decided to copy them out. Some of it he typed out in full, and some of it he condensed. The copies he showed me contained many sections of the proposal, but the very last one contained a hypothetical scenario on what would happen if a new type of venereal disease were to be introduced into modern society. Drawing mainly on syphilis as a model, it argued that such a disease would spread preferentially among the more promiscuous sections of society, namely "left-wing" types. There was no mention of homosexuality, no doubt because of the time it was written. The study did mention, however, that in such an eventuality "there would be large numbers of innocent victims."

Right after this section was a short paper, apparently written in late 1954 or early 1955. The first paragraph contained a description of both the mental and physical symptoms of the "skinny disease," spread by con-tamined blood, from which people wasted away and died. The main feature of this progress report was some tests that had been carried out on what was clearly AIDS-infected blood. Whoever carried out these tests was thinking even in 1954 of a cancer-causing virus. It is well known that cancer cells are more susceptible to heat than normal ones.

What got my attention was a figure showing a plot of tests done; time was plotted on the horizontal axis, and temperature on the vertical one, in steps of 5° F. From this it was clear that after heating the blood to a temperature of 110° F for 4 hours, those so treated were not infectious. That is, their blood would no longer transmit this disease. Was Dr. Logan so far off track then, 35 years later, when he wanted to test hyperthermia as a treatment for AIDS? Did NAID and Dr. Anthony Fauci know that this treatment had shown promising results decades earlier when a secret government agency was working on it? In 1956 Raymond, who was very interested in witch doctors and what they could do, told me a tale about an African courtesan who cast a magic spell on her sexual partners, protecting them from ever suffering from the "skinny disease." Updated into this decade, it would appear she had Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), which apparently immunizes against AIDS. By sleeping with each of them for a week, she transmitted it to her clients. Mirko Grmek, in his History of Aids, confirms that this disease was known in parts of Africa at that time (the 1950s).

MODERN RESEARCH

In our time, Myron Essex and his team at the Harvard School of Public Health has confirmed that prostitutes in parts of West Africa, though infected with AIDS, remain healthy, apparently because they already had SIV. Essex and his group have been studying 4,300 people living in West Africa, where a large proportion of the population is infected with the SIV virus. He has already demonstrated two things (my inference is in parentheses after each):

1. The lifespans of people in that region who are infected with the SIV virus and those who are not infected, are the same. (Hence SIV is harmless to humans.)

2. People infected with the SIV virus do not develop AIDS. (Because they are immune to it.)

Then another piece of work by Essex and his team was published recently. In this latest work, Essex has concentrated upon a group of prostitutes in the West African nation of Senegal, who are infected with the SIV virus. Now these women have multiple sexual partners each night, and as AIDS has spread to that country now, obviously some of their clients must have the early states of AIDS. But according to the article, "During the 18 months that the women have been studied . . . they have not shown even subtle signs of immune suppression, which would be detectable in individuals infected with [AIDS] itself for that long." They are immune to AIDS and presumably transmit the immunity agent-SIV virus-to their clients.

TEST THE THEORY The theory could be easily tested to see if inoculating people with SIV virus would work the same way as cowpox did for smallpox: confer immunity against it without harming people. References to the beneficial properties of cowpox in England can be traced back to the 1300s and certainly by the early 1700s every milkmaid in England knew what no doctor did, that cowpox protected against smallpox.

Here is a method of testing whether SIV virus confers immunity against AIDS;

1. Select large group of sexually active people, male and female; include both heterosexuals and homosexuals.

2. Test the blood of all the volunteers for AIDS. Reject those testing positive. Request all test subjects to have no sexual partners until told otherwise.

3. Wait six months. Again test blood of all remaining volunteers for AIDS. Again, reject any who test positive at this stage.

4. Inject all remaining volunteers with blood containing SIV virus obtained from people in West Africa. Again instruct participants to have no sexual partners until told otherwise.

5. Wait 6 months, then test blood of all volunteers to confirm that they have produced antibodies to the SIV virus.

6. Instruct all volunteers to resume normal sexual behavior, the same as they were doing before being selected.

7. Periodically monitor the blood of participants to see if there is any sign of immune system suppression.

8. Follow up with repeated tests until it becomes clear whether these people are immune to AIDS. The official position of the U.S. government indicates that nothing is going to be done for those who have AIDS. The National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, a private organization which provides scientific advice to the federal government, in February 1993 said, "Despite thousands of deaths and an aura of national health emergency, the AIDS epidemic will have little impact on the lives of most Americans or the way society functions" because AIDS is concentrated "among socially marginalized groups who have little economic, political and social power."

Now we know what it feels like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany!

REFERENCES:
Max Essex and Phyllis J. Kanki, "Origins of the AIDS Virus," Scientific American, October 1988, pp. 64-71. P.J. Kanki, M. F. McLane, N.W. King, Jr., N.

L. Levin, R.D. Hunt, P. Sehgal, M.D. Daniel, R. C. Desrosiers, and M. Essex, "Serologic Identification and Characterization of a Macaque T-Lymphotropic Retrovirus Closely Related to Human HTLV-III," Science, Vol. 228, No. 4707, June 7, 1985, pp. 1199-1201.

P.J. Kanki, J. Alroy, and M. Essex, "Isolation of T-Lymphotropic Retrovirus Related to HTLV-III/LAV from Wild-Caught African Green Monkeys," Science, Vol. 230, No. 4728, November 22, 1985, pp. 951-954.

F. Barin, S. M'Boup, F. Denis, P. Kanki, J.S. Allen, T.H. Lee, and M. Essex, "Serologic Evidence for Virus Related to Simian T-Lymphotropic Retrovirus III in Residents of West Africa," The Lancet, Vol 2 for 1985, December 21/28, 1985, pp. 1387-89.

Phyllis J. Kanki and others, "Human T-Lymphotropic Virus Type 4 and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus in West Africa," Science, Vol. 236, No. 4803, May 15, 1987, pp. 827-831.

Richard G. Marlink and others, "Clinical, Hematologic, and Immunologic Cross-Sectional Evaluation of Individuals Exposed to Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 2 (HIV-2)," in Aids Research and Human Retroviruses, Vol. 4, No. 2,
April 1988, pp. 137-148.

Original article: http://www.sonic.net/~doretk/ArchiveARCHIVE/Aids/TheMerchantsofAIDS.html