The Day the Science Died - Criteria to determine disease cause cancelled
- The scientific criteria for determining the cause of a disease are based in logic and have been proven to work
- A pathogen must be found in affected tissues in amounts sufficient to interfere with the functioning of that tissue
- AIDS patients often have no HIV at all present in the tissues affected by their disease nor anywhere in their bodies
- Rather than reject HIV as the cause of AIDS, public health officials discarded the very criteria HIV failed to meet
Two hundred years after the 17th century discovery of bacteria, their role in causing disease remained in doubt. This reservation of judgment accrued to society’s benefit, forcing the employment of a rigorous scientific method which led, according to one of the fathers of modern-day retrovirology, Dr. Peter Duesberg, to the development of indispensable axioms. Writing in his magnum opus, Inventing the AIDS Virus, the professor explains.
Many leading doctors, in fact, refused to believe that disease could result from transmissible microbes at all. Although they ultimately turned out to be mistaken, their healthy skepticism nonetheless played a critical scientific role, forcing the early microbe hunters to formulate objective standards for blaming any disease on a germ. The importance of such proof cannot be underestimated: Many diseases are not infectious, yet a number have been falsely blamed on harmless passenger microbes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such mistakes can be easily avoided only when scientists carefully apply logical standards. [Emphases added].
First bacteria cultured from an animal
In the late 19th century, German physician Robert Koch finally met the challenge to prove germs guilty of causing illness. The blood of cows suffering from anthrax had already been shown by French scientist Casimir Davaine to cause anthrax in other cows when injected. Koch succeeded in separating from the cow blood the actual agent of disease, Bacillus anthracis, cultured it in an early version of what came to be known as a Petri dish (after his assistant) and used it to cause the same disease in a different animal.
First bacteria cultured from a human
Koch wasted no time applying his newly developed technique, to isolate and grow bacteria, to battle the top infectious disease of the time, quickly finding that: In all tissues in which the tuberculosis process has recently developed and is progressing most rapidly, these [Mycobacterium tuberculosis] bacilli can be found in large numbers... As soon as the peak of the tubercle eruption has passed, the bacilli become rarer.
Scientific criteria established
Included in his 1884 tuberculosis paper were what became known as Koch's postulates, three criteria which must be met if a microbe is indeed the cause of a disease:
- The microorganism must be found in abundance [i.e., in amounts sufficient to cause pathological effects] in all organisms suffering from the disease [and in every affected tissue],
- The microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown in pure culture,
- The cultured microorganism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy organism.
Only minor changes needed
These three postulates have required only slight revisions to allow researchers, for more than a century, to avoid blaming innocent pathogens for diseases in which they play no role.
For example, a fourth postulate was added holding that the microorganism must be reisolated from the inoculated, diseased experimental host. Another change was made by Koch himself. After initially speculating that bacteria cause disease in any organism carrying them, he retracted this position when he found asymptomatic carriers of what were usually relatively small concentrations of germs.
Ignoring Koch’s postulates at society’s peril
Unfortunately, the invaluable postulates carefully laid out by Koch have, very often, not been adhered to. Diseases caused by nutritional deficiencies were even blamed on contagions years after Koch’s publication of his postulates. Thus, each of the following were mistakenly blamed on microbes without any regard for Koch’s postulates, allowing their real, and simple cures, to unnecessarily remain hidden from suffering patients for decades:
- Scurvy, caused by vitamin C deficiency
- Beriberi, caused by vitamin B1 deficiency
- Pellagra, caused by niacin deficiency
HIV fails all of Koch’s postulates
In Duesberg’s 1992 paper, AIDS Acquired by Drug Consumption and Other Non Contagious Risk Factors, he tests HIV as a cause for AIDS against Koch’s postulates:
- The microorganism must be found in abundance [i.e., [in amounts sufficient to cause pathological effects] in all organisms suffering from the disease [and in every affected tissue].
HIV fails to meet this first postulate in spectacular fashion.
HIV is certainly not present in all AIDS patients … HIV is not even present in all persons who die from multiple-indicator diseases plus general immune system failure-the paradigm AIDS cases.
Most importantly, HIV is never present "in amounts sufficient to cause pathological effects."
Since on average only 0.1% … of T-cells are ever infected by HIV in AIDS patients, but at least 3% of all T-cells are regenerated during the two days it takes a retrovirus to infect a cell, HIV could never kill enough T-cells to cause immunodeficiency.
Thus, even if HIV killed every infected T-cell, it could deplete T-cells only at 1/30 of their normal rate of regeneration, let alone activated regeneration. The odds of HIV causing T-cells deficiency would be the same as those of a bicycle rider catching up with a jet airplane. [Emphases added].
The case for HIV causing AIDS faces an even greater challenge with other AIDS illnesses:
In several AIDS diseases that are not caused by immunodeficiency, HIV is not even present in the diseased tissues, e.g., there is no trace of HIV in any Kaposi's sarcomas, and there is no HIV in neurons of patients with dementia, because of the generic inability of retroviruses to infect nondividing cells like neurons.
2. The microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown in pure culture.
HIV being completely absent from many AIDS patients, the virus obviously cannot be isolated from them. Nonetheless, public health officials will consider those patients HIV positive if they test positive for HIV antibodies, i.e., for the very antibodies the body used to neutralize the HIV that is no longer found in the body. Even in those patients from whom HIV can be found and removed, its scarcity necessitates an isolation process unlike anything envisioned by Dr. Koch:
. . . there is typically no free HIV in AIDS patients. Indeed, the scarcity of infectious HIV in typical AIDS patients is . . . the reason that on average 5 million leukocytes of HIV-positives must be cultured to activate ("isolate") HIV from AIDS patients. Even under these conditions it may take up to 15 different isolation efforts(!) to get just one infectious virus out of an HIV carrier.
Some AIDS researchers have claimed to resolve this issue on the basis that HIV, being a virus, does not need to meet this second postulate at all since viruses, unlike bacteria, are not alive and thus cannot grow in pure culture. In so doing, they ignore the fact that Koch’s postulates were applied to previously known viruses by simply adapting the postulate to allow for growth in host cells. Indeed, all truly viral diseases do fulfill Koch's standards perfectly - yellow fever, measles, polio, chicken pox, herpes, hepatitis A and B, and flu, among others.
In fact, Duesberg argues,
These time-tested standards apply even more perfectly to viruses, which are nonliving parasites with no behavioral flexibility, than they do to bacteria, which can sometimes release toxins or adapt to changing environments. [Emphasis added].
3. The cultured microorganism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy organism.
Again, HIV comes up spectacularly short in efforts to meet this postulate:
HIV … fails to cause AIDS when experimentally inoculated into chimpanzees which make antibodies against HIV just like their human cousins. Up to 150 chimpanzees have been inoculated since 1983, and all are still healthy.
HIV also fails to cause AIDS when accidentally introduced into humans … The scientific literature has yet to prove that even one health care worker has contracted AIDS from the over 206,000 American AIDS patients during the past 10 years, and that even one of thousands of scientists has developed AIDS from HIV, which they propagate in their laboratories and companies. . . .
. . . the AIDS risk of those health care workers that have treated the 206,000 American AIDS patients is in fact lower than that of the general population.
NIH’s response - keep HIV, throw out the postulates
Rather than follow the scientific method and draw the necessary conclusions, Robert Gallo, the NIH official who falsely claimed to have discovered HIV in AIDS patients while, on the same day, filing a patent to profit from an HIV test, dismissed Koch’s postulates as outdated without even offering a substitute set of criteria for determining the cause of infectious diseases:
Rules were needed then, and can be helpful now, but not if they are too blindly followed. Robert Koch, a great microbiologist, has suffered from a malady that affects many other great men: he has been taken too literally and too seriously for too long …
Koch's Postulates, while continuing to be an excellent teaching device, are far from absolute in the real world outside the classroom (and probably should not be in the classroom anymore except in a historical and balanced manner).
Professor Duesberg reacted thusly to this public abandonment of Koch’s postulates:
Koch's postulates consist of elementary logic … Gallo never tries to explain how logic would change over time … Nor does Gallo offer any rigorous scientific rules to replace Koch's postulates, leaving HIV science with no standards at all.
Gallo continues by misstating Koch's [revised] postulates, falsely claiming that a germ is required to cause a disease every single time it infects a new host. With most microbes, the majority of infected people or animals experience no symptoms; Koch's test only requires that some animals become sick when injected with a disease-causing germ or that vaccination prevents the illness.
Gallo then cites false or misleading examples of germs that supposedly fail the postulates despite causing disease, pretending, for example, that the hepatitis and flu viruses cause no disease in animals. Gallo misses the point that the failure of a given germ to meet Koch's postulate does not call the postulate into question, but rather the germ as the cause of a disease.
Duesberg concludes,
Leading AIDS researchers … have argued that the failure of HIV to meet Koch's postulates invalidates these postulates rather than invalidating HIV as the cause of AIDS. But the failure of a suspected pathogen to meet Koch's postulates [does not invalidate] the timeless logic of Koch's postulates.
What's needed now?
Whether we date the abandonment of the scientific method to the April 23, 1984, press conference by NIH official Robert Gallo blaming AIDS on HIV while ignoring its failure to meet Koch's postulates, or to the August 18, 1993, publication of Gallo's book officially calling for them to be removed from “the classroom” and not taken “too literally” or “too seriously,” one thing is for sure; the world is in desperate need of a return to the scientific method without fear of a backlash from public health officials who do not like the data.
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- How and why did Fauci suppress evidence that HIV does not cause AIDS?
- How many times have public health officials mistakenly blamed a virus or bacteria for a disease?
- What do coronavirus and HIV have in common?
- What do the COVID vaccines and the HIV treatment have in common?
- Who’s censoring Kennedy’s expose The Real Anthony Fauci?
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