Last July, New York Press published an article by Liam Scheff entitled “Orphans on Trial.” The piece sparked a slow-building wave of media interest in the children of Incarnation Children’s Center in Washington Heights, who have since become a lightning rod for a larger debate on HIV/AIDS drugs. A small but increasingly influential faction, commonly known as AIDS denialists, claims that HIV does not cause AIDS, and that the drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS are worse than the disease. We have invited longtime human-rights activist Jeanne Bergman and Celia Farber, a journalist and self-described “AIDS dissident,” to discuss the positions of their respective camps. We hope the heat generates some light.

—The editors

Jeanne Bergman

Celia Farber

For the last year and a half, Incarnation Children’s Center, a small skilled nursing
facility in Washington Heights for children with AIDS, has been the target of a concerted attack
by HIV denialists, the dangerously deluded people who believe that HIV is not the cause of AIDS and
that people with HIV should not receive treatment.

The denialists accused ICC of abusing the foster children who live there
as “guinea pigs” for deadly medical experiments, and these charges have elicited interest and
some support within the Black community in northern Manhattan, which is acutely aware of both the
racist history of American medicine and the routine incompetence and hostility of the Administration
of Children’s Services (ACS), New York City’s troubled foster care agency.

HIV denialists have been around for years. Scientists, AIDS activists,
clinicians and service providers ignore them when they can. Every wingnut claim they make—that
HIV does not exist, that AIDS does not exist, that HIV medicines are the cause of the disease—has
been thoroughly and completely demolished. But the lies spread by the denialists are beginning
to have a destructive effect, hampering prevention efforts and obstructing access to treatment
for people with HIV, in the U.S. and globally. By selecting ICC as a target, the HIV denialists are
cynically exploiting the African-American community’s deep and legitimate concerns about medical
racism, pharmaceutical profiteering and ACS’s abuses of government power in order to spread disinformation
about HIV and AIDS in communities of color.

The attacks on Incarnation Children’s Center began with a sensationalist
stew of lies, partial truths and innuendo cooked up by an AIDS denialist and free-lance writer named
Liam Scheff and circulated on the Internet in early 2004. The New York Post picked up the
story in March of that year, eliciting a spasm of misinformed grandstanding by a couple of City Council
members. Scheff got New York Press to print his story that July [vol. 17, issue 28]. But his
claim that children at ICC were being tortured in hideous experiments by a cabal of plotters including
the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Catholic Archdiocese, GlaxoSmithKline, Columbia-Presbyterian
Medical Center, and the Administration of Children’s Services wasn’t taken seriously until the
story was rendered by people with British accents on BBC Two in November 2004. Regrettably, the
HIV denialists driving this hoax have since been joined by African-American activists affiliated
with small groups like the December 12th Movement, whose rage is directed primarily at ACS. They
started organizing protests outside ICC, thus outing the residents as children with AIDS and characterizing
their home as a “slaughterhouse.”

The HIV denialists have also effectively worked the independent media
networks. Over the last six months several programs on WBAI, NYC’s Pacifica radio station, have
repeatedly and thoughtlessly reiterated the charges against ICC and the deadly lie that anti-HIV
treatment, not HIV itself, is the cause of AIDS. Last month, the New York City Council’s General
Welfare Committee convened a hearing showcasing the HIV denialists’ claims. Christian right-wing
extremists have also joined the call for a criminal investigation of the National Institutes of
Health for supporting foster children’s inclusion in clinical trials. The Executive Director
of the Traditional Values Coalition, Mrs. Andrea Lafferty, parroted the denialists’ attack on
medicine and ICC when she declared, “Powerless and parentless children … are being scrutinized
by the ‘scientists’ of the NIH. But using HIV-infected foster children, some as young as infants,
for their AIDS experiments is beyond despicable. … these voiceless little ones have no rights
and no one to speak for them when the NIH is in charge.”

Creationism and HIV denial have a common enemy in science.

When Incarnation Children’s Center was founded in 1988, children
with HIV/AIDS who were in foster care in New York City were not allowed to participate in clinical
trials. As new medications were developed, including those for AIDS-defining opportunistic
infections and eventually antiretrovirals, they were tested on, and approved for, adult populations
first, and only then considered for children. Clinical trials are the first point of access to new
and effective treatments; in addition, HIV+ children in clinical trials receive the best available
medical care.

Children perinatally infected with HIV develop symptoms much more
rapidly than adults: almost all HIV+ infants are ill by the time they are three, while adults are
commonly symptom-free for a decade or more after infection. Children also do not live long without
treatment. Before the advent of antiretroviral medications used in combination therapy,
HIV infected newborns had a median survival rate of six months after diagnosis. In the 1980s,
HIV+ children lucky enough to live with their birthparents could be enrolled in clinical trials
and get both the newest drugs and the best available care. But a 1992 study reported that over 50 percent
of the HIV-infected children in New York City lived with relatives or in foster care, and these children
could not participate in the trials. That is, more than half of the kids with HIV—and they
were overwhelmingly Black and Latino—were denied access to life-saving drugs simply because
they were in foster care. That is the story of racial discrimination in health care and the
foster care system that needs to be told.

ICC and other advocates for children with HIV successfully fought to
have the policy that discriminated against foster kids changed. Almost all of the children from
the ICC clinical trials period, children who would otherwise have died, are alive and well
today because of what they accomplished. Not a single child at ICC died as a result of clinical trials
they participated in there. Those kids were not “guinea pigs.” They were children with a deadly
infection receiving state-of-the-art medical care and drugs already proven effective in adults.

ICC’s participation in clinical trials ended in 2002 because, as a result
of the successful treatment of children in the clinical trials, those drugs were approved as safe
and effective for pediatric populations. But the denialists spin even this as sinister: now, Scheff
has charged, foster kids with HIV are being given anti-viral medications not just experimentally
but as—gasp—routine treatment. That’s true. And that’s good.

The denialists emphasize the limitations and the side effects
of antiretroviral medications; some, ignorant of the history of the epidemic, assert that these
treatments are themselves the cause of AIDS. There is, of course, no cure yet for HIV, and the antiretroviral
drugs are at best nasty to take and difficult to tolerate. (In his NY Press article last year,
Scheff boldly revealed that ICC’s Medical Director admitted, “The drugs have a ‘significant,
lingering, bitter taste.’ So they mix the pills or powders in chocolate or strawberry syrup.” Perhaps
Scheff’s next exposé will tell the truth about cherry-flavored NyQuil.)

No one familiar with HIV and AIDS treatment has ever suggested that being
on combination therapy is pleasant for anyone, and both immediate allergic reactions and long
term side effects can be very serious, and even, in rare cases, fatal. HIV disease sucks, and the
drugs so far available for it suck, too. Generally, however, the side effects are greatly outweighed
by the benefits of treatment. The children at ICC had the advantage of living in a structured, supportive
setting that ensured that they could adhere to complex regimens with stringent dietary requirements,
and on-site health care that enabled rapid identification of, and response to, any side effects.

The HIV denialists say that the young children at ICC could not refuse
the drugs or fight off the “researchers” who gave them their medications. Should children of two
or even 12 years get to decide if they will or will not take their medicine? Of course not, particularly
when irregular dosing may result in drug-resistant HIV. All responsible parents and caregivers
understand that children can’t make crucial life-and-death decisions for themselves, and the
law recognizes this fact too: that’s why legally children can neither give nor withhold medical
consent. ICC, with its loving, expert and compassionate staff, cared for the children; parents or other guardians signed informed consent forms. The
clinical trials—the only way the kids could get the drugs that kept them alive—were
closely monitored by the National Institutes of Health, collaborating hospitals, and the Administration
of Children’s Services. The HIV denialists see a conspiracy where there were in fact multiple levels
of oversight.

Were the children at ICC stolen from their parents to be used for experiments?
Absolutely not. The parents of many children at ICC had died from AIDS; others were incapacitated
by HIV-related illness, drugs, or homelessness and unable to care for very sick children: that’s
why the kids were in the foster care system. Until ICC was founded, orphaned and unparented HIV+
kids at Harlem Hospital were stuck there as “boarder babies”—too sick for regular foster
care, they had nowhere to live but the hospital. The denialists assert that the Administration
of Children’s Services as not merely neglectful, but complicit in a “full blown criminal conspiracy”
when it placed HIV+ kids in ICC. ACS is always (and often justifiably) an easy target: the agency
often abuses its power over parents while failing to protect children. But what ACS did in this instance
was, for once, really wonderful: it put kids with HIV/AIDS who had no other home into a cozy, first-rate
specialized care facility where they had access to state-of-the-art combination anti-viral
therapy under the expert supervision of a brilliant and compassionate staff. That’s not a crime
to be prosecuted, but an incredible accomplishment to be celebrated.

Thanks to other clinical trials proving the efficacy of AZT and Nevirapine
in preventing perinatal transmission, and in particular to the amazing community education and
care provided to pregnant women by Harlem Hospital, the incidence of perinatal HIV transmission
in Washington Heights and Harlem has fallen dramatically. Almost no new HIV-infected babies are
born in northern Manhattan now, and the AIDS babies of ICC are nearing adulthood.

It’s not hard to understand why some people don’t believe in
the reality of HIV and AIDS. They may be in genuine psychological denial: they don’t want to be infected,
and they don’t want this terrifying pandemic to decimate their families, their world. Others resist
changing the behaviors that put themselves and others at risk of HIV infection, so they persuade
themselves it doesn’t matter. More broadly, the history of racism in American medicine, the pharmaceutical
giants’ single-minded pursuit of profit, and the frustration that more than 20 years into the AIDS
epidemic there is no cure, have prepared fertile ground for denial and disinformation.

It’s more difficult to discern the motives of people who urge others
to reject the overwhelming scientific evidence and medical consensus that HIV causes AIDS by destroying
the immune system, allowing the opportunistic infections that would otherwise be easily fought
off to turn deadly.

A closer look at the denialist who evidently instigated the hoax about
ICC explains a lot. Christine Maggiore, one of the most visible HIV denialists, introduced Liam
Scheff to the guardian of two children who lived at ICC. Maggiore has built a profitable career by
combining a gift for self-promotion with a couple of false-positive HIV test results. The story
she tells begins in 1992, when, despite the complete absence of risk factors, a routine HIV antibody
test came back inconclusive. The retest was positive, and Maggiore threw herself into the whirlwind
life of an AIDS poster girl, “booked for a year’s worth of engagements before I’d even finished [a
speaker's] training course. I made the audiences, laugh, cry, and scared.” When a year or so later
her doctor suspected she wasn’t really infected with HIV, she “finally found the courage to retest,”
and in a series of tests received results that were inconclusive, she reports, then positive, negative
and positive again.

False-negative HIV tests are extremely rare, while false positives
are much more common, though infrequent. This fact and all the other available evidence strongly
indicate that Maggiore was never infected with HIV, and she herself emphasizes the term “positive”
and avoids saying she is infected or has the virus, allowing others to draw that erroneous conclusion.
Most people would be thrilled to learn they were uninfected, but Maggiore was unwilling to give
up the spotlight. This HIV pretender twisted her good health and the marginal incidence of false
positives into a lucrative new racket—selling HIV denialism and bragging about her good
life “without pharmaceutical treatments or fear of AIDS.” But of course Maggiore has no “fear of
AIDS”—she doesn’t have HIV. She has since had two children, now three and seven years old,
whom she boasted to Scheff “have never been tested. … They don’t take AIDS drugs. And they’re
not in the least bit sick.” But of course Maggiore didn’t want them to be tested: she knows that they
are not at risk and that their being uninfected would lead people to question her own status. And
of course they don’t take “AIDS drugs”—they don’t have HIV or AIDS.

Christine Maggiore isn’t living proof that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS;
she’s just another lying AIDS profiteer, exploiting the real fears of those who actually are infected
with HIV and the real suffering of those living with AIDS to get public attention, sell books and
pick up well-paid speaking gigs. This might matter less if she wasn’t telling parents and caregivers
of children who really are HIV-infected to take the kids off difficult but life-saving antivirals.
Maggiore has never had to make agonizing treatment decisions for herself or for her children.

This month, the Centers for Disease Control reported that about
1.1 million people in the United States are living with HIV. (Of these, fully half are African-American.)
This is the largest number of infected Americans since the start of the epidemic, reflects the good
news that people with HIV are living longer because of antiretroviral therapy and the sad fact that
HIV prevention messages are not effective enough, so the virus is continuing to spread. Because
HIV denialists actively discourage people with the virus from taking antiretroviral drugs, and
because disinformation about HIV allows people to ignore advice about safer sex and clean needles,
the rates of both deaths and new infections will rise if their campaign is successful. The communities
most at risk—African-Americans, Latinos, and gay men of all ethnicities—will suffer
the greatest losses. Not believing in the virus offers no protection from it.

The small clutches of protesters who gather occasionally outside Incarnation
Children’s Center vow “No More Tuskegee Experiments.” But remember: The essence of the Tuskegee
atrocity was that poor African-Americans who were known by doctors to have a devastating, usually
fatal infection were lied to about their condition and intentionally denied lifesaving medication
that was available to others. That is exactly what the denialists are perpetrating right now. Denialism
is the new Tuskegee. In Washington Heights, the heroes who fought the government to get treatment
to the powerless children of color who were infected, sick and dying were the brave little group
at Incarnation Children’s Center.

The hysteria-laden question of whether anti-HIV drugs are “life-saving,” as the AIDS orthodoxy holds, or “deadly,” as the HIV dissidents claim, is unanswerable in the currently available language, which was blunted and rendered incoherent by political forces as early as 1981. Language is the only interface between phenomena and our comprehension of them, and I have grown weary of being forced to use AIDS language that is itself inaccurate and loaded. First of all, lives can’t really be “saved”—they can only be extended. To prove that a life has indeed been extended one must first know, with absolute certainty, that without intervention, the life would have ended. In order to know that, one must know the natural history of the disease, and then one must examine the fate of the untreated population.

The unified voice of the AIDS establishment has claimed thunderous victory for the post-1996 drug regimens that came to be known as ‘cocktails,’ which came into vogue about three years after death rates began declining, but nonetheless got full-trumpet credit for turning the tide.

Let me say, first, that I have been told and have reported and have imprinted upon my soul that for some people, at some stages of immune collapse, these drugs have helped, and maybe even prevented a slide into death. Roberto Giraldo, a doctor and expert in infectious and tropical diseases who crosses the world treating AIDS, tells me this is probably due to their anti-oxidant, anti-viral and anti-microbial properties. He also tells me that in his experience, severe immune deficiency—which may be a more useful term than “AIDS”—occurs only where severe depletion of vital nutrients has occurred; reversing the illness starts with restoring those nutrients.

“Biochemically speaking, people who are malnourished, whether because they are poor, or because they are drug addicts, suffer from oxidization, and lack vitamins A, B, E, zinc and selenium. This is true of all AIDS patients I have ever seen,” he said via telephone.
“We cannot say that protease inhibitors are useless. In 1996 when they started to use protease inhibitors, there is no doubt that there was a change. Before 1996, all the people who used AZT, they were killed. There was no benefit there. Protease inhibitors—they are also very toxic—but they have benefits—they are antioxidants. No doubt they are poison and in the long run they kill the person, but you need proteases in the process of oxidation. Besides that, these drugs are also antibiotics.”
Giraldo believes that AIDS is a disease “of poverty,” primarily, meaning of extreme depletion of the cells, and that those who have been middle- or upper-class, who have gotten sick, depleted their bodies through drug use and prolonged exposure to toxins. “HIV by itself causes nothing,” he says.

Giraldo has written and published voluminously on how to reverse the condition of severe immune suppression through intensive nutritional supplementation and orthomolecular medicine, combined with modified antibiotic and other targeted drug regimens. I am well aware of how scorned these ideas are among those who feel that they and they alone know what AIDS is, and how to “fight” it, i.e., the orthodoxy and the pro-drug activists.
Since 1986, when I began reporting on AIDS, I have compensated for this scorn, ridicule and censure by quoting the Roberto Giraldos of this world—not because I know these voices are “right,” but because I feel they must be represented against the relentless chorus of the new-and-better-drugs-into-all-bodies-in-all-nations crowd. I am not a doctor and have never treated an AIDS patient. I’ve known dozens if not hundreds of people though, in my 20 years studying this and listening to people, who have been HIV-antibody positive and stayed healthy for up to 20 years and probably more. I wish somebody was counting them, listening to them, logging them in the official history. Nobody is; they are not supposed to exist.

Each of the 26 anti-HIV drugs currently on the market, combined in infinite combinations, or “cocktails,” is, by admission of the manufacturers, potentially lethal. One of the unexpected effects of Protease Inhibitors, or so-called HAART therapy (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy) seen in recent years was a disruption of the body’s fat-distribution mechanisms. This in turn (in addition to the fatty deposits on the upper neck and various parts of the body) has caused strokes and heart attacks in many patients, at the very moment when the drugs were theoretically ‘working,” meaning so-called surrogate markers (cd4 cells and viral load) were going the right way. The other significant danger of HAART proved to be liver and kidney failure, which, according to a study done at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, “surpassed deaths due to advanced HIV,” in 2002. In 2005 the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to a Danish study, AIDS drug cocktails “may double the risk of heart attacks.”
In 2004, the journal AIDS reported, with characteristic lack of alarm, “All 4 classes of antiretrovirals (ARVs) and all 19 FDA approved ARVs have been directly or indirectly associated with life-threatening events and death.” The paper was titled “Grade 4 Events Are as Important as AIDS Events in the Era of HAART,” and “grade 4 events” referred to “serious or life-threatening events.”

The conclusion: More than twice as many people (675) had a drug-related (grade 4) life-threatening event as an “AIDS event” (332). The most common causes of grade 4 events (drug toxicities) were “liver related.” The greatest risk of death was not an AIDS “event” but a drug event—heart attacks (“cardiovascular events”).
The authors wrote: “Our finding is that the rate of grade 4 events is greater than the rate of AIDS events, and that the risk of death associated with these grade 4 events was very high for many events. Thus the incidence of AIDS fails to capture most of the morbidity experienced by patients with HIV infection prescribed HAART.” (Italics mine)
In plain English, AIDS drugs cause AIDS and death far more effectively than “AIDS” itself.

Any triumph or victory claimed by the AIDS lobby for these drugs must be measured against a phenomenon they continue to deny exists, namely the untold number of people who are, to use their language, “living with HIV.” This includes those invisible, uncounted, unloved people who are HIV-antibody positive, taking no drugs, not getting sick, not dying at a faster rate than HIV negatives. This begs the question of whether HIV causes AIDS.
Currently, we have one camp—which I will call the “orthodoxy”—that argues that although current HIV drugs have frightful side effects and are difficult to take, they have nonetheless reversed a tide of death, which was seen throughout the 1980s and into the mid 1990s in people who were diagnosed with severe immune dysfunction. This camp, since it views AIDS as “HIV disease,” meaning caused singularly by HIV, concentrates its efforts to “fight AIDS,” on high tech drugs that in various ways are meant to disable HIV in the blood. They are extremely mechanistic in their view of the human body and the immune system. It’s all numbers.

The much-maligned contraries camp, which I will call the “dissidents,” have argued since the early 1980s that AIDS has multiple causes, and that its resolution should be rooted in a direct address to all these root causes. These include a cessation of recreational drug use, avoidance (when possible) of the most toxic anti-HIV drugs, a strong focus on reversing malnutrition, (particularly in Africa) and a treatment approach that treats the specific opportunistic infection a person manifests, with the state of the art treatment for that infection.

PCP pneumonia, for example, is utterly treatable, yet thousands of people died in the 1980s of it. Why? Because fighting AIDS meant “attacking” HIV, period. Never the specific diseases; never the underlying causes—only the virus. David Ho, Time’s Person of the Year, sported a button at a conference that summed up this ideology. The button said, “It’s the virus, stupid.”

How that came to be the dominant scientific religion is a subject of infinite complexity and tragedy. The virus (which is actually a retrovirus, of a class that was never thought to be pathogenic prior to 1984, and which we all harbor shards of in our germline) provided an absolute measure, a clear delineation, a battleground, and above all, a focus for a gigantic industry, as well as an international corporation called AIDS Inc.
The natural and true history of AIDS is only beginning to be told, or rather, retold.
When AIDS Began: San Francisco and The Making of An Epidemic (Routledge) by Michelle Cochrane traces the earliest intersection between what was being observed, those who were doing the observing, and how the “truth” fared in the process. Cochrane weaves a rigorously detailed semantic, medical, and sociological examination of the first cases as they were charted and described by the San Francisco Department of Public Health in 1981. She explodes the myth of the first cases of AIDS having appeared, as the New York Times famously phrased it, in “previously healthy,” and even upwardly mobile, gay men, and shows that quite the contrary, the first nine cases were in men who had a range of immune assaults. All were recreational drug users, many were IV drug users, and some were even homeless. They suffered from diseases that had been seen in IV drug users since the 1930s, primarily fungal infections and lung diseases. That they were “gay,” was perhaps the least significant detail. Because the federal research effort ($36 billion so far) has been 100 percent HIV-centric, and because AIDS was presumed to be sexually transmitted as opposed to “acquired,” we are essentially 20 years behind in our intelligence gathering on AIDS.
One of the most astonishing things about the politics of AIDS is the way in which the left repudiated any explanations of disease causation that could be predicted by poverty and social marginalization.

One of the hallmarks of the AIDS orthodoxy’s language is that coiled within each word and phrase is the answer, as well as the shaming of the question itself. George Orwell (in 1984) described the orthodox style as, “…at once military and pedantic,” characterized by a trick of “…asking questions and then promptly answering them.”
Anti-HIV drugs, for example, are always called “life-saving drugs.” Why not just call them “drugs” and allow their merits to be debated? Because at the root of the AIDS orthodoxy is a relentless urge to control all thought on AIDS.

All people who question any facet of orthodox AIDS theory are “murderously irresponsible,” and dripping with the psychic blood of millions. In this gladiatorial atmosphere, it is a wonder anybody speaks out at all. If only we could agree that most people are not, by nature, homicidal, and that dissenting views are productive to a search for truth, we might get somewhere. But I know, as surely as I know anything, that my opponent in these pages will have characterized my position as “denialist.” I am not denying anything. People have died of AIDS and the matter at hand is what they died from. A retroviral infection? A host of immuno-compromising factors? An absence of AIDS drugs—or indeed, the AIDS drugs themselves?

In 1984, when the US government announced at a press conference that one of its scientists—Robert Gallo—had found the “probable cause of AIDS,” the official theory held that HIV caused AIDS by eating CD4 cells at a rapid clip. HIV was said to cause AIDS in a year or two, at best. Today, this theory has morphed into a range of possibilities; HIV causes AIDS in 10 to 15 years, in most people, but a small minority, so-called “long-term non-progressors,” might be spared due to a genetic fluke.

To my mind, if we are to stick to the orthodoxy’s own measure, one cannot begin to speak of “saving” life until one has surpassed these ten or fifteen years.
In the 1980s, AZT was claimed, with the same high dudgeon by the same orthodoxy, to “save” lives, yet few survived for more than a year on the earliest AZT regimens.
The word “denial” comes to mind.

When people make dramatic claims for current drug regimens, the death rates they are actually comparing are not drugs vs. no drugs, but rather extremely toxic drugs of the early years compared to less toxic drugs of today. The earliest AIDS cases, marked by Kaposi’s Sarcoma, were treated with chemotherapy (1981 to 1986) followed by AZT monotherapy in doses ranging from 1800 milligrams to 500 milligrams (1986 to 1989) followed by combinations of AZT, ddi, ddc and d4t (1989 to 1996) followed by protease inhibitors in various combinations, from 1996 to the present day. The one era I have no question resulted in deaths from the treatment itself, is the early AZT era, (circa 1986 to 1989) particularly when the common dosage was 1200 to 1800 milligrams.
A German AIDS physician named Klaus Koehnlein told me in 2000, “We killed a whole generation of AIDS patients with AZT.”

My friend Richard Berkowitz, author of Stayin Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex, A Personal History (Westview), said: “Every friend I had that went on AZT in those early years is dead.” He says that they lasted on average nine months on the drug. HIV positive since the early 1980s, Berkowitz credits his survival to two things: 1) having avoided AZT, and 2) safe sex.

What he means by “safe sex,” a concept and term he himself developed and coined, together with the late activist Michael Callen, is far more complex than mere condom use. Drawing on the pioneering observations and warnings of Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, it involves an avoidance of many STDs and parasitic infections, coupled with a belief in life rather than a belief in the death sentence of HIV. Berkowitz has also mitigated my repudiation of cocktail therapy by stressing that a moderate regimen pulled him back from the brink of death a few years ago.

Paul King, a Brit who runs a dissident website called Dissident Action Group in the U.S., counters the establishment’s claim that dissenting views on AIDS, HIV and drug regimens are still “fringe.”

“From the very beginning in the 1980s, the AIDS dissident movement faced a level of censorship unrivaled since the anti birth control information Comstock Law of the early 20th century,” he said in an email. “Every day,” King claims, “almost without exception, we attract another PhD or doctor and now have well over 4,000 doctors and scientists endorsing our views.”

“The public has had enough of exaggerated stories of epidemics that never materialize and [that diminish] personal freedom.”