HIV 'discoverer' blamed AIDS on stolen virus without detecting in patient
In AIDS without HIV, we presented the little known fact that many people suffering from AIDS are actually HIV-negative and it's often recreational drugs that are playing havoc with their immune systems. But what then is HIV?
After ignoring, and then suppressing, the non-contagious, real cause of AIDS, CDC officials spent three years furiously searching AIDS victims’ bodies for a new virus. Not finding one, they requested a sample of a newly discovered virus from Europe, claimed it as their own then blamed it for harming patients without actually isolating it from any patients!
False flag 1 - Cytomegalovirus as the cause of AIDS
Initially public health officials only found the well known herpes-type cytomegalovirus in AIDS patients. Cytomegalovirus was isolated in the 1950s. It was so mild that few people, other than immunocompromised cancer patients ever even noticed it despite its steady infection rate of some 80% of the population. Thus, its prevalence among AIDS patients only indicated that it was a possible result of immunosuppression, certainly not its cause.
False flag 2 - HTLV-I as the cause of AIDS
The next virus to be “blamed” for AIDS was HTLV-I, a retrovirus (a type of virus that replicates in the reverse of the usual pattern and generally does not cause disease).
Contagious cancer? Robert Gallo, credited as a co-discoverer of HIV, started out as a researcher for the NIH's National Cancer Institute, believing cancers to be contagious.
1st Gallo Scandal - false claim of new virus: Gallo first announced having found a virus in human cancer cells in 1975. Professor Peter Duesberg, in Inventing the AIDS Virus, provides his account of how events unfolded from there:
To Gallo's dismay, however, he faced humiliation when he presented the finding at the Virus-Cancer Program's yearly conference. Other scientists had tested his virus and discovered it to be a mixture of contaminating retroviruses from woolly monkeys, gibbon apes, and baboons. Gallo tried to save his reputation, speculating wildly that perhaps one of the monkey viruses caused the human leukemia. This excuse did not fly, and he later described the event as a "disaster" and "painful," admitting that it placed "human retrovirology, and me with it, at a very low point."
2nd Gallo Scandal - first stolen virus: Gallo again announced having isolated a virus in human cancer cells in 1980, naming it Human T-cell Leukemia Virus (HTLV-I). Once again, controversy followed his announcement. According to Duesberg,
At the same time, a Japanese research team reported isolating a human retrovirus from leukemic patients, which they named ATLV. After they courteously sent Gallo a sample of the virus to compare with his own, Gallo published the genetic sequence of HTLV-I. The sequence of Gallo's Caribbean virus proved to be nearly identical to the Japanese virus; it contained a mistake identical to one made by the Japanese group.
Since all other non-Japanese HTLV-I isolates differed much more widely from the Gallo-Japanese twins, some retrovirologists suggest Gallo may have offered the Japanese sequence as his own. No formal investigation has probed this incident, and Gallo was awarded the prestigious Lasker Prize as the presumed discoverer of the leukemia virus. [Emphases added].
3rd Gallo Scandal - manipulating data: Having successfully held onto his claim to be the discoverer of HTLV-I, Gallo spent years researching that virus as a contagious cancer cause, despite the fact that “there is not one epidemiological study in which the incidence of leukemia is higher in HTLV-positive groups than in virus-free control groups.”
To get around this lack of correlation between HTLV-I infection and cancer, Duesberg says that Gallo and his colleagues at the National Institutes of Health redefined one type of leukemia, Adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma (ATL), as a cancer caused by HTLV-I. Thus,
Doctors may not diagnose patients as having "ATL" unless the victim also has antibodies against the virus; uninfected patients with identical leukemias are categorized under a different clinical name. This little trick handily abolishes one of the gaps between the disease and the virus.
Suddenly there was a 100% correlation between HTLV-I and ATL.
4th Gallo Scandal - mysterious virus properties: According to Duesberg,, another trick was needed, though, to blame HTLV-1 for leukemia since active HTLV-I was absent from leukemia patients. In fact, doctors had to test patients for antibodies against the virus rather than test for the presence of the virus itself. So Gallo alleged that the virus causes mutations that cause problems decades after the virus first enters the body and long after the active virus can no longer be found.
5th Gallo Scandal - virus simultaneously causing cell growth and cell death: Having now “established” that HTLV-I causes cancer, Gallo set out to prove that it also causes AIDS, despite the inherent contradiction that entails. (i.e. Cancer is out-of-control cell growth. A hallmark of immunosuppression in AIDS patients is T-cell depletion.)
If HTLV-I caused infected cells to grow into cancers, it could not also kill those same cells [which it would need to do to deplete T-cells]. Indeed, retroviruses had seized the high ground of cancer research during the 1970s precisely because they did not kill infected cells …
To obfuscate the impossibility of this claim, Duesberg says that Gallo simply renamed his virus, in 1985, while maintaining its acronym. Human T-cell Leukemia Virus thus became Human T-cell Lymphotropic Virus, with the new implication that the virus merely “favors infecting T-cells. This new name implied neither cancer nor cell killing, thereby maintaining an ambiguity that could allow the virus to cause both diseases at once.”
False flag 3 - HIV as the cause of AIDS
Despite the name change, Gallo faced difficulties in proving his virus guilty of causing AIDS and even faced opposition from other cancer-virus researchers not comfortable with the more cancer-neutral label given to HTLV-I. At the same time, French researcher Luc Montagnier succeeded in isolating a different retrovirus, LAV, later renamed HIV, from a person considered at risk of developing AIDS, though he was in fact not suffering from AIDS.
6th Gallo Scandal - taking credit for others' work: Those who imagine public health officials as always prioritizing public health, while considering their prestige secondary, will be quickly disabused of that notion when learning of Duesberg's account of Gallo’s reaction to Montagnier’s discovery of HIV.
Gallo began quietly telling colleagues that Montagnier had made a mistake. Hedging his bets as always, Gallo also generously offered to write the short summary for the beginning of Montagnier's upcoming scientific paper. The unsuspecting French scientist agreed, and Gallo wrote in it that the new virus was closely related to his HTLV-I and -II retroviruses.
So while Gallo was denouncing Montagnier's discovery and stepping up his own campaign to make HTLV-I the "AIDS virus," he was also trying to take credit for the new virus. Gallo proudly defended his new title, "father of human retroviruses," and lived up to it by adopting all human retroviruses to his HTLV family.
7th Gallo Scandal - ignoring well established scientific protocol: Despite the passage of almost a year from Montagnier's May 1983 paper on his discovery of HIV (LAV), and despite waiting all that time to publish four papers he had prepared claiming to have found the same virus, Gallo suddenly rushed to hold a press conference on his findings, breaking long-time protocol for scientists to present their findings for review by their peers before the general public.
Montagnier's paper was published, and Gallo spent the next several months furiously trying to find the same virus. Finally, by April of I984 he was ready to announce having found a similar retrovirus, which he unsurprisingly named HTLV-III. He had prepared four separate papers reporting his discovery of the virus and its isolation from a number of AIDS patients. Ethical protocol among scientists required that he first publish those papers, allowing his peers to analyze the results before he went to the news media.
But Gallo and his employer, the Department of Health and Human Services, pulled a coup d'etat on Montagnier by holding a press conference on April 23, more than a week before the papers were to be printed in the journal Science. Margaret Heckler, Secretary of Health and Human Services, sponsored the huge event and introduced Gallo to the press corps. Backed by the full prestige of the federal government, she officially declared this new virus was probably the cause of AIDS, a conclusion dutifully reported by the media. By April 24, EIS [Epidemic Intelligence Service] member Lawrence Altman had dubbed it the "AIDS virus" for the readers of the New York Times. Thus, before any other scientists could review and comment on Gallo's claim, it had been set in stone.
8th Gallo Scandal - censoring opposition: Gallo not only blocked timely peer review of his own research claiming HIV to be the cause of AIDS, but also blocked the research of others into alternative causes, according to Duesberg.
The press conference marked a point of no return. Career-minded scientists immediately dropped all other AIDS research, including work on the Epstein-Barr virus, cytomegalovirus, and HTLV-I, as well as all remaining experiments on poppers. From that date forward, every federal dollar spent on AIDS research funded only experiments in line with the new virus hypothesis.
Had researchers been politically free to examine Gallo's papers for themselves, they might have objected that some of his AIDS patients had never been infected by the virus. They would have pointed out that no virus had been found in any of Gallo's AIDS patients, but only antibodies against it. Antibodies are traditionally a sign that the immune system has rejected the virus. Researchers also could have remembered that retroviruses do not kill cells. For that matter, they might have noticed that Montagnier had found the virus first.
9th Gallo Scandal - filing a patent for his virus test the same day as his press conference: In addition to stifling all other AIDS research, Gallo's press conference ensured him a major monetary windfall, persuading the lay public that his simultaneously patented test was needed to diagnose AIDS.
… on the very day of the press meeting, while the rest of the world was struggling to come to terms with the first infectious plague in many years, Gallo quietly filed his U.S. patent application for the virus antibody test. The patent stated under oath that the virus could be mass produced for HIV tests within indefinitely growing, "immortal" T-cells. But according to Gallo's scientific papers the virus caused AIDS by killing T-cells.
10th Gallo Scandal - stolen HIV: The only way to top all the above scandals would be for Gallo to have never even found HIV in a patient, but to have merely copied it from Montagnier. Did he?
Gallo insists he independently found the virus at the same time, but waited nearly a year to test it before releasing his results to the world . Several other researchers immediately noticed a suspicious coincidence: The Gallo and Montagnier viruses were so similar to each other that they had probably come from the same patient. Normally, a retrovirus isolated from two different people has mutated, if only in trivial ways, enough to mark the two isolates as distinct.
But Gallo's virus was almost identical to Montagnier's. The French researcher had generously sent samples of his virus to Gallo on request, and now Gallo was offering an amazingly similar one as his own. When challenged, Gallo failed to produce any of the other virus isolates he claimed to have. To explain away the similarity, he even proposed that the American and French isolates had come from two patients who just happened to be sexual partners. Finally, in 1991 Gallo publicly admitted in the science magazine Nature that the French virus was indistinguishable from his own and has excused his lack of other viruses by weaving tales of laboratory accidents that somehow happened to destroy his dozens of isolates.
[A] journalistic investigation also revealed a deliberate cover-up. In I986 Gallo was forced to admit that the photographs of HTLV-III published in his 1984 papers had actually been photos of the French LAV … Gallo … tried to excuse the switched photo as having been "largely for illustrative purposes" …
But more recently another hidden fact has come to light … In [an] earlier manuscript, [a lab associate] gave full credit to the French for finding the virus first and showed that the Gallo lab had been able to grow LAV soon after receiving the sample. Those admissions were crossed out in the draft, and in the margins Gallo's handwriting scoldingly declares, "Mika, you are crazy... I just don't believe it. You are absolutely incredible." The published version of the paper contained none of the statements giving credit to the French scientists. With this piece of damning evidence, Gallo has been caught lying about his supposed inability to grow the French virus in his lab.
In I989 Chicago Tribune correspondent John Crewdson joined in the fray with another expose of Gallo, followed by several more articles. That began an avalanche of scientific fraud investigations originating in the NIH itself, in the National Academy of Sciences, and in Congress. As a result, [that lab associate] was fired from the NIH for fraud, and Gallo himself was convicted of scientific misconduct at the end of 1992. [Emphases added].
11th Gallo Scandal - stolen cell line: Apparently, not only did Gallo grow Montagnier's virus, rather than his own, but even the cell line he used to grow the virus was commandeered by Gallo.
Gallo apparently also commandeered the cell line in which he grew the stolen French virus. A sample of the leukemic T-cells, originally named HUT78, was sent to his lab for isolating a leukemia virus. Unable to find any retrovirus, Gallo renamed them H9, claimed he developed the cells himself, and used them instead to grow HIV. No prosecutions have yet precipitated over this second alleged misappropriation.
12th Gallo Scandal - stolen HIV test
A scathing report by the Chicago Tribune, U.S. Inquiry Discredits Gallo on AIDS Patent, concluded,
A two-year inquiry by the inspector general's office of the Department of Health and Human Services has found no evidence to support Dr. Robert C. Gallo's claim that he was the original inventor of the widely used diagnostic blood test for AIDS ….
the patent examiner who granted HHS the 1985 patent on Gallo's AIDS test told investigators she would not have done so had she known that French scientists already had developed such a test…
Gallo … failed to tell the Patent Office that scientists at the Pasteur Institute of Paris already had performed "extensive work" with the AIDS virus and had used it to make an AIDS blood test of their own.
Despite a legal obligation to disclose all information "material" to his claim of inventorship, the summary says, Gallo failed to inform the Patent Office that his laboratory had cultured the French AIDS virus, called LAV [renamed HIV], "for an extended period and used it for many of their experiments."
According to the summary, Gallo later told investigators his assertions were untrue. "There is a point where I say I didn't grow LAV," Gallo is quoted as having acknowledged. "And, of course, LAV was grown." …
a number of key statements attributed to Gallo-some made under oath-that are contradicted by evidence gathered in the inquiry.
According to the summary, after the dispute arose in 1985, HHS officials insisted that Gallo, not Pasteur, had been "first to identify the virus and to describe the virus antibody test."
The inquiry leaves little question, however, that Pasteur scientists were first to discover the AIDS virus, to isolate it successfully from several AIDS patients, to describe it in a scientific article, and to use it to make a diagnostic blood test for antibodies to the AIDS virus …
HHS lawyers later dismissed the fact that Pasteur had sent Gallo a sample of its newly discovered AIDS virus as having had "no significance" for Gallo's research.
The summary asserts, however, that someone in Gallo's lab simply renamed the French virus, changing its designation from LAV to MOV, and continued to use it in the experiments that led to the development of Gallo's blood test.
The AIDS isolate Gallo later called HTLV-3B, the virus with which the U.S. version of the AIDS test is still manufactured, also has been shown to be the French virus LAV.
The AIDS test, one of the government's few lucrative inventions, has produced at least $20 million in royalties for HHS since 1987, compared with $14 million for Pasteur during the same period. Gallo has so far received more than $700,000 from the sale of the AIDS test in addition to his government salary.
The French first began to seek an expanded share of the AIDS test royalties in 1991, after Gallo admitted that HTLV-3B is really LAV-the result, he said, not of any misappropriation but of an "accidental contamination" in his laboratory.
The inspector general's report, however, states, "The claim that 3B was contaminated by LAV comes into question since there appears to be no evidence there ever was a 3B to be contaminated…"
That investigation concluded Gallo deliberately "misstated the role that the French virus . . . played in his work with the AIDS virus" by removing all references in the article to his assistants' use of LAV and then inserting a sentence claiming that LAV had never been successfully cultured…
The authoritative newsletter, Science & Government Report … quoted Frederick Richards, the Yale University professor who headed a blue-ribbon committee of scientists that oversaw the misconduct investigation, as calling for a reopening of the misconduct inquiry based on evidence that had emerged since the withdrawal.
Among other items, Richards referred to the recent discovery by congressional investigators of a 1987 computer analysis, by scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, showing that Gallo's HTLV-3B was merely Pasteur's LAV by another name. A memo from those scientists, written to senior NIH officials just nine days after the Franco-American settlement was announced, said the government's assertions that Gallo had made an independent discovery amounted to a "double fraud."
"The major purpose of this whole investigation," Richards was quoted as saying, "was to find out whether they stole the virus. The answer is, they stole the virus. But we didn't know that at the time." [Emphases added].
In the end, a headlined announced, Patent dispute costs Robert Gallo the Nobel Prize.
Medicine without patients
There you have it. A top public health official can get away with stealing another researcher’s virus discovery by requesting a copy of it and claiming to have independently discovered it. Then, though he never actually isolated it from any of his patients, he can claim that is what made them sick, a virus that came from across the world from a person who did not suffer from the disease from which his patients suffered.
One consequence of all that was Gallo became the most cited scientist in the world from 1980 to 1990.
In short, HIV wasn’t declared the AIDS virus as a result of research on patients, but was decided far away from patients and laboratories, in Dr. Gallo’s mind, when he decided to mail order a copy of the virus he planning to blame for a disease that already had a known cause.
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