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THE HIDDEN AGENDA BEHIND HIV

by Bryan J. Ellison

     Bryan has impressed us all in the past, but perhaps
nothing is so explosive as his revelation that the U.S. Public
Health Movement is full of doctrinaires, dogmatists, tyrants,
and public policy disasters. This piece is derived from some
of the material in his new book (with Dr. Duesberg), INVENTING
AIDS, sold to Addison-Wesley (who chickened out at the last
moment) and then finally bought by St. Martin's, possibly
due for release in August. Can we get advance copies? Probably
not yet. This article is sure to generate strong feelings,
both positive and negative-let us hear your opinions!

    Despite all assurances to the contrary, the AIDS
establishment continues to fund only research on HIV. Peter
Duesberg inadvertently proved this blackout on all alternative
research when he recently submitted a grant proposal to the
National Institute on Drug Abuse. The Institute's clinical
director of AIDS research had personally invited the proposal,
which outlined a plan to test the long-term effects of nitrite
inhalants, or "poppers," on the immune systems of mice. The
answer came back in December: the anonymous referees had not
only turned it down, but had refused to give the proposal
more than a cursory review.
    Why does such a political correctness continue to dominate
the War on AIDS? After all, public health officials cannot
yet demonstrate they have saved any lives from the syndrome,
while its death toll rises steadily. The scientific predictions
have also failed miserably.
In contrast to the predicted spread of AIDS in the United
States, the epidemic has remained strictly confined to risk
groups; nine of every ten AIDS cases have been male, and ninety
percent of all AIDS victims have been linked to heavy drug
use, whether intravenously or as "fast track" homosexuals.
Indeed, epidemiologists have yet to establish that any epidemic
at all has struck among blood transfusions recipients. Even
individual AIDS diseases prefer specific risk groups, such
as Kaposi's sarcoma among homosexuals and the near-absence
of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia among Africans, whose lungs
all contain the microbe. And some thirty-nine percent of AIDS
diseases in America have nothing to do with immune
deficiency-witness Kaposi's sarcoma, various lymphomas, wasting
disease, and dementia, for example. In short, AIDS is not
an infectious disease.
     The obsession with an "AIDS virus" has little to do with
science or medicine. Writing in NATURE in 1991 (June 21),
British HIV researcher Robin Weiss and American CDC official
Harold Jaffe hinted at the real purpose in an attack on Peter
Duesberg: "But if he and his supporters belittle 'safe sex,'
would have us abandon HIV screening of blood donations, and
curtail research into anti-HIV drugs and vaccines, then their
message is perilous." To whom? If AIDS is not infectious,
such recommendations would simply save the taxpayer money
and anxiety.
     But perhaps this is the point. A 1989 report by the
National Research Council more explicitly revealed the hidden
agenda. Originally sponsored by the Rockefeller and Russel
Sage Foundations and then funded by the Public Health Service,
AIDS: Sexual Behavior and Intravenous Drug Use laid out a
plan for social engineering on a massive scale-using AIDS
as the excuse. "The devastating effect of an epidemic on a
community can evoke strong political and social responses,"
the committee duly noted, "An epidemic necessitates the rapid
mobilization of the community to counter the spread of illness
and death" (p. 373). The power of such a method to force
changes in cultural values is based on careful manipulation
of fear. "Ideally, health promotion messages should heighten
an individual's perceptions of threat and his or her capacity
to respond to that threat, thus modulating the level of
fear...What is not yet known is how to introduce fear in the
right way in a particular message intended for a particular
audience. Acquiring that knowledge will require planned
variations of AIDS education programs that are carefully
executed and then carefully evaluated," stated the committee
coolly(pp.267-8).
     The report then identified one of the major targets of
change--Judeo-Christian moral values. "Historically, there
has been a strong social reluctance in the United States to
speak or write about sexuality in explicit terms. Despite
recent indications of greatly increased tolerance for sexual
explicitness in the media and literature, that reluctance
remains strong in much of the population; it is particularly
strong in instances that involve the education of children
and adolescents"(p.379). The fear of a supposedly infectious
AIDS epidemic, however, could be used to fix such problems.
As the report declared, "The committee believes that, during
an epidemic, politeness is a social virtue that must take
second place to the protection of life"(p.379).
     Other public health officials have been even more
forthright. As an officer of the Centers for Disease Control,
Donald Francis had in 1984 drafted the CDC's proposed AIDS
strategy. In his 1992 retirement speech at the agency's
Atlanta, Georgia headquarters, Francis voiced the ambitions
held by many of his fellow officers in describing "the
opportunity that the HIV epidemic provides for public health"
(JAMA, 9/16/92). He stated in no uncertain terms the radical
nature of the plan:

    The cloistered caution of the past needs to
be discarded. The climate and culture must be
open ones where old ideas are challenged. Those
who desire the status quo should seek employment
elsewhere. The American HIV prevention program
should be the place where the best and the
brightest come, where the action is, where history
is being made. This is the epidemic of the century,
and every qualified person should want to have
a piece of the action.

     The "action" described by Francis was a set of programs
that would, as he fully recognized, need strong political
protection from angry taxpayers and voters. For example, he
bitterly attacked public opposition to condom distribution
programs, and called for powerful legal measures to bypass
parental discretion. "The ongoing controversies involving
abstinence and condoms typify the morass into which schools
can fall," Francis complained, "If, in the opinion of those
far more expert than I, schools cannot be expected to provide
such programs, then health departments should take over, using
as a justification their mandate to protect the public's
health."
     Francis also included proposals for dealing with the
AIDS risk of intravenous drug use--including a call for
"prescription of addicting drugs" with Federal government
sponsorship. Even libertarians who advocate legalizing drugs
would balk at such notions, which would ultimately create
a massive bureaucracy encouraging drug use. "Following a more
enlightened model for drug treatment, including prescribing
heroin, would have dramatic effects on HIV and could eliminate
many of the dangerous illegal activities surrounding drugs,"
he insisted, knowing that only fear of the AIDS epidemic might
make such proposals tolerable to the public. Ignoring the
toxic, and possibly AIDS inducing, effects of drugs, Francis
emphasized that "In addition to treatment, safe injection
[!] must be stressed both for those in treatment programs
and those out of treatment. The provision of sterile injection
equipment for drug users should be the standard of public
health practice in the United States."
     Most chillingly of all, Francis saw the possibilities
in harnessing other epidemics to advance similar agendas.
As he put it, "if we establish new mechanisms to handle the
HIV epidemic, [these] can serve as models for other diseases."

     The common denominator of these and similar plans is
that they originate with the Federal government's Public Health
Service, and especially from its frontline public health
agency, the Centers for Disease Control. Public perceptions
often paint the CDC as a minor office that gathers and
publishes dull statistics on disease. The truth is shockingly
different. A sophisticated $2 billion-per-year operation,
the CDC employs a staff of thousands who see themselves as
having an activist mandate. They view epidemics as
opportunities for control and for imposing lifestyle changes
on the population.
     The CDC has traditionally specialized in contagious
disease. Its initials, in fact, originally stood for the
Communicable Disease Center, from its formation in 1946 until
its name changed in 1970. And therein lies its bias, for it
tends to interpret almost any epidemic as being infectious.
Certainly the CDC has plenty of raw material with which to
work; each year at least one thousand outbreaks, or "clusters,"
of disease strike in the United States--one every eight hours.
These can range from flus and pneumonias to closely-occurring
cancers, but most outbreaks involve no more than a handful
of people each; since the polio epidemic, none have posed
serious threats to the general public. However, by falsely
labeling any arbitrarily chosen outbreak as infectious and
blaming it on a virus or other microbe, the CDC can quickly
generate public fear and political mobilization behind almost
any agenda.
     The CDC has actually engineered a number of false alarms
or misdirected campaigns over the past four decades,
neutralizing scientific dissent and calmer voices when
necessary. AIDS, though not the first example, has now become
the most successful epidemic by far. Two powerful weapons
in the agency's arsenal, both unknown to the public at large,
have made this possible: a semi-secret wing of the CDC known
as the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), and a quiet
"partnership" program with private organizations.
The Epidemic Intelligence Service
     Among epidemiologists, it is often half-jokingly referred
to as the "medical CIA." Founded in 1951 by public health
professor Alexander Langmuir, the EIS was first designed to
act as an elite biological-warfare countermeasures unit of
the CDC. Langmuir was hired because he also served as one
of the select advisors to the Defense Department's chemical
and biological warfare program.
     The first EIS class of 21 recent medical or biological
graduates underwent several weeks of intense training at the
CDC's Atlanta headquarters, before being dispatched on their
two-year assignments on loan to various state or local health
departments around the country. They acted as the eyes and
ears of the CDC, carefully monitoring for any possible outbreak
of war-induced disease. While on their tours of duty, each
EIS officer could be sent elsewhere in the country on a 24
hour-a-day basis. In case of war, the EIS would operate under
any emergency powers granted the CDC--potentially including
quarantines, mass immunizations, or other drastic measures.
     In an article written for the American journal of Public
Health(March, 1952), Langmuir made clear that membership in
the EIS did not end with the two year assignment, but was
permanent. He wrote that, "As a result of their experience,
many of these officers may well remain in full-time
epidemiology or other public health pursuits at federal, state,
or local levels. Some, no doubt, will return to civilian,
academic, or clinical practice, but in the event of war they
could be returned to active duty with the Public Health Service
and assigned to strategic areas to fulfill the functions for
which they were trained."
     Every year since 1951 has seen a new crop of EIS recruits,
some classes over one hundred members in size. The nearly
2,000 alumni have gone on to high positions in society, though
rarely advertising their affiliation. Indeed, the CDC has
now made the EIS more secretive than ever, having suppressed
the public availability of the membership directory since
last year. Members can be found in the Surgeons General's
office and elsewhere in the Federal government, as well as
in the World Health Organization, state and local health
departments, universities, pharmaceutical companies, tax-exempt
foundations, hospitals, and even as staff writers, editors,
or news anchormen for major newspapers, scientific journals,
and television news departments. In these positions, EIS alumni
act not only as the CDC's surveillance arm and emergency
reserve, but also as seemingly "independent" advocates for
CDC policies.
     In time, the fear of artificial disease epidemics faded.
But Langmuir and other top CDC officials had always held bigger
plans for the EIS. Langmuir, for example, an apostle of Planned
Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, involved the EIS in the
population control movement by the 1960s. The CDC has gained
most, however, from EIS activities in natural disease
epidemics, to which its "disease detectives" have turned their
attention.
     The flu, being truly an infectious disease, often proved
itself most valuable to the CDC. Although the winter following
the end of World War I was the last time a flu epidemic caused
widespread death, the CDC has pushed annual flu vaccinations
up to the present day. At times, the agency has even rung
the alarm over an impending flu crisis, hoping to use memories
of the 1918 epidemic to gain emergency powers and impose mass
vaccinations. By using such tactics in 1957 over the Asian
flu, the CDC managed to wrangle extra money out of Congress
to expand the EIS and crash-produce a vaccine. But the flu
season was already winding down by the time the vaccine was
ready, and the flu itself turned out to have been as mild
as in any other year.
     By 1976, CDC director David Sencer wanted to try again,
though on a grander scale. After one soldier in Pennsylvania
died of a flu-related pneumonia in January, Sencer predicted
that a pig-borne human virus, nicknamed the "swine flu," would
soon devastate the United States. Panicked with visions of
impending doom, Congress moved to authorize the CDC's
immunization plan for every man, woman, and child in the
country. Unexpectedly, the legislation suddenly stalled when
the insurance companies underwriting the vaccine discovered
that it had seriously toxic side effects.
     Sencer had to do something fast. He immediately set up
a "War Room" in Auditorium A at the CDC headquarters, and
put the EIS network on full alert to search for any disease
outbreak that might resemble the flu. Within weeks, the War
Room received word of a pneumonia cluster among men just
returning home from the Philadelphia convention of the American
Legion. Several Philadelphia-based EIS officers and alumni
had detected the outbreak, and acted as a fifth column that
not only helped arrange an invitation for the CDC to come
in, but also took their orders from the arriving team of CDC
and EIS officers. Even the New York Times staff writer sent
to cover the story, Lawrence Altman, was himself an EIS
alumnus.
     The CDC team allowed media rumors to circulate that this
Legionnaires' disease was the beginning of the swine flu.
Within days, Congress decided to pass the vaccine bill. Only
later did the CDC admit that the legionnaires had not been
infected by the flu virus, too late to stop the immunization
program. Some 50 million Americans received the vaccine,
leading to more than a thousand cases of nerve damage and
paralysis, dozens of deaths, and lawsuits awarding almost
$100 million in damages. In the ultimate irony, no swine flu
epidemic ever materialized; the only destruction left behind
by the phantom swine flu resulted from the CDC's vaccine.
     The agency later blamed Legionnaires' disease on a common
soil bacterium, one that clearly fails Koch's postulates for
causing the disease and is therefore actually harmless. The
legionnaires' deaths are not so hard to understand, since
the pneumonias struck elderly men, many of whom had undergone
kidney transplant operations, and who had become particularly
drunk during the Bicentennial celebrationthe classic risks
for pneumonia. Thus "Legionnaires' disease" is not an
infectious condition, but merely a new name for old pneumonias.
      Using its EIS network, the CDC has applied similar
tactics to other outbreaks of disease. During the 1960s, for
example, the EIS helped fuel the National Institute of Health's
growing Virus-Cancer Program by tracking down every small
cluster of leukemia cases, trying to create the impression
that some virus was responsible for the cancer. Robert Gallo
was one of the many scientists so impressed with the CDC
investigations that he devoted the rest of his career to
finding a human leukemia virus.
     More recently, the CDC managed to have a team of EIS
officers invited into New Mexico to investigate a cluster
of pneumonia cases among Navajo Indians. By June of 1993,
the CDC began insisting that the brief and relatively small
outbreak was caused by a rat fecal virus, the Hantavirus.
But as a letter in the January 1 issue of the Lancet pointed
out, most of the affected Navajos actually tested negative
for the virus. And unlike a contagious disease, this pneumonia
never spread beyond the first few dozen victims. Again, the
CDC's "disease detectives" used a high-profile investigation
to create media publicity and frighten the general population,
rather than troubling themselves with the scientific method
and its more boring answers.

     Of all the epidemics mismanaged by the CDC, AIDS proved
the most spectacular in achieving political success. By 1981,
the EIS had so thoroughly penetrated the medical and public
health institutions in the United States that it could now
detect even the smallest and most loosely-connected "clusters"
of diseases, no matter how far apart the victims were in time
and space. The original AIDS cases were all found in homosexual
men in the "fast track" lifestyle-those having hundreds or
thousands of sexual contacts and using enormous amounts of
hard drugs to make such promiscuous activity possible. For
the CDC, the trick was to make the illness seem contagious;
a simple drug-induced epidemic among homosexuals would hardly
have frightened the public, nor have allowed the CDC to
accomplish its radical public health agenda.
     The epidemic officially began in 1980 after Michael
Gottlieb, a new immunologist at the UCLA Medical Center in
Los Angeles, decided to test the brand new T cell-counting
technology. He put out an informal request to fellow physicians
to refer cases of immune deficiency to him. Over the next
several months, colleagues sent him four such cases, all male
homosexuals with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Sensing that
the CDC might take an interest, Gottlieb called active EIS
officer Wayne Shandera in the Los Angeles health department.
Shandera had heard an isolated report of a fifth homosexual
with the same problem, and compiled a report for the CDC.
     Ordinarily, each of the five cases would have been seen
by separate doctors, leaving nothing to suggest the word
"epidemic" to anyone. But having a pre-positioned EIS agent
like Shandera certainly helped the CDC gather such cases
together as a potential cluster. Shandera's report fell on
the desk of James Curran, an official in the CDC's venereal
diseases division; the 1987 book And the Band Played On records
that Curran wrote "Hot stuff. Hot stuff." on the report (p.
67). He had the agency publish it immediately.
     By the time the report appeared on June 5, 1981, Curran
was already organizing a special Kaposi's Sarcoma and
Opportunistic Infections (KSOI) task force to lead an
investigation of the fivevictim epidemic. EIS members Harold
Jaffe and Mary Guinan, also from the venereal diseases
division, helped run the task force. The first order of
business was to find as many similar patients as possible,
thereby causing the epidemic to "grow." Next was to explain
the syndrome; to the CDC, this meant trying to find an
infectious agent. This would be no simple task, since
essentially all of the first fifty cases admitted to heavy
use of poppers, a drug preferred by homosexuals as a means
of facilitating anal intercourse. Even if this toxic drug
presented itself as the obvious explanation, the CDC
investigators had no intention of letting the evidence
interfere. According to historian Elizabeth Etheridge, "While
many of the patients were routine users of amyl nitrites or
'poppers,' no one in the KSOI task force believed the disease
was a toxicological problem" (Sentinel for Health, 1992,
p.326).
     So the EIS was activated to prove AIDS infectious. EIS
officer David Auerbach and others confirmed that these
extremely promiscuous homosexuals were often linked to one
another through long chains of sexual encounters. To prove
that AIDS was "spreading" to other people , other officers
scoured hospitals to find heroin addicts with opportunistic
infections, and blamed their needle-sharing rather than the
heroin use, itself a classic risk factor for pneumonias and
other illnesses. Bruce Evatt and Dale Lawrence, both members
of the EIS, discovered one hemophiliac in Colorado with an
opportunistic pneumonia as a side effect of internal bleeding,
but rediagnosed the patient as an AIDS case. Even Haitians
in Florida and Haiti were interviewed by EIS officer Harry
Haverkos, who renamed their endemic tuberculosis as AIDS.
     Not understanding the loaded nature of such
investigations, the outside world completely bought the CDC
line. Soon the race was on for scientific researchers to find
the guilty virus. But this search, too, had been rigged. Donald
Francis, an EIS member himself since 1971, decided just eleven
days after the original Shandera report that the syndrome
should be blamed on a retrovirus--with a latent period, no
less. Using his various contacts in the retrovirus field,
Francis spent the next two years pushing Robert Gallo to
isolate a new retrovirus. Eventually Gallo did take a interest,
and claimed credit for finding HIV.
     With his April 23, 1984, press conference, Gallo completed
the crusade begun by the CDC and its EIS. As the tapes rolled
and the cameras flashed, Gallo and Health and Human Services
Secretary Margaret Heckler launched the nation into a War
on AIDS. Few people knew the true story behind the
announcement, or of the political agenda that Don Francis
and others were preparing to foist on the American people.

The Partnership Program
     The CDC's second major weapon for mobilizing public
support lay in its assistance programs for private
organizations By funding or otherwise supporting groups not
affiliated with the CDC, the agency could create apparently
spontaneous mass movements. Spokesmen claiming to represent
various communities could all simultaneously advocate policies
identical to those of the CDC, while allowing the agency to
remain quietly in the background and avoid direct criticism.
     In 1984, the CDC began forming "partnerships," based
on "cooperative agreements," with large numbers of
"community-based  organizations," for the purpose of AIDS
"education" (read: indoctrination). At first the funding was
channeled through the United States Conference of Mayors,
which dispersed the money to a growing network of AIDS activist
groups. By 1985, the CDC was giving over $1 million to state
governments, influencing their response to AIDS.
     After 1986, the money began flowing freely, and the CDC's
corresponding influence expanded quickly. The American Red
Cross alone received over $19 million from 1988 to 1991,
cementing CDC control among medical institutions. Millions
more were targeted to such groups as the American Medical
Association, the National Association of People with AIDS
(which operates as a coordinating center for much of the AIDS
activist and gay rights movements), Americans for a Sound
AIDS Policy (which generates CDC-approved materials for
evangelical Christians), the National Education Association
(the major teachers' union), the National PTA, the National
Association of Broadcasters (which represents most television
and radio stations and their networks), the National Conference
of State legislators, and dozens of others. Even such groups
as the National Urban League, the National Council of La Raza,
and the Center for Population Options receive CDC grants and
other technical aid. Man specifically AIDS-related groups
actually depend on CDC money for their very existence.
     Naturally, the CDC has established mechanisms for ensuring
that its money and other aid are used for the intended
purposes. Organizations wishing to receive grants must not
only file applications, but are pre-screened by having to
send representatives to CDC workshops on how to apply. These
meetings allow the CDC to meet and judge applicants directly.
Furthermore, any organization receiving aids winds up having
CDC supervision of its AIDS-related "educational" activities.

     It is little wonder there is so much political pressure,
from all sides, to defend both the virus-AIDS hypothesis and
the CDC's public health agenda.
     As with so many non-contagious diseases in the past,
the CDC has persuaded the public that AIDS is infectious.
Thus the taxpayer is manipulated with fear to acquiesce to
the radical measures being pushed by the agency. Where "safe
sex" programs, sterile needle exchanges, Federal subsidies
of drug addiction, and other CDC proposals would normally
be thrown out--along with the officials who proposed them--many
Americans suspend judgment.
     Most people do not yet realize that the entire campaign
has been orchestrated mostly by a single agency of the Federal
government, rather than being a spontaneous decision by
independent experts and activists. As intended, the CDC has
been able to mobilize the scientists, the medical institutions,
political bodies, the news media, and a bewildering array
of AIDS organizations behind its hidden agenda. All such groups
will lose their credibility once the public discovers the
real source of the campaign, and honest skepticism will spread
faster than AIDS itself.
     Signs of imminent change are appearing. The CDC's public
health measures--condoms, sterile needles, contact tracing,
and the like-have failed to prevent the steady growth of AIDS.
As this bad advice is recognized for what it is, more voices
are joining the chorus of dissent against the HIV-AIDS
hypothesis. The CDC may soon have to hold HIV research meetings
all by itself.
     That is, if Congress doesn't abolish the CDC first.


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