Bug on stoop of Walt Whitman's home

One byline that has popped up regularly over the years is renowned American activist and journalist Celia Farber who sympathetically covered AIDS denialism in her column Words From the Front in Spin magazine from 1987 to 1995. She has also long written about UC Berkeley virologist Dr. Peter Duesberg who believes the majority of AIDS cases in the West can be attributed to drug toxicity.

When Farber drudged up the same old same old in a 2006 feature story for Harper's magazine, headlined "Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science," author and ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer wrote to the editor, "Putting aside the question of how Celia Farber's lengthy article got into an estimable magazine like Harper's, the fact that it did requires a convincing response... Even I can recognize holes in Farber's arguments, and I can see how nimbly she skates over certain issues."

And so last week I picked up the current summer issue of the Montreal-based Maisonneuve magazine, whose cover story by journalist Bruce Livesy is headlined inside, "The X Factor: AIDS researchers have struggled to find a cure for the disease for thirty years. But what if they have it all wrong?"

The feature focuses on a Toronto bookstore owner (!) and AIDS "expert" John Scythes who contends people with AIDS are really dying of latent syphilis. The story makes HIV-denialist Dr. Peter Duesberg out to be some kind of tragic hero and blames big pharma for insisting HIV is the cause of AIDS.

I was so incensed I fired off an email to, among others, folks like Larry Kramer, Dr. Mark Wainberg (past-president of the International AIDS Society whose McGill lab discovered the antiviral capabilities of the anti-AIDS drug 3TC), Ken Monteith of Montreal's COCQSIDA, Dr. Julio Montaner of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (and current president of the International AIDS Society), as well as veteran activist Michael Hendricks, who has done more for gay civil rights in this country than any judge or politician.

Hendricks was pretty pissed too. In his letter to Maisonneuve, which Hendricks also sent me, he wrote, "As a gay senior, a gay rights activist and a veteran of the sexual revolution and the ensuing HIV/AIDS epidemic in Montreal, I was flabbergasted as I read your cover story, The X Factor. Somehow I had thought that our community had gotten over the dogmas of HIV-denial and moved on. But it seems I was wrong...

"While I understand where Mr. Scythes is coming from (I've known a number of people like him over the years), I was unable to grasp what the journalist, Bruce Livesey, was doing when he wrote this article," Hendricks continues. "A feature on some old guy who has invested years in the search for the Holy Grail - that I can understand. But did Mr. Livesey do any fact checking? If he had read up a bit, how could he explain to himself the remarkable effectiveness of the class of HIV treatment drugs called entry or receptor inhibitors which target specific sites in the HIV reproductive cycle and, in combination with other medication, actually arrest the advance of the infection and the progress towards developing AIDS? If syphilis were the unknown cause of AIDS, this would not happen.

"By publishing these fantasies, you are doing harm to our community. Seeing this stuff in a reputable magazine plays into a kind of denial in some segments of the homosexual community that wish to believe in magical thinking. By giving space to the Mr. Scythes of the world, you are encouraging people who are already in denial about HIV and AIDS to keep on dreaming."

Then Hendricks goes in for the kill: "Now, would you please be ethical enough as a journalist to ask someone who really knows the stuff and is not an 'armchair HIV theorist', someone like Dr. Julio Montaner, director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence, to respond to Mr. Scythes' opinions? One would hope that your code of ethics would oblige you to try to restore some balance to your magazine's coverage."

As for myself, I shall never buy Maisonneuve magazine ever again.

Find out the truth in Walt Whitman, Aug. 16 at 4 p.m. on Vermont Public Television.

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AIDS Denialists have a history of homophobia     This a great post. In the US, AIDS Denialists have long spewed homophobic remarks. Peter Duesberg has used homophobic language more times that I can count. referring to 'Homos' in leather jackets using drugs that cause AIDS. Pseudoscientist Henry Bauer at Virginia Tech University has written about homosexuality as a mental illness and now says HIV cannot cause AIDS. Extreme right wing 'libertarians' have financed AIDS denialism. AIDS Deniers claim that AIDS is caused by a Gay lifestyle, not a virus. And you are right, 'journalists' like Farber and Canadian journalist Connie Howard give AIDS Deniers a forum and make them look like legitimate scientists when they are not. Check out a new book Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy. All royalties are donated to buy HIV meds in Africa. Seth C. Kalichman denyingaids.blogspot.com
Seth Kalichman		August 13th, 2009