What are the failures of the paradigm?
The chief one is what used to be called the heterosexual AIDS explosion, which was the model. It was the core of the HIV theory—that there was a virus that was lethal, that was transmissible via unprotected sexual intercourse, needles, and other methods of transmission—blood-to-blood transmission. What they actually said was that there was a model of tertiary transmission. So anybody who sleeps with anybody who sleeps with anybody who's ever slept with anybody who ever was a drug addict, et cetera. It was a very terrifying model.
And one of the studies that the so-called dissidents have been drawing attention to is a study by a Berkeley researcher named Nancy Padian. Her study looked at transmission between couples where one was positive and one was negative. They had unprotected sex. They watched them over a period of 10 years. And there was not one single transmission in the whole group [during the 10-year study]—not one. [From the research paper: "Overall, 68 (19%) of the 360 female partners of HlV-infected men (95% confidence interval (Cl) 15.0-23.3%) and two (2.4%) of the 82 male partners of HlV-infected women (95% Cl 0.3-8.5%) were infected . . . transmission occurred prior to entry in the study. . . . Over time, the authors observed increased condom use (p <0.001) and no new infections."]
So what does that mean? Well, there's been a ruckus, a wild debate about this all over the Internet. At the very least, it means that the spread of HIV is extremely difficult, which is quite different than the terror, dread, bubonic-plague model we were given. That's just the first piece. The piece that I am most personally alarmed and upset by is the AZT piece of the history. When we were doing our most focused reportage in SPIN, it was during the peak of the AZT-mania years. AZT was given in extremely high doses. It is a chemotherapy that was developed in the '60s. Very crude, very toxic—some people say the most toxic drug ever given to human beings. And at the 1800- and 1200-milligram doses that were given in the first few years of the AZT craze, people died very clear AZT deaths. And there were some people around at the time who were saying, "That's AZT killing those people." And most people, by far, were saying, "That's crazy. It's the virus that's killing those people." That was where the first real war lines were drawn over AZT. AZT killed them—not the virus, not the illness, but the drug itself.
So what remains? Their great white hope is the cocktail therapy. And those cocktail therapies, protease inhibitors and so forth, definitely are a vast improvement. They are far less toxic. And, yes indeed, people stopped dying at the same rates they used to be dying. There are also broad-spectrum antibiotics and antimicrobials. So people have indeed been brought back from these complex immune disorders with those drugs.
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