Again, you don't believe that AZT extended lives?
No.

Getting back to Nancy Padian, doesn't she feel like you've misquoted her research? Is there any controversy there?
Nancy Padian is upset that people like me are quoting her research because she doesn't want her research to be used toward what she calls denialist discussions. But the data is the data. Most people are saying, "Well, it's difficult to transmit." And then you get in to breaking down further into camps. How difficult? Is it impossible? Is it almost impossible?

So do you believe that it's impossible to transmit the disease through sexual contact?
I have lived in New York City for the last 20-some years, and I don't know anybody who has acquired HIV through sexual contact. I've interviewed people who are coming at the problem from so many different directions. There are several suppositions that I'm still not finished studying. At the center of all of this is the HIV antibody test. If you look at the HIV antibody test very, very, very carefully, you'll see that it tests for certain proteins that were said to constitute a novel retrovirus. So at the proto-origin of all of this is a question—when we talk about spread, when we talk about Padian—everything we're talking about is through the filter of the test, of what we're seeing through the antibody test. When it comes to the spread of HIV and whether it is possible to spread it sexually, I have to defer back to what I stand for, which is debate and reading and scrutiny, dialogue and discussion and dialectic. And I don't have the answers to many, many questions. Including that one.

I'm not a safe-sex educator and I'm not a public-health advocate. I'm a journalist. So I have to steer myself away from that end of the questions and say, "It's in my work. It's in my book. It's in everything I've ever written." I would like people to read my book and then they will see, in that book, that I am a vessel for all kinds of questions and concerns and anxieties about the data underlying this paradigm. As opposed to a person who dictates what is true, like, "I've figured out what's really going on." I'm like a human question mark.


In the introduction to your book you write that you are not a scientist, that you cannot say what is right and what is wrong, that you are simply presenting the human drama. But aren't you making a statement by covering this controversy over such a long period of time?
I think this is the story of the century. And it's a huge story that directly addresses truth in the information age, and how we know what we think we know. And what's the media's role in it? What's the soul of science today in the pharmaceutical age and the biotech age?

But clearly you are affiliated with one side of this story.
That's a fair question. In the beginning, I interviewed Peter Duesberg as a straight news story: "Top retrobiologist says HIV doesn't cause AIDS." Let's see what he has to say. When that was published, what happened was I was attacked. And when you get attacked, you have to start to defend why you did what you did. And then you get this compounded—you get a spiral situation. Where you're attacked, you become that much more "zealous" because you're trying to defend your first action, which you thought was straightforward journalism. So you're radicalized by the forces that would have you silenced. What's radical is the act of holding on in light of those attacks. I didn't so much insist on talking to people who didn't think HIV caused AIDS so much as I got knocked into a kind of terra incognito.

Why is this not covered in a mainstream way?
Well, Harper's is mainstream, don't you think? ["Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science." Celia Farber, Harper's Magazine, March 2006.]

But you really don't see other journalists covering this.
I think you should ask them. I think they know it's a career threat, for one thing. They sense that in their spines.

What about the opinion of the major journals? They seem to have come to a consensus that is opposed to Duesberg and the AIDS dissidents.
I know personally dozens of people who have been HIV-positive and perfectly healthy with no drugs, no ARVs [antiretroviral drugs] for over 20 years. They are common. They are not unusual. There are at least 5,000 cases in the literature of full-blown AIDS—that is, immune decimation with no trace of HIV [according to Duesberg]. The orthodoxy has said it may take on average up to 15 years, possibly up to 30, before HIV causes AIDS. That is, to be fair, closer to the dissident position than to the orthodox position, which began 22 years ago saying HIV caused AIDS instantly. So I daresay that their paradigm has been stretched to unrecognizability from its original form.

My uncle had AIDS in the early years, and I disagree that it was presented as an instant killer.
What I'm saying is that they handed down a death sentence to the sexually active population of the world, and some people say that they were right to be more draconian and fearful than they needed to be. I've always felt personally that it's a violation to say "I'm going to tell you when you're going to die." And I think this is a very interesting question: How much time did they give people? Did they give them six months, a year, five years? Either way, can't you see that it's arbitrary? They had no knowledge, no right to do that; they should have said, "There's all kinds of things we just don't know." But they never did that; they got into this kind of almost fascist lingua franca, this doctrine.

So you have issues with how the medical field looked at what this disease is, what causes it. And then there's how it should be treated, the pharmaceutical angle. And also how information about the disease was presented to the public by the medical establishment. So what is the larger thing that comes from all of this? What is your thesis regarding the medical community?
I feel that what I've arrived at is that in America, during the time of the biotech boom, with the sudden explosive growth of the pharmaceutical industry—and I'm dating this roughly to the eruption of AIDS—medicine and science became co-opted by an almost industrial revolution of financial interest, which clouded the truth and the data and the reality very powerfully and put new fears into the system. It's not all money, but money is a huge part of the story. You have doctors who can barely keep pharmaceutical reps out of their examining rooms while they're examining patients.

And then science itself, I would say, if I had to put it simply, has ceased to covet curiosity. This is what a lot of scientists talk about—that heaven help you if you go against the doctrine of the time. And the doctrine of the time, you will see, almost without fail, is driven by the vested financial interest of the time.