Wrongful Death: The AIDS Trial by Stephen Davis

Reviews by Henry H. Bauer and Joan Shenton

Link to review by John Kirkham

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Review by Henry H. Bauer - Professor Emeritus of Chemistry & Science Studies
Dean Emeritus of Arts & Sciences
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

Wrongful Death: The AIDS Trial by Stephen Davis. Virtualbookworm.com, 2006. 384 pp. paper. ISBN 0-58939-868-8. Order at www.theaidstrial.com/order.htm: autographed, $25; from publisher, $17.95, or e-book pdf for $9.95; audio-book (10 CDs) $39.95.

Anyone who thinks that HIV has been proven to cause AIDS and that antiretroviral drugs have made AIDS a manageable disease should read this book. Those who have already learned better will nevertheless find points of interest as well as enjoyment here.

The story is told in the form of a legal proceedings, an appropriate device for presenting evidence; and there are a couple of ingenious twists. It may well be that HIV/AIDS theory will only be unseated when a court hearing of some sort forces the orthodoxy to defend its claims. The particular approach imagined here could probably not be used in practice, according to the Epilogue; nevertheless, this book may serve as a salutary stimulant to ponder what actual options there might be for pertinent legal maneuvers.

The AIDS Trial is a class-action suit by relatives of those who died needlessly because they had followed the orthodox recommendation to treat “HIV-positive” with AZT, a substance long known to be so toxic that it could not even be used for cancer chemotherapy. This is the most gut-wrenching corollary of HIV/AIDS dogma, and the author handles well the interplay of emotion and evidence. Though the explicit focus is on AZT, the case that HIV does not cause AIDS is soundly explicated as well.

The AIDS Trial is very timely, because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are urging that HIV-testing become routine. The mainstream view is that HIV-positive suggests that treatment with antiretrovirals may be called for. However, such treatment is usually debilitating and ultimately fatal, whereas HIV-positive is not necessarily a sign of serious ill-health (Bauer 2005, 2006a, b, and references therein). If testing does become routine, on the order of 1 million healthy Americans will be urged to start a life-time course of toxic chemotherapy, setting in motion potentially the largest iatrogenic massacre in history.

A disclaimer, said to be for legal reasons, describes the book as fiction and claims fictional character for most of the people, other than the best known ones. Still, several others are readily identified, not only through their views or actions but also because the initials of their names are not altered. There is considerable, warranted, detail about the documented misdeeds of Robert Gallo and his laboratory. It remains for this reviewer a matter of astonishment that these publicly known facts about Gallo, and about the toxicity of AZT documented in innumerable publications, and other facts as well, continue to be ignored.

It is in the nature of novels in this genre, which intend direct instruction on matters of substance, that the characters are ready-made rather than individually developed--think of Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Ayn Rand, Michael Crichton in State of Fear. Like the last, this novel is garnished with citations to the scientific and popular literature, in this case some 900 of them. I did not attempt to check them all, but the important ones are certainly there.

I began reading this book with no inkling that I would be comparing it to those of the just-mentioned writers. The AIDS Trial had three strikes against it in my expectations: it is self-published; it is a first novel from a non-professional writer; and it is a novel-with-a-message. None of those augurs well, and the combination tends to be devastating. But I did not want to put this book down before I had finished it. It is well paced. It stops how and when it should stop, truly a rarity. The characters may be stock, there may be a few farfetched devices, there is a bit of soap opera here; but so there is in the works I cited, which also sought to bring to public attention matters of singular importance. I doubt that the task could be much better done than Stephen Davis has done it.

I noticed only a few errors, none of them central to the story:

• That “HIV-positive” is found at about the same rate everywhere in the population (p. 272).
  No. It varies drastically with geography and other demographics, see Bauer (2005, 2006a, b). But the essential point is correct, that the distributions of HIV and of AIDS are vastly different.
• That the male-to-female ratio among HIV-positive people is about 1 (pp. 275--6).
  No. It varies with age, but on average is about 2. Again, however, the essential point is correct, that it differs greatly from the ratio for AIDS.
• That most of African AIDS may be iatrogenic (p. 289).
  No. Antiretrovirals have not been much used there (as yet). African AIDS is chiefly malaria, tuberculosis, and other endemic diseases exacerbated by failing economies and infrastructures and the associated widespread poverty and malnutrition.

That tiny number of substantive inaccuracies is a far better performance than the contemporary norm in most of the mainstream literature. Moreover I noticed no more than 2 or 3 typos, which far exceeds the contemporary norm for publishers’ competence.

The author notes that the book was written first as the script for a film. What a movie this could make! Given the publication of Celia Farber’s article in Harper’s (Farber, 2006a), and her collection of essays (Farber, 2006b), and several books by other skeptics and dissidents in the offing, and a pending court case in Australia, perhaps the tide is about to turn. This movie may yet be made in the lifetime of some now living. That is devoutly to be wished. In the meantime, there is this book to savor.

Henry H. Bauer
hhbauer@vt.edu
www.henryhbauer.homestead.com

References:

Bauer 2005: Bauer, H. H. (2005). Demographic characteristics of HIV: I. How did HIV spread? Journal of Scientific Exploration19, 567-603; erratum, 2006, ibid. 20, 95.

Bauer 2006a: Bauer, H. H. (2006). Demographic characteristics of HIV: II. What determines the frequency of positive HIV-tests? Journal of Scientific Exploration . 20, 69-94.

Bauer 2006b: Bauer, H. H. (2006). Demographic characteristics of HIV: III. Why does HIV discriminate by race? Journal of Scientific Exploration20, 255-88.

Farber 2006a: Farber, C. (2006 ). Out of control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science. Harper’s, March, 37-52.

Farber 2006b: Farber, Celia. (2006 ). Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS. Hoboken (NJ): Melville House.

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WRONGFUL DEATH – The AIDS Trial By Stephen Davis
At lasts the truth through fiction about the death of a generation of young men

Review by Joan Shenton – medical journalist and documentary producer.

As I read Stephen Davis’s remarkable book I said to myself, “This could have happened. This should have happened.”

Having followed and participated in the debate surrounding HIV as the cause of AIDS from the very beginning there is no doubt in my mind that the death of a generation of young men and some women who had been diagnosed HIV antibody positive took place, caused by AZT.

No one survived the high dose regime of 1,500 milligrams a day. The truth behind Peter Duesberg’s challenge to the HIV/ AIDS hypothesis would have emerged through the public arena of the courts had a few lawyers had the courage to pursue the cases of drug injury put before them.

Duesberg will attest how the initial enthusiasm shown by the lawyers who were approached soon cooled as they checked in with the ruling scientific orthodoxy who told them of the “overwhelming evidence” that HIV causes AIDS. It was hard for lawyers to take the risk as the very few independent scientific voices on this issue were drowned by the cacophony from the National Institutes of Health and from academics across the United States whose departments were receiving money from the pharmaceutical industry for running their multi-centre clinical trails for AZT.

Davis ’s book is disturbing but also deeply satisfying to read, as through his fictitious narrative he slowly “gets the villains”. The hero, prosecuting lawyer Benjamin Mesick, is a cross between Don Quixote and a samurai warrior. He calls witnesses from the scientific orthodoxy who require a subpoena, scores his points off them and leaves the defence struggling.

The villain is Dr Robert Gallo who claimed to have “discovered” HIV as the cause of AIDS. Davis recounts all the political shenanigans surrounding the deal brokered by Chirac and Reagan when Gallo was accused by French scientist Luc Montagnais of having stolen his virus.

The book is also all the more juicy for an British reader as UK libel laws would, as I understand it, prevent the real names of scientists like Robert Gallo, Anthony Fuci and also the names Burroughs Welcome and the National Institutes of Health to be used in such a pejorative context.

As for accuracy, the book is minutely reached with hundreds of references. As well as sticking closely to documented fact it introduces an important imaginary scenario which, if implemented today, could provide a solution to the current veil of secrecy and censorship in the scientific community. Davis introduces a witness, a scientist from Japan who describes the way a mysterious illness involving paralysis and blindness had gripped the Japanese people (and others across the world) in the 60s. It was called SMON – Sub acute Myeloid-Optic Neuropathy. This disease was initially thought to be infectious, caused be a virus. When Japan realised that this could affect their hosting of the Olympics they decided to set up a multidisciplinary commission to investigate.

In an academic climate where virologists and organisations controlling infectious diseases did not hold sway, some solid epidemiological detective work took place and it was discovered that the cause of this dreadful malady was the toxic effect of anti-diarrhoeal drugs containing variations of clioquinol which severely damaged the nervous system.

Once a multidisciplinary team is set up to investigate the science behind the infectious hypothesis for AIDS it will not take long for the verdict on the cause AIDS to be declared a toxic one. In other words the erosion of the body’s immune system caused by risk associated conditions such as poverty, malnutrition, recreational drug use and certain clinical conditions like haemophilia.

This book is important on many different fronts but perhaps the most important is its presentation of the way in which scientific inquiry can become derailed by financial an ultimately political interests. It will take more careful documentation and chronicling, at times a fictitious presentation of the facts and most importantly the creation of a multidisciplinary commission in order to get independent scientific inquiry back on the rails and for the truth about AIDS to get out.

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