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DOES HIV REALLY CAUSE AIDS? It may come as a surprise for some to learn that there is little, if any, evidence that HIV causes AIDS! he HIV Connection?, a group of individuals including scientists and lay-peo- ple, announced on 12th October 1992 that it will make its position paper, The AIDS Crisis: The Other Side, available to the public. The position paper presents an objective, documented and referenced history and overview of the dom- inant, publicly accepted theory that HIV is the sole and direct cause of AIDS. The group was formed by Ed Vargas in 1992, for the purpose of providing factu- al and documented information on HIV and AIDS that is not distributed by the AIDS establishment. Today the group consists of people from all AIDS-affected communities and is focusing on educating the media, policy makers, people with AIDS and people with HIV. By distributing The ALDS Crisis: The Other Side, the group hopes to initiate a reassessment of the current HIV-AIDS hypothesis. The group hopes that this reassessment will lead to a more productive AIDS hypothesis in terms of public health benefits including AIDS prevention, treatment and prediction of the course of the epidemic. In April 1984, US Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler announced to the world at a press conference that an American scientist, Dr Robert Gallo, had discovered the “probable cause" of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)—the retrovirus subsequently named Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Since this announcement, the AIDS epidemic and our understanding of it has been fought on a politicised landscape. Margaret Heckler, a politician, made this announcement before one single American study on HIV had been published. In addition, no discussion, review or debate of its merits occurred in any medical or scientific journals. This process of science by press release violated conventional scientific procedures and customs. The political decision to credit Gallo with the discovery of HIV failed since sub- sequent investigations have established that HIV was discovered in 1983 by Dr Luc Montagnier of France, who sent a sample of his discovery to Gallo.* The retro- virus Gallo claimed to have discovered was the same retrovirus he had received from Montagnier.' Immediately following Heckler's announcement, Gallo published four articles in Science (May 1984) that showed correlations between HIV and AIDS. These arti- cles, which are the basis for the current hypothesis that H1V is the sole and direct cause of AIDS, were proved fraudulent on many counts critical to their scientific validity by recent investigations conducted by the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Sciences? Since the April 1984 news conference, there has not been a single scientific research publication that purports to prove that HIV causes AIDS. In addition, there’s been a lack of discussion and debate both outside and within the scientific community specifically addressing the contradictions and inconsistencies with the current HIV-AIDS hypothesis and the epidemiological research on which it is based. To compound this, the current HIV-AIDS hypothesis has been entirely unproductive in terms of public health benefits, including AIDS prevention, treat- ment, and even in predicting the course of the disease within each individual or the course of the epidemic within the gencral population. Written by The HIV Connection? 1072 Folsom Street, Suite 321 San Francisco, CA 94102, USA NEXUS «39 APRIL - MAY 1994 THE AIDS CRISIS: THE OTHER SIDE