No Debate About It
HIV Causes What?
By Nicholas Regush, ABCNEWS.com
(1999)
WHEN DR. Rodrigo Munoz, president
of the American Psychiatric Association, strongly defended antidepressant
drugs in the aftermath of the Littleton, Colo. high school shootings,
I challenged him to a public debate on the subject. His commentary's
lack of convincing, long-term data made it seem like a poorly timed
ad for the drug industry. Munoz and I exchanged e-mails. After he
approved of my credentials, he agreed to a public debate.
And then nothing. He simply stopped communicating
with me. It has caused me to think a lot about the way the medical
establishment ducks public debates.
For example, back in 1987, Peter Duesberg, a microbiologist
at UCalifornia-Berkeley who has an international reputation for
being well ahead of the research pack, wrote an article in the journal
Cancer Research questioning the relatively new idea
that a virus -- namely HIV -- was the cause of AIDS. He slammed
the HIV hypothesis as poorly researched and implausible, essentially
challenging the emerging AIDS establishment to put up real data
-- not wild speculation -- or go back to square one.
This got the attention of Jim Warner, a senior policy
analyst to then-President Ronald Reagan, who proposed a full-scale
White House debate on HIV. He aimed to deal with the doubts in the
minds of policy-makers over competing ideas of how AIDS develops.
The debate, which was to include Duesberg, was set for Jan. 19,
1988. Well, guess what? The establishment chickened out. Warner
was stunned at how the big HIV guns, particularly those with the
National Institutes of Health, made a run for the hills. To protect
their cowardly flanks, they did what scientists often do: they dismissed
Duesberg and their other critics as cranks.
On the vaccine front, I have numerous files crammed
with examples of how scientists at the forefront of research, particularly
those armed to the teeth with drug company money, respond to serious
challenges. Rather than debate publicly -- and risk opening a Pandora's
box -- they lash out at critics, even writing nasty letters to damage
reputations.
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