How the Chronicle Invented AIDS
by George Trinkaus


Playboy: Do you think there is a sexual revolution going on in this country?

Mel Brooks: Yes, I do think there is a sexual revolution going on, and I think that with our current foreign policy, we'll probably be sending troops in there any minute to break it up.

-- Playboy interview, 1966

The San Francisco Chronicle has run more AIDS stories than any other U.S. newspaper, up to 460 in a single year. That's why the Chronicle makes a perfect case study for mass-media AIDS. Is AIDS a disease or a media campaign? What is its true agenda? The Chronicle continues to grind out the old propaganda while ignoring the global scientific revolt against orthodox AIDS that's been boiling for a decade. Written by a media skeptic with 25 years in publishing, this is a review of the forgotten early years of mass-media AIDS as seen through the headlines of a typical big-city U.S. daily. How so-called AIDS has put the fear back in sex. How the early campaign climaxed in the shameless exploitation by the Chronicle and the rest of the death of actor Rock Hudson.

How the Chronicle Invented AIDS

Copyright © 1998, 2000, 2001
by George B.Trinkaus
All rights reserved for any commercial use.
third edition
BN 0-9709618-7-1

Orders, inquiries, comments: toll-free 877-263-1215

This is a review of AIDS headlines in the San Francisco Chronicle from 1981 to 1986. Effective public criticism of AIDS, now a decade old if you date it from Dr. Peter Duesberg's speaking out in 1987, has focused almost entirely on the dubious science. My focus here is on the dubious media.

The scientific critique that has been developed demonstrates beyond any doubt, as far as this writer is concerned, that AIDS has no substance in science, no empirical foundation that can be established in a laboratory. You won't read about it in the Chronicle, but there is a worldwide movement whose purpose is to tear to shreds a tenacious, oppressive, and scientifically in-supportable myth called AIDS. The Chronicle won't tell you. Dan Rather won't tell you. To the contrary, their devotion is to the promotion of the myth. Congress has not aired the resistance. To the contrary, it funds those that promote the myth, including any plausible scientific research that does not question the myth and educational programs at all levels of the public school system. But the official silence notwithstanding, a movement there is. Its manifestations include: organized resistance among scientists; a proliferating network of regularly convening dissident organizations; an anti-red-ribbon campaign; internet activity that includes one site spanning over 500 pages; and a veritable library of dissident AIDS literature that has built up over the last decade. (See "for more information" at end of article).

Among the dissidents there is an emerging consensus that (1) the definition of AIDS is worthless, (2) HIV is a phony, and (3) the deaths result not from any virus but from the "cure."

You've never heard of any of this? Not surprising, considering the relentless intensity of AIDS' triumphant propaganda.

Though many had their doubts from day one, it was the questioning of the theory of HIV that put the anti-AIDS resistance movement into gear. A front-page news story that never made it into the likes of the Chronicle is that the HIV theory has flunked its peer review. Actually, HIV has become an embarrassment in certain sectors of medicine. For example, innocent researchers studying some aspect of AIDS have wanted, as a matter of scientific discipline, to give their papers foundation by citing in footnotes some routine documentation supporting the HIV theory. But, however they persisted, they were unable to find any such documentation.

Nobody has reported isolating the virus. Nobody has reported cultivating the organism out of the tissue of any of AIDS' presumed victims. And nobody has reported that the virus has been planted into healthy tissue with the result of producing the symptoms. Thus HIV flunks that time-honored etiological test called Koch's Postulate.

In fact, there is not even scientific agreement that the elusive retrovirus called HIV even exists, for when it is "identified," it is only by an inference made from the presence of proteins presumed to be "markers" presumed to be associated with the presumed virus.

The web of AIDS is flimsy. Touch it at any spot, and it falls apart.

the test: bizarre rules

The HIV Test, it turns out, is not a test for the virus at all but for antibodies to HIV (or, rather, for markers presumed to be associated with the presumed antibodies). You thought that if your immune system made antibodies to a disease this was a healthy sign? Not under the bizarre rules of AIDS where antibody detection means you flunk. And whether you pass or flunk depends on what lab runs your test and on what day. Among the swelling ranks of AIDS dissidents are many whose experience with conflicting HIV test results has led to their asking questions that embarrassed AIDS doctors were at a loss to answer.

When Dr. Duesberg, an award-winning biochemist, who had specialized in retroviruses (and who had even been a co-worker with HIV inventor Robert Gallo at the National Cancer Institute), called HIV a phony and managed to publish this heresy in a reputable medical journal, it threw the government into a panic. (See federal memo.)

The biggest scandal of AIDS is the "therapy," which is poison. The drug traditionally mandated for the unfortunate AIDS diagnosee, even in the absence of symptoms, even for pregnant women and even for infants, is AZT. This chemical is technically a DNA chain terminator; it does its killing of healthy immune cells such as in bone marrow deep down at the structural DNA level. Rejected long ago by the cancer industry as too toxic even for them (there is a skull and crossbones on the bottle), AZT was resurrected especially for the AIDS emergency. Says Duesberg, "AZT is AIDS by prescription."

It has been argued by some AIDS doubters like Robert Strecker, Alan Cantwell, and Leonard Horowitz that HIV is real and that it has been deliberately bio-engineered as a depopulation agent. In fact, proponents of this idea have uncovered government documents suggesting just such a project. But the big technical problem with biological warfare agents is how to deliver them to their target populations. Isn't it far more elegant to media-brainwash the targets so they voluntarily come to the doctors of death, take their AZT and die? Iatrogenic AIDS is a chemical warfare abetted by a psychological warfare conducted through media like the Chron.

iatrogenics

"Iatrogenic" is a term of long standing in the medical lexicon. It means doctor-caused. AIDS is the Iatrogenic Epidemic.

Geographically AIDS is always where the doctors are. That accounts for its predominantly urban demographic.

But what about the new protease-inhibitor cocktails promoted by the Chronicle and the rest as a breakthrough? "There will be a massive protease-inhibitor die-off," predicts prominent AIDS dissident David Rasnick who holds patents in the very biochemistry on which the protease inhibitors are based. Says Duesberg: "It's like adding cyanide to arsenic."

As the die-off begins to happen, it is blamed on a smart, mutating HIV. More research is needed, more funding. Round and round goes the deadly bureaucratic game of AIDS' fraudulent science.

But if AIDS has no substance in science, no empirical foundation, then what is it?

From the point of view of the scientific critique, AIDS might be viewed as a disease, but, from the perspective of a media critique, one is tempted to perceive it as a campaign. Whatever the origins of this campaign (corporate, governmental, medical), it could not have been successfully conducted without the central participation of the propaganda machinery we politely refer to as the mass media. Am I daring to say that without mass media like the San Francisco Chronicle AIDS would not exist? Yes.

Given the sweep of mass-media participation in the promotion of the AIDS hysteria, why do I pick on the poor old Chronicle? Most of the media, print or electronic, is editorially dominated by a handful of major city daily newspapers, the most powerful of which, of course, are the New York Times and the Washington Post. But, if you go into the newspaper indexes and count the entries, the winner among daily newspapers in articles run on AIDS, fraudulent AIDS, is the San Francisco Chronicle. For example, in one pivotal year in the campaign, 1984, the New York Times ran 67 articles on AIDS and the Chronicle ran 191.

In 1985 the Times is seen creeping up on the Chronicle, publishing 380 articles to the Chronicle's 404. However, throughout the period, the Times' frequency never quite catches up with that of the Chronicle. Appreciate that the Chronicle, at the peak of our study period, was publishing to the city of the gay Mecca, to Northern California, and to the world, stories promoting the existence of a new homosexual disease at a rate of better than one a day.

Concurrent with HIV-AIDS is an epidemic of germ-scare imagery in the media: mad-cow, e-bola, hepatitis C, encephalitis in the news enriched by all the mass-disease movie scenarios and CB-warfare terrorism scares. The receptive media victims become nervous and intimacy-avoiding, exactly the psychological effects the divide-and-conquer propagandists desire.

statistical deception

In the final year of our study period, 1986, the year by which the myth of AIDS had been firmly planted in the consciousness of its readers, the Chron's annual AIDS-story total soared to 460. But even by 1986, all the scare propaganda notwithstanding, there were still only 20,000 recorded cases of so-called AIDS. This was a cumulative count of total cases since 1981, the year AIDS was invented. Among the anomalies of AIDS is that it is the only disease statistically reported in terms of a cumulative total. For all other diseases the case count is annual. The cancer cases reported that year totaled 480,000, just for that year, but this was not considered newsworthy. When diseases in this period are ranked statistically, AIDS is insignificant. The Statistical Abstract of the United States, published annually by the feds, gives a listing by frequency of all diseases reported for the year. Up through 1986 AIDS did not even rate an entry.

definition worthless

The 20,000 cases themselves, in as much as this statistic can be believed, were rounded up under a nebulous definition that cast a wide net. The definition, as constructed by the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC), is revised periodically to meet the exigencies of maintaining the delusion called AIDS.

CDC Proposes Changes In Definition of AIDS

--Chronicle 12/12/86

An early definition of AIDS went like this: "Any condition at least moderately predictive of a defect in cell-mediated immunity among high-risk groups." That's an awfully loose definition given the grim impact of an AIDS diagnosis. Suppose you were convicted of a crime simply because you were a member of a high-risk group and it was only moderately predictive that you did it?

Back in 1981 when a CDC research group went "into the streets," as they liked to call it, looking for some cases, they found some gays with perianal ulcer, herpes, candida growths, thrush, and a toxic condition of the nervous system. All of these they unabashedly identified as the gay disease that later came to be called AIDS. The official definition of AIDS has developed into a bureaucratic construct so expansive and convoluted that today the CDC must publish it in a book-size volume. AIDS, as now defined, embraces no fewer than 30 diseases, most of which have been described in the medical literature for decades. For example, cervical cancer can enable an AIDS diagnosis. (Essays have been written on the alliance of cancer and AIDS. They are industries that interlink. With AIDS, like cancer, the cure is always just around the corner but somehow never comes.)

Linguistically, one would think that, in order to introduce a brand new term into the medical lexicon, certain criteria of specificity and exclusivity would have to be met, even in the case of the new and fashionable "syndromes." For example, if a researcher were to suggest a term so broad and general that it embraced a number of other terms on the same level of specificity, then that term would likely be criticized by his peers and deemed less than useful. The peers might appreciate, as a matter of scientific housekeeping, that to employ such a term in discourse could only pollute the inquiry, and so principle would argue that the term, and the concept that went with it, be banned from the lexicon. This might have happened to a 15th-rate idea called AIDS had it not been snapped up by the media and made famous and lucrative.

Later, HIV would be introduced in a manner contrary to all the rules of scientific housekeeping. The HIV theory never had an opportunity for peer review in the journals, etc. Its inventor (Gallo), who occupied a lofty post in the federal health bureaucracy, simply had his assistant (Gelman) announce at a conference of virologists that his pet retrovirus was, conclusively, the cause of so-called AIDS. The conferees, recognizing that the jackboot of governmental scientific authority was slamming down on all inquiry, responded with boos. But thereafter the cause of AIDS was a closed matter, and the federal-grant largesse would flow in only one direction.

Although a responsible scientific inquiry into today's extensive immune-system erosion may be appropriate, especially if conducted with an eye to environmental and pharmaceutical impacts, AIDS as an analytical category has been rendered worthless.

So lexically irresponsible is "AIDS" that we best avoid using the term with a straight face, lest we continue to pollute the inquiry. Responsible discourse requires that we resort to constructions like "so-called AIDS."

In 1996, the Chronicle ran 150 stories on so-called AIDS. This, apparently, is the frequency thought necessary to maintain the brainwash.

.

religiously correct

Most organized religions have embraced AIDS, have echoed its propaganda from their pulpits, and have pushed forward its campaign. In secular society, AIDS replaces the church as a moral force. In church society, AIDS is used to reinforce moral traditions, But would moral faith more soundly based need such synthetic scares? The AIDS scare has overshadowed moral perspective and dialog on matters of intimacy and sex. The more vacuous a religion, the more it must invoke the specter of AIDS.

AIDS itself has become a sort of religion. It can become a religious exercise in tenacious belief, where knowing is sacrificed to believing and raising questions is taboo.

inquisition

AIDS takes place in an inquisitional context. The TV news dependably serves up the Sex Criminal of the Week. Any celebrity is at risk for being used as grist for the insatiable mill of the new sex inquisition. Any public official is fair game. Sexual nonconformity will be sought out, accusers brought forward. The suspect, privacy rights suspended, is exposed to the cruel light of publicity. Of all the presidential crimes Clinton might have been exposed for, the new inquisitors elected to scandalize his comparatively petty sexual deviations. (Interesting synchronicity that, in the inquisition of the Middle Ages, the most notorious judicial body was called the Star Chamber.) Presidential incumbents of the past were discreetly permitted privacy in matters of sex, but Clinton was used by the inquisitional media to put the citizenry on notice that no one's privacy will be respected. For the common citizen there is the Oprah-style format on the TV with its accusers, the confessors, and the selected studio-audience participants whose role is to stone verbally the deviate, and always the judicial presence of the psycho-babbling almighty counselor to enunciate the norms.

politically correct

Our headline-study period embraces the years in which an official truth was established. It took, at the outside, only five years to spin, as we shall see, out of thin air, a mythological viral sex plague in which an entire nation and much of the entire planet place their belief as if it were an em- pirically supportable reality.

Orthodox, inquisitional AIDS is sacred, and to question its authority is an heretical act. Before the specter of AIDS, the usual voices of dissent have fallen silent. Along with the forces of mass media and organized medicine, the AIDS campaign is driven by the force of massive governmental and corporate funding that has spawned 92,000 AIDS organizations to beat on the drum so that even the usually dissident constituencies that one would expect to rebel have been seduced into a consensus that AIDS is politically correct. In some circles, AIDS is downright chic. (That 92,000 figure in not an hyperbole but an actual count, so profusely flows the governmental and corporate largesse.)

It is acceptable, even on the radical left, to take orthodox AIDS right off the newswires at face value. The same leftist publications and Pacifica radio stations which are in open disdain of the World Bank, IMF, and WTO will intone with respect in their news columns and broadcasts trumped-up scare statistics (African, Indian, Thai, etc.) from press releases straight from the flackmen at UNAIDS and WHO.

The outspoken heretic can encounter a violent refusal. (Question AIDS: make new enemies; lose old friends.) This may be because people just don't want to accept that the citizenry can be duped on such a scale. It's too pathetic a truth to swallow, this Orwellian political catastrophe in which we live.

By what ingenuities can one conduct a counter-propaganda against such a force? What a challenge!

censorship

"Without censorship propaganda is impossible," wrote journalist Walter Lippman. This was back in 1922 when a few insiders published on their craft with surprising candor. "In order to conduct a propaganda, there must be some barrier between the public and the event," continues Lippman. "Access to the real environment must be limited before anybody can create a pseudoenvironment."

Never mind the manifest censorship of the Chron and the rest. Some unlikely media are protecting the "pseudoenvironment" of AIDS, alternative media whose vigilance we depend upon.

KPFK, the Pacifica FM in L.A., is one peculiar entity. Roy Tuchman, host of "After Midnight" on that station has run for many years a regular series called "AIDSgate," hundreds of hours of lively interviews with all the dissidents. But elsewhere on KPFK there has been no deviation from the official line. The same with Pacifica news and even the alternative-alternative news on stations in the network lately boycotting Pacifica. KBOO in Portland, Oregon provides no relief at all. What about your Pacifica station?

Most of the so-called alternative news- weeklies, conform, and the Sacramento News & Review and San Francisco Weekly have published attacks on AIDS dissidents. Back in 1989, L.A. Weekly did run John Rappaport on Duesberg, but the local gay-AIDS establishment must have jumped on that paper with both feet, for, in a quick about-face, it hired onto their staff as their new editor of AIDS their own version of the Chron's Randy Shilts.

Back in '89, this writer ventured to arrange with the Clairmont, California Quakers, some of whose meetings he had been attending, for John Rappaport to speak. "Fine," said the elder to whom the proposal was made, and this writer sent a letter of invitation to the author of AIDS Inc, Scandal of the Century. But later this writer was taken aside privately, not by any elder, but (deniably, deviously) by an agent with no particular status in the meeting, and was shown a copy of a letter already sent to the author denying him the opportunity to speak.

Various drafts of this little self-published work you are reading (first penned in 1986), have bounced off of some other barriers in the alternative press: The East Bay Express, The Anderson Valley Advertiser, The Bay Area Reporter, The Advocate, and even Mother Jones.

Interestingly, all these publications wrote back. "This is inconsistent with our editorial policy," was the terse reply from The Advocate's editor, Goodstein himself. An editorial intern at Mother Jones wrote a long anguished letter insisting that such a phenomenon as a bogus AIDS could not happen here.

history of a propaganda

How, in the first place, does such a propaganda get "planted," as they say in the industry, take root and grow? Let's quote the Chron's own headlines and build a little history of the first five years of so-called AIDS:

US CDC Studies Pneumonia That Strikes Gay Males

-- Chron 6/4/81

This is the first AIDS headline, the story that launched the Chron's campaign. What is behind this story? What is the medical science behind this remarkable new disease that selects its victims not only by gender but by sexual orientation?

In June of 1981, Michael Gottlieb, a doctor at UCLA medical who had a specialty in the immature science of immunology (and who had some Hollywood connections), reported his discovery of cases of pneumocystis pneumonia in some men he identified as gay. PCP, though announced as new and rare at the time, had actually been described for 30 years and had even been epidemic at times. (The same goes for Kaposi's Sarcoma, KS, which became a bit later another infamous gay-AIDS indicator disease.) Though well studied in the past, PCP had never been remotely associated with gender or with sexual transmission, much less with sexual orientation, and, as a matter of fact, no disease in the history of medicine had been known to display these amazing peculiarities. But Gottlieb's conjectures on a presumed gay disease were blandly published in the New England Journal of Medicine, echoed solemnly by the CDC in its Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, and pounced upon by the media as if a gay disease were exactly what its inquisitional little souls had been hungering for.

The number of sick gay men in Dr. Gottlieb's milestone study numbered five (5). One of Gottlieb's five sick men had been dead a month before Gottlieb even heard of him; he existed only in hospital files. Another was diagnosed for the PCP on the telephone: "That was the first time I diagnosed PCP by telephone," boasted Gottlieb to the authors of an early AIDS propaganda book, "I've done it many times since."

Because Gottlieb's specialty was immunology, the new gay disease had the immunodeficiency spin on it from the get-go, but I hazard to suggest that if a practitioner of another specialty had reported a new sex disease from his quarter, the media would have similarly pounced, and we would have a sex plague of a different color.

Immunology itself was in its infancy when AIDS was invented. In the specialty, so-called AIDS was placed in a classification called primary immunodeficiencies. At the time there were a few rare, usually congenital, iseases that fell into this category. Secondary immunodeficiencies result from the stress of another sick condition such as cancer, or from its treatments like radiation or chemotherapy (AZT), or from environmental stresses such as chemical insults, or from exhaustion, starvation (as in much of so-called African AIDS), depression (as from an AIDS diagnosis), etc.

The system that defines primary immunodeficiencies was developed by the World Health Organization. WHO has become a big international player in the game of AIDS.

WHO Begins Global Fight against AIDS

--Chron 11/21/86

But WHO's system of definitions has been broadly assailed as an inadequate apparatus for diagnosis. Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine calls the system "unfortunate."

It was into this definitional muddle that Gottlieb threw his new gay disease.

Gottlieb was also the founder of the T-cell-counting fashion, but, as it was pointed out by some critics even way back then, there was no research behind human T-cell counts such that a benchmark of normalcy could be established. That the diagnostic meaning of any count was a purely subjective matter, did not deter the cavalier Dr. Gottlieb, who was receiving from the media every encouragement to plunge forward with his sensational newsex disease.

US Survey Links Diseases to Gays

--you know who 9/1/81

Strange Deadly Diseases Striking Gay Men

-- 5/13/82

Diseases Linked to Gays Turning Up in Heterosexual Patients

-- 6/11/82

Now the gay disease is spreading into the general public. Or is it? Throughout the campaign, the media will oscillate between the strictly gay disease and the generalized one, maintaining the gay identity but intimating the threat to all. The media always wants to have it both ways. Today the posture is that the gay disease has not spread to straights quite as much as had been expected.

Gay Plague Is Epidemic

Read more www.whatisaids.com/howthechroninventedaids.htm

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From: daveactup (at) aol.com (Dave ACTUP)
Newsgroups: misc.health.aids
Date: 17 Apr 2002 04:35:40 GMT
Organization: AOL www.aol.com
Subject: Pasquarelli Health Update
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April 14, 2002

AN UPDATE FROM ACT UP ACTIVIST DAVID PASQUARELLI
FOLLOWING HIS RELEASE FROM S.F. COUNTY JAIL

Dear Friends and Supporters:

My apologies for taking so long to communicate to you events following the
release after my unforeseen 72-day incarceration at San Francisco County Jail.

As you probably recall, I along with my colleague Michael Petrelis,
participated in a phone, fax, and e-mail zap to draw attention to antigay
statistical scapegoating of gay men by public health authorities and consequent
calls for quarantine of people with HIV/AIDS and homosexuals that do not wear
condoms.

For this act of direct action we were served with civil restraining orders and
required to appear in civil court, which we did. At the conclusion of this
civil hearing, on our way out the door and in the presence of our attorneys,
Michael and I were ambushed and arrested by police officers, inspectors, and
representatives of the District Attorney's office.

Media photographers and TV news crews had been alerted in advance by the D.A.'s
office to capture the shocking arrest of "San Francisco's AIDS Stalkers" as we
were "captured" out in the hall. Michael and I were then vilified in the media
by our very own "progressive" District Attorney Terence Hallinan who told the
media we were dangerous "terrorists." Articles in The San Francisco Chronicle
unfairly accused us of issuing bomb threats and representatives of The
Chronicle claimed we threw bricks through the windows of their offices and
reporters homes -- allegations that were entirely false.

These misrepresentations of actual property damage and threats of violence with
explosives were presented to the Court as facts despite no supporting evidence.
Our bail was kept at a phenomenal $1.1 million until Judge Perker Meeks
examined the case and found no evidence of bomb threats or bricks.
Consequently, our bail was reduced to a still exorbitant $220,000 but, luckily,
we were able to secure our freedom with a bail bond.

In describing events while in custody and following my release, I can only
speak for myself and not my colleague Michael Petrelis, who has his own
experiences to share.

Without going into too much detail, I can say my imprisonment was sudden,
grueling, and extraordinarily stressful -- more so than my body could endure,
as I later discovered.

While in jail I could eat very little of the food I was served due to allergies
I suffer to milk, oranges, and peanut butter. Each day, I slowly starved and
lost weight as my repeated requests for a high-protein/dairy-free diet were
ignored throughout the duration of my time in custody. Amazingly, I couldn't
even obtain a daily Ensure protein drink or a supplemental snack to help
maintain my weight despite being diagnosed as "HIV-positive" by the jail's
medical personnel.

Needless to say, sleeping was difficult to impossible. Loud sounds of clanking
cell doors and jangling keys, the snores of scores of inmates, sudden fights
and screaming guards translated into 72 days of seriously disturbed sleeping
patterns complete with little rest and loads of nightmares. Add to this the
poor ventilation, the harsh toxic cleaning chemicals we were forced to use,
zero access to outdoor air and sun, and lack of facilities for exercise and the
rapid breakdown of my body became increasingly evident.

Thrush took over my mouth and throat. I was plagued by repeated painful eye
infections and weird skin outbreaks. I rapidly lost weight and became weak. Of
course, being classified as "HIV-positive" meant I was repeatedly pressured
into submitting to every imaginable blood test, pill, and available
vaccination. I refused all attempts by medics to rope me into the "AIDS
standard of care" but it was difficult and contributed greatly to my stress.
The prospect of being forced into the medical ward and violated in some way
always loomed large in my mind.

Thankfully, on February 8 at 9:30 p.m. I was finally released from the
jailhouse hell that had lasted two-and-a-half-months. I had spent behind bars
my birthday, Christmas, New Year's, and the five-year anniversary of meeting my
partner.

Upon my release things seemed pretty good as I was operating on adrenaline. I
was eager to return to my previous busy life but then four days later
everything crashed.

On February 12, while walking down Polk Street, I collapsed and had to be
rushed to the emergency room. I was diagnosed with malnutrition, dehydration,
and severe anemia. I was rehydrated and discharged that day. For the next month
I endured batteries of blood tests to determine the extent of the damage done
to my immune system due to my time in custody. The deterioration was
devastating.

Prior to being arrested I was vital and thriving with T-cells in the 600s and
CD8s in the 800s along with no detectable "viral load" (for those who put stock
in such blood tests.) Immediately after my release my T-cells had plummeted to
14, my CD8s dropped to 200, and my "viral load" had skyrocketed to 450,000.
While I personally don't put much faith in these blood-borne numbers, the
physical symptoms of my immune system destruction were also obvious and
undeniable.

A month later, on March 12, I began to have serious difficulty breathing. Late
at night I was once again rushed to the emergency room. X-rays were taken and I
was diagnosed with PCP pneumonia. I was so weak I needed assistance standing
and walking. It was so hard to breathe I lost all color and my hands and feet
were completely numb due to lack of circulating oxygen. I had to be put on a
breathing assistance device and heart monitors.

Desperate to return to health I followed the doctor's orders of taking two
double-strength Bactrim three times a day. I consumed the Bactrim for 48 hours
and I almost died because of it.

The Bactrim prompted such a severe allergic reaction I became anxious,
disoriented, and forced to endure spiking fevers of 105-degrees for days. My
body began to shut down and on March 13, for the third time, I was rushed back
to the emergency room and finally admitted to the hospital (I have no medical
insurance.)

Despite being so disoriented and obviously harmed by Bactrim's effects, I was
infused with even more Bactrim as well as additional antibiotics -- expressly
against my wishes and those of my caregiver. My condition deteriorated so badly
hospital officials threatened to use bed restraints to keep me in the room
while my closest friends pondered what appeared to be my imminent death. I was
so gravely ill, I too believed my life was over and started the sad process of
"letting go."

Then, suddenly, on March 14, while lying in this hospital bed hooked up to all
these machines, something compelled me to leave immediately. I awoke to a nurse
who had quietly entered the room and begun to inject a large syringe of serum
into my intravenous drip -- without my knowledge or permission. It burned my
arm so I ordered her to stop immediately. She protested and I screamed at her
to TAKE IT OUT! She removed the syringe and I decided this poisonous medical
care I was receiving was my real problem. I demanded to be discharged
IMMEDIATELY knowing it was my only hope of survival. I called friends and
demanded that they "get me the hell out of this deathtrap NOW!" They quickly
arrived, helped me out of bed, into my clothes, and quickly out the doors.

Even after that dark day, my health continued to go from bad to worse for a
time. Then, miraculously, my condition began to slowly improve thanks to the
advice of an incredible physician and naturopath.

But there were still emerging problems. In addition to the candida overgrowth
in my mouth, the anemia, and the lung infection impeding my breathing, I
developed a terribly severe herpes simplex outbreak. It rapidly spread painful,
raw lesions over the entire area of my upper and lower lips. This condition is
still not resolved and the pain is excruciating. It's now been four weeks of
this nightmare. Eating is agonizing, speaking is almost impossible, and
sleeping is frequently interrupted by spontaneous bleeding episodes where I
wake up drenched. Basically, I just endure the raw pain as day by day the
lesions gradually heal and become ugly, blackened scabs.

But the good news is I am healing -- slowly. My symptoms are resolving with the
passing of time and with the help of some incredible friends, doctors,
acupuncturists, and body work practitioners -- plus, of course, lots of food,
water, and rest. I guess if it takes 72 days to destroy an immune system it
takes just as long or longer to put one back together!

I have learned so many important lessons over the past two months about life,
faith in God, patience, and what's truly important when your health is in
jeopardy. It hasn't been pleasant but I suppose lessons of life aren't
necessarily meant to be. Most importantly, I've finally learned to trust my
body to tell me what it needs. And although it almost killed me, I got a
glimpse inside the AIDS machine that treats all HIV-positive people as though
they are already marked for death. The "well-meaning" fools that keep the
machine humming pump their victims full of poisonous drugs like Bactrim that
end their lives and they never feel guilty about it. After all, "they're just
doing their job," their treatments are the standard of care and the patient was
dying of AIDS anyway.

All I can say is "NEVER AGAIN!" I will never again out of fear and hysteria of
ailing health be prompted by megalomaniacal doctors to sacrifice my body to
their monstrous machine. Instead, I choose to survive!

In closing, I want to offer my sincere thanks and appreciation to the hundreds
of supporters who helped Michael Petrelis and I make it through our ordeal.
Your letters, cards, drawings, books, and kind words of encouragement kept us
going on the right path of our journey. I also especially want to thank those
very special people that gave their time, energy, and love to bring me back
from the brink of death. You all know who you are and I don't know how I'll
ever repay you. I love you with all my heart and truly owe you my life.

David Pasquarelli
Sunday, April 14, 2002
San Francisco

==========

ACT UP San Francisco
1884 Market Street * San Francisco, California 94102
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http://www.virusscience.org/hiv/aids/jack_levine.htm

The 23rd of March 2002 Jack Levine died of AIDS in hospital, 47 years old.

I met Jack on the VirusMyth webboard first time about a year ago. In addition we exchanged about a dozen letters in 2001-2002.

When Jack started posting he immediately drew attention with sharp, entertaining, inspired and witty writings, revealing an educated man who was professionally involved with expressing himself in print. From vitriolic attacks - of which I had my share also! - over parodies on some of the most hilarious opinions. Or wondering why we all would spend our time on this aggressive board when we instead could listen to Mozart and read Gertrude Stein. A damned good question, actually.

Whatever the mood and subject it was always original and readworthy. I'd have liked to bring a number of quotes. Sorry that webmaster Mr. Robert Laarhoven once again decided to thrash all postings to the board shortly after Jack Levine shocked it by giving up his denial early 2002.

Jack constructively seeked alternative ways of tackling HIV/AIDS. This is always needed. Of course all now approved medications was once alternative.

From a healthwise point of view Jack's problem was that his own research didn't seem to help despite doing what he could.

He ate as healthy as possible, got lots of sleep. But still during 2001 he lost weight. On the board he posted that doctors urged him to start treatment as his results from disease progress tests continuously were going rapidly south.

Like so many other HIV/AIDS denialists Jack Levine ended up facing the reality of AIDS: physical symptoms. Or, in other words: He got sick.

In about a dozen letters to me he describes the thoughts and effect of his late treatment. Starting very intensive antiviral treatment is no joke already. In people already ill from their disease it can be more than rough.

It is common medical consensus that treatment for disease should be done well before damages become irreparable.

Jack waited much too long and died more early than needed from typical AIDS-related diseases March

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There are times where we all would need to deny. Where we can't face the facts and seek hope wherever we can despite cold facts staring us in the face.

But for a man with Jack Levine's intellect and education it was an uphill battle.

Certain questions needed an answer and Jack just didn't get them from the denialists. Despite being in opposite camps I'd occasionally see Jack repeating unanswered questions from me on the board. "If drugs cause AIDS (as the denialists postulates) why are a long range of AIDS-defining diseases only found in HIV-positive people and not in HIV-negative drug users?"

Jack Levine's conversion from denial was not friendly looked upon among his earlier "friends" at the VirusMyth webboard. As Dave Brader put it they turned against him as a couple of dogs.

But at least feelings were mutual. In his last mail, sent 3 weeks before he died he wrote:

"The Virus Myth webboard will not see my name on it for a long time, if ever. They repel me, these denialists. You don't know until you get ill."

Jack's premature demise was a result of the unlucky fact that he got infected and that he waited too long with treatment. While the first can happen for anybody the second was his own choice.

Most of the people supporting Jack in delaying treatment are confused about what constitutes science, reseach, data and conclusions. However damaging for others you can't blame people not having the insight.

The people who make me real sad are the denialist 'scientists' who shamelessly through 20 years repeat their mantras, despite an enormous amount of contradicting data. Their name and formal title keeps a denial alive that otherwise would be dead and buried with all the people who went to their grave because of HIV.

They definitely share a responsiblity for the fact that Jack went before he had to.

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Jack, I am sorry I never met you in person. I am sorry that I have received my last mail from you. But in our short encounter you were a formidable inspiration and had me laughing quite a couple of times.

Looking forward to drinking a beer with you in another world where the subject that took so much of our time here will be purely academical earthly matters.

But if I know you and myself right I am quite sure that we'd find something else to debate.

Until then... Rest in peace, mate!

Yours

Chr. Monsune

P.S. I thank Jack's family for getting back to me with the sad news and details and finally for sending me his picture and granting me permission to use it.




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