“The HIV hypothesis ranks with the ‘bad air’ theory for malaria and the ‘bacterial infection’ theory of beriberi and pellagra [caused by nutritional deficiencies]. It is a hoax that became a scam.” (Sunday Times (London) 3 April 1994)

Dr. Bernard Forscher, former editor of the U.S. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences

  The first casualty of the ‘war on AIDS’ was the integrity of science. The exact moment of the crime can be pinpointed: it was the April 1984 press conference where the then Health Secretary Margaret Heckler declared that government scientist Robert C. Gallo had discovered the viral cause of AIDS. [...] Heckler hailed the discovery as ‘yet another miracle for American medicine and science’ and a ‘victory over a dreaded disease’. If smoke and mirror tricks are miracles, then miracle it was. [...] Neither Gallo nor the [Pasteur] Institute proved that the virus was pathogenic. Indeed, they did not even isolate it, as the Pasteur Institute chief later admitted. But the spin-doctors at the National Institutes of Health had organized leading journals to endorse Secretary Heckler’s ‘miracle’ with the seal of Science. From that moment, all AIDS research and policy were based on a speculation converted to dogma by bureaucratic power.

  This initial public execution of scientific integrity unleashed a propaganda machine that expands Heckler’s initial obvious whopper (‘victory over a dreaded disease’) into a never-ending sickness saga that extorts money and grinds millions into the muck of bad medicine.

  Scientific integrity was murdered by a brutal health fascism. The next victim was the gold standard of clinical evaluation, the double blind trial. With a perversity that spin doctors must admire, the methodology was abandoned in the name of ethics! In reality, the double blind trial had to be murdered because it placed the treatment and causality dogmas of AIDS science at grave risk of falsification. The next victim was the integrity of independent clinical judgment. Any doctor who bucked the official line placed himself at risk of retaliation. And [...] the fundamental right of informed consent and right to refuse treatment were also murdered.

  [...] ‘AIDS science’ is 90% mindless repetition and 10% deeply inconsistent findings of no clinical value.

Hiram Caton, Coming to Grips with Health Fascism, VirusMyth.net, April 1999
Hiram Caton, PhD, is a Fellow at the National Institute of Law, Ethics, and Public Affairs at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

With Robert Gallo at her side, Margaret Heckler stood behind a podium in the Hubert H. Humphrey Building in Washington, D.C. Lights flooded her face,    cameras rolled, reporters clutched their notebooks expectantly.

  “Today we add another miracle to the long honor roll of American medicine and science” announce Heckler, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. “Today’s discovery represents the triumph of science over a dreaded disease. Those who have disparaged this scientific search - those who have said we weren’t doing enough - have not understood how sound, solid, significant medical research proceeds.”

  It was April 23, 1984.

Elinor Burkett, The gravest Show on Earth : America in the age of AIDS, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1995, 398 pages.

  “I was very upset,” Lange [Dr Michael Lange, infectious disease specialist at St Luke’s Hospital in New York City]  continues. “The cause of AIDS was discovered by government fiat. I had been working with the Pasteur Institute for six months, but then that announcement was made at the press conference. As far as I’m concerned, from that point on AIDS research turned into seedy, criminal politics, and it remained that way.”

  Dr. Kary Mullis [Nobel laureate], a biochemist and the inventor of PCR, shakes his head. “Why they did it,” he says, “I cannot figure out. Nobody in their right mind would jump into this thing like they did. The secretary of health just announcing to the world like that that this man Robert Gallo, wearing those dark sunglasses, had found the cause of AIDS. It had nothing to do with any well-considered science.”

Celia Farber, Fatal Distraction, Spin, June 1992.

  ” Science Fictions is bursting with allegations leveled at Dr. Gallo, his associates, rivals and enemies, that include deception, misconduct, incompetence, fraud, sabotage, back-stabbing, double-dealing, overstatements, half-truths, outright lies, a clandestine affair with a co-worker, a bribery attempt, denials, evasions, coverups and serial rewritings of history.”
  New York Times

  “Scrupulously researched and sweeping… Science Fictions documents enough treachery, negligence and megalomania to make even the most trusting of readers skeptical of the scientific establishment.”
  Washington Post

John Crewdson, Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, A Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, Little Brown & Company,  2002, 672 pages.

  From the Virusmyth.net review:
  In this book Shenton introduces scientists who maintain that HIV has never been isolated and that the HIV test is simply picking up proteins said to be specific to the virus, but which reside in all of us and happen to become raised when the body’s immune system is compromised for other reasons. She has recorded an extra-ordinary account of the tyranny of orthodoxy imposed by some scientists and the pharmaceutical industry which, according to Shenton, has distorted and derailed the process of scientific inquiry, cost billions of misspent dollars for ‘treatment’ and mis-directed research funding, and condemned tens of thousands of individuals with the stigma and anxiety of an HlV-positive label.

  In the Third World, according to Shenton, millions of unfortunates are being falsely classified as HIV and AIDS victims who, because they ‘are going to die anyway’, are being denied treatment for their true ills brought on by poverty, deprivation and malnutrition.

  Joan Shenton’s medical journalism has included the production of 49 documentaries on health issues for network television, 7 on the HIV / AIDS issue. Two of her films on AIDS have received the Royal Television Society Journalism Award and a British Medical Association award. Shenton’s programmes have been made for the BBC, Channel 4, Thames TV and Central TV.

Joan Shenton, Positively False; Exposing the myths around HIV and AIDS, I.B. Tauris, London 1998, 310 pages.

  As a scientist who has studied AIDS for 16 years, I have determined that AIDS has little to do with science and is not even primarily a medical issue. AIDS is a sociological phenomenon held together by fear, creating a kind of medical McCarthyism that has transgressed and collapsed all the rules of science, and imposed a brew of belief and pseudoscience on a vulnerable public.

David W Rasnick, Blinded by Science, Spin, June 1997