Read this Inventing the AIDS Virus by Peter Duesberg for free here if you like.
One of the goals of this project is to wade through the morass of controlled opposition figures to find that diamond - the genuine hero. So often, we learn sadly that that hero has “coincidently” died at an unnaturally young age. The cases of journalists Christopher Hitchens and Udo Ulfkotte and the musician Prince come to mind.
If this is the case, I at least try to share what they were saying before their untimely demise. The author of this book Peter H. Duesberg suffered immense losses to his career and “perceived stature” but he is still with us physically.
I hope we can really appreciate what this man, who has suffered consequences for his honesty, is trying to tell us about the false religion of scientistism. A religion where the media demands that we all practice blind belief in whatever they decide we’re supposed to believe and then they brand us as deniers and threaten us if we don’t play along with whatever story they all choose to tell at that moment.
The “denier” is the new heretic of a religion aggressively enforced by publicists who are well paid - more than likely - by a number of corporate, banking and organized crime magnates with origins in Europe, mostly England, Germany and Russia.
It’s worth noting that Napoleon’s official enemies were the oligarchs of England, Prussia, Austria and Russia.
The following excerpt of the book pictured above is continued from here.
THE SMON FIASCO
Indeed, blaming noninfectious diseases on infectious microbes has occurred many times before. Hidden in foreign-language materials and the footnotes of obscure sources lies the story of SMON, a frightening disease epidemic that struck Japan while the war on polio was accelerating in the 1950s.
In many ways, SMON anticipated the later AIDS epidemic. For fifteen years the syndrome was mismanaged by the Japanese science establishment, where virtually all research efforts were controlled by virus hunters. Ignoring strong evidence to the contrary, researchers continued to assume the syndrome was contagious and searched for one virus after another.
Year after year the epidemic grew, despite public health measures to prevent the spread of an infectious agent. And in the end, medical doctors were forced to admit that their treatment had actually caused SMON in the first place.
Once the truth about SMON could no longer be ignored, the episode dissolved into lawsuits for the thousands of remaining victims.
This story has remained untold outside of Japan, ignored as being too embarrassing for the virus hunters. It deserves to be told in full here.
The patient was middle aged, suffering from a mysterious nerve disorder that had already paralyzed both her legs. Reisaku Kono was there to observe the victim because of his work studying poliovirus, which in a few infected individuals would break into the central nervous system, causing progressive paralysis and sometimes a slow, miserable, death.
While the condition he examined that day in 1959 was not polio, it bore a certain resemblance to it. And the suspicion was growing that this, too, could be the result of some undiscovered virus, perhaps one similar to poliovirus.
Kono was visiting the patient at the hospital affiliated with Mie University's medical school. Hiroshi Takasaki, a professor of medicine at the university, told Kono about a number of these cases he had recently seen at the hospital. They now realized they were facing an outbreak of something new, not just a minor mystery that doctors would catalog and forget.
Just the previous year, medical Professor Kenzo Kusui had published a report of another such case in central Japan: The patient had suffered a similarly strange combination of intestinal problems, manifesting as internal bleeding and diarrhea, with symptoms of nerve degeneration.
This illness, stomach pains or diarrhea followed by nerve damage, had been noticed in a few isolated cases as early as 1955, but was now turning into a local epidemic.
More published reports began accumulating after Kono's visit to the hospital. The next five years saw seven major regional epidemics of the new polio-like syndrome, with the annual number of new cases increasing from several dozen in 1959 to 161 victims by 1964-an alarming rate for those small areas.
Scientists jumped to conclusions, believing they had every reason to assume the disease was infectious. Just its sudden appearance was enough evidence to convince them. The disease also broke out in clusters around specific towns or cities, and clusters were seen within families.
The first person to develop the condition in each of these families was followed by a relative within several weeks. Many outbreaks were centered around hospitals, places notorious for spreading disease.
The annual peak of new patients occurred in late summer, hinting at possible spread of the disease through insects. Those scientists who first thought the disease might be related to some noncontagious occupational hazard were quickly dissuaded once the data showed that the disease lacked the expected preferences.
Farmers, for example, who would be more easily exposed to pesticides, had a lower-than-average incidence. Medical workers, on the other hand, had a rather high rate of this condition-further suggesting it was contagious. However, the scientists investigating the epidemic did notice some important contradictions.
For instance, the disease had an odd, amazingly consistent bias for striking middle-aged women, but was less common among men and could hardly be found among children, who normally transmit virtually any infectious disease.
Careful medical inspection showed that the symptoms did not coincide with those typically expected for an infection. Blood and other bodily fluids, which usually circulate a virus throughout the body, showed no abnormalities, nor did the patients manifest any fevers, rashes, or other signs of fighting off some invading germ.
These important pieces of evidence should have raised doubts about the viral hypothesis. The virus hunt pressed onward. Scientists were expecting to find a virus that primarily induced diarrhea, as was the case in polio.
Infectious diseases can be more lucrative than non infectious diseases.
Looking back on this period, Kono has since become admirably frank about his early biases, shared at the time by his fellow virologists: "I was at that time engaged in poliovirus research, so I suspected such a virus to be the cause."
Despite years spent searching for the elusive virus, he never could isolate a single one from any patient. Kono patiently reported his null results as he plodded forward.
Meanwhile the epidemic was growing and the 1964 Olympic Games were approaching. Ninety-six new cases had been diagnosed the previous year, and the increased number of cases was being accompanied by new symptoms.
Some victims, for example, were now suffering debilitating blindness. Preparing to host tourists from around the world for the 1964 Olympics, Japan could ill afford to have an uncontrolled plague. To make matters worse, forty-six new patients suddenly appeared around the city of Toda, one of the locations for Olympic events.
Embarrassingly dubbed the "Toda disease," this outbreak directly threatened Japan's reputation and tourist industry while focusing public fear on the epidemic.
Etsuro Totsuka, later to become a lawyer for victims of the disease, summarized the public mood at the time: "Even I was quite worried at the time, as a university student studying physics. The general public, including me, was extremely worried; we didn't know how to prevent it, and there was no cure."
In May of 1964, at the 61st General Meeting of the Japanese Society of Internal Medicine, the disease was raised as a formal topic. Kenzo Kusui, one of the first doctors to report patients stricken with this condition, chaired that session. The participating researchers gave the disease a formal name, Subacute Myelo-Optico-Neuropathy (SMON), and they agreed on a standardized clinical diagnosis.
The Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare quickly provided a research grant and launched a formal commission to investigate the epidemic under the leadership of Magojiro Maekawa, a medical professor at Kyoto University.
Kono was one of several virologists named to the commission, thereby establishing its mandate as a formal search for a virus. The same year brought the first sign of a possible breakthrough. Masahisa Shingu, a virologist at Kurume University and a fellow member of the commission, announced his discovery of a virus in excretions from SMON patients.
The virus was classified as an echovirus-an acronym for enteric cytopathogenic human orphan virus. The viruses were called orphans because they had been discovered accidentally during polio research but caused no disease.
Echoviruses were known for infecting the stomach or intestines, and Shingu found evidence of infection in various SMON sufferers. He excitedly drew the conclusion that this orphan virus had finally been matched with a disease. Perhaps, he speculated, this virus could also occasionally break into the nervous system, much like poliovirus.
He published the finding in 1965, unabashedly boasting he had isolated the syndrome's cause. But Kono, knowing the potentially disastrous results of blaming the wrong microbe for the disease, took a more cautious attitude.
In 1967, after three years of research trying to confirm Shingu's claims, Kono could only report to a SMON symposium that he had not isolated the virus from patients, nor could he find even indirect evidence that the patients had previously been infected.
Kono's better judgment saved Japanese science from stampeding in the wrong direction. He was fully vindicated four years later when other researchers announced the same lack of evidence to suggest any danger from Shingu's virus.
In the midst of this fruitless investigation, the Mackawa team made a surprising observation that was tragically brushed aside.
According to surveys of hospitals, about half the SMON patients had previously been prescribed a diarrhea-fighting drug known by the brand name Entero-vioform, and the other half had received a compound marketed under the name Emaform.
Both drugs were prescribed for problems of the digestive tract-the early symptom of SMON. The suspicion naturally arose that these drugs might play some role in the syndrome, but the commission, intent on the viral hypothesis, bowed to the consensus view of SMON as contagious and quickly dismissed this, noting that two different drugs should not cause the same new disease. Had the commission researchers checked further, however, they would have discovered that the two drugs were merely different brand names applied to the same drug, a fact that did not surface for several years.