Introduction
Some of the richest history of the no virus group comes from the Perth group lead by Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos. It is fascinating to see how this group has almost completely been wiped from memory. We got in touch with Anthony Brink and Rod Knoll who discussed the people and groups during that time. Please forgive the bad audio and interruptions as we are working behind the scenes to have this resolved.
For more information on this topic please refer to the six part history that was written by Anthony Brink on his https://www.tig.org.za website.
Anthony Brink gave me permission to repost his six part history of rethinking AIDS. We have updated the writings by only adding pictures of some of the people involved.
Additional notes:
Shoutout to Moon Maiden for helping out with this article.
Anthony praises Viroliegy (Mike Stone) for his relentless efforts in exposing the fraud that is virology.
Rod Knoll’s bio can be reviewed on his substack here.
Shoutout to Pablo for joining us on the space also and for his continued effort to get the message out. Check out his twitter account here.
Part One
The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, and the Rethinking AIDS Group: 1991 – 2002
The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis is formed in 1991 at the initiative of Charles Thomas, former professor of molecular biology at Harvard. The Group comprises thirty-two signatories to an open letter to the scientific community:
It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes the group of diseases called AIDS. Many biomedical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose that a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis be conducted by a suitable independent group. We further propose that critical epidemiological studies be devised and undertaken.
Most important among the signatories is Royal Perth Hospital biophysicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, who has identified the fundamental problem with the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS missed by fellow signatory Dr Peter Duesberg, professor of cell and molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley: she shows that contrary to his mistaken concession on this critical point, Luc Montagnier hadn’t isolated any retrovirus as he’d claimed in 1983, and nor had Robert Gallo or anyone else thereafter.
Despite this fundamental contradiction between Papadopulos-Eleopulos and Duesberg in their radically different and antagonistic critiques of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis, the letter is sufficiently broadly framed to accommodate them both.
In June 1992 the first issue of a newsletter called Rethinking AIDS explains:
RETHINKING AIDS is an occasional publication of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis
The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis came into existence as a result of our efforts to get the following four sentence letter published in a number of prominent scientific journals. All have refused to do so. [text of the letter above]
The ‘Editorial Board’ of Rethinking AIDS is gathered and constituted informally. It is not elected by the thirty-two founder members of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, or by subsequent signatories supporting the Group’s statement. Papadopulos-Eleopulos is not invited to join it.
Harvey Bialy, a proponent of Duesberg’s claim that ‘HIV’ is a harmless passenger virus, is editor. James Trabulse, a businessman, is publisher. Duesberg is on the ‘Editorial Board’.
Unsurprisingly, the debut article in Rethinking AIDS entitled ‘It’s time to re-evaluate the HIV-AIDS hypothesis’ is straight out of Duesberg’s book and is solidly premised on his uncritical acceptance of Montagnier’s claim to have isolated ‘HIV’, and that it exists and can infect cells, only it’s harmless.
In the second half of 1994, around the time Duesberg and Bryan Ellison broke up over their co-authored book dispute, Trabulse sides with Ellison, falls out with the ‘Editorial Board’, and uses the RA mailing list to advertise Ellison’s edition of the book and mail out unauthorized Rethinking AIDS newsletters.
Bryan Ellison
In October 1994 UC Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson issues a disclaimer dissociating from Trabulse, Ellison and Rethinking AIDS, and announces the intention to recommence publication of the newsletter under the title Reappraising AIDS.
In November 1994 Issue ‘Number 1’ of ‘Volume 2’ of the newsletter is published under the new name.
In January 1995, without the authority of the ‘Editorial Board’, Trabulse uses the Rethinking AIDS newsletter to publish ‘PHILLIP JOHNSON ON TRIAL: The Attempt to Censor the Ellison/Duesberg Book by Joel A. Schwartz and Bryan J. Ellison’.
The January 1995 issue of Reappraising AIDS publishes ‘AIDS in Africa?’ by Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her Perth Group.
On 17 February 1995 the ‘Editorial Board’ gets a letter published in Science. It’s coarsely drafted – from the style and content apparently by Bialy. The Perth Group are not consulted about the letter, nor are the other original founding members of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis.
The letter is undersigned by the members of the Reappraising AIDS newsletter ‘Editorial Board’, all named, purporting to represent the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis.
But this letter differs radically from the original four sentence letter to which Papadopulos-Eleopulos and the other AIDS dissident scientists subscribed under the collective name for the particular purpose – and no other – The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis.
The letter in Science is premised on Duesberg’s mistaken concession in his 1987 Cancer Research paper that Montagnier achieved the ’isolation of ... HIV’, and it implicitly contradicts Papadopulos-Eleopulos’s observation to the contrary. The letter stabilizes the orthodox HIV-AIDS model to the extent that it affirms that ’HIV’ does exist, questioning only whether it lives up to its name as the cause of AIDS:
In 1991, we, the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, became dissatisfied with the state of the evidence that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) did, in fact, cause AIDS.
Specifically, we have proposed that researchers independent of the HIV establishment should audit the Centers for Disease Control’s records of AIDS cases, bearing in mind that the correlation of HIV with AIDS, upon which the case for HIV causation rests, is itself an artefact of the definition of AIDS. Since 1985, exactly the same diseases or conditions have been defined as ‘AIDS’ when antibodies are present, and as ‘non-AIDS’ when HIV and antibodies are absent. Independent professional groups such as the Society of Actuaries should be invited to nominate members for an independent commission to investigate the following question: How frequently do AIDS-defining diseases (or low T cell counts) occur in the absence of HIV? Until we have a definition of AIDS that is independent of HIV, the supposed correlation of HIV and AIDS is mere tautology.
Other independent researchers should examine the validity of the so-called ‘AIDS tests,’ especially when these tests are used in Africa and Southern Asia, to see if they reliably record the presence of antibodies, let alone live and replicating virus.
The bottom line is this: the skeptics are eager to see the results of independent scientific testing. Those who uphold the HIV ‘party line’ have so far refused. We object.
Eleen Baumann, Tom Bethell, Harvey Bialy, Peter H. Duesberg, Celia Farber, Charles L. Geshekter, Phillip E. Johnson, Robert W. Maver, Russell Schoch, Gordon T. Stewart, Richard C. Strohman, Charles A. Thomas Jr.
Celia Faber
Peter Duesberg
Harvey Bialy
Phillip E. Johnson
Richard Strohman
For the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis.
The first issue of Reappraising AIDS soliciting tax-deductible donations is in July 1996. This means that what commenced as a group of signatories has been registered with the IRS as a tax exempt organization: a private foundation or a public charity. Papadopulos-Eleopulos is not consulted, nor are the other original Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis members, other than those on the ‘Editorial Board’.
In the February 1997 issue of Continuum Duesberg deplores as ‘tragic’ that AIDS dissidents should be debating whether ‘HIV’ exists or not:
‘I hope to liberate the minds of HIV dissidents from HIV for the cause that unites us all – the solution of AIDS. It seems tragic that over 99% of AIDS researchers study a virus that does not cause AIDS and that the few who don’t are now engaged in a debate over the existence of a virus that doesn’t cause AIDS.’
In January 1997 David Rasnick, a chemist, is listed as a member of the ‘Editorial Board’.
David Rasnick
The June 1997 issue of Reappraising AIDS includes ‘About the Australians’ and the Perth Group’s article ‘The Isolation Question’.
In September 1997 the ‘New! Reappraising Web Site’ is announced.
In July 1998 the ‘Editorial Board’ is renamed the ‘Board of Directors’.
In August 1998 Rasnick is cited as ‘President’ of the ‘Board of Directors’.
In April 1999 the ‘Board of Directors’ is cited as the ‘Reappraising AIDS Board of Directors’.
In May 1999 the ‘Group’s Board of Directors’ is cited, plus a statement ‘About the Group’, asserting:
We have found solid scientific reasons to conclude that: HIV may be entirely harmless’ [etc].
Several further points talk about ‘HIV infections’. The statement represents Duesberg’s harmless virus line as the sort and as the quality of science propounded by the original Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis of which Papadopulos-Eleopulos was a founding member in 1991 – contradicting her observation that the virus Duesberg and his allies believe in hasn’t been shown to exist, as elucidated in the Perth Group’s article ‘The Isolation Question’ in the June 1997 newsletter.
In the second half of 1999 reappraisingaids.org goes online, changing a few months later to rethinkingaids.com.
The December 1999 issue of Reappraising AIDS publishes ‘About the Perth Group’ and their article ‘THE FINAL ACT: Should HIV-AIDS Critics Question the Existence of HIV?’ under cover of then editor Paul Philpott’s introduction:
The Australian HIV-AIDS research team led by biophysicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos answer their fellow AIDS reappraisers who wish to ignore their doubts about HIV’s very existence. They have scoured the scientific data in search of reasons to believe that HIV exists.
Nonetheless, when in January 2000 South African President Thabo Mbeki telephones Rasnick as ‘President’ of the ‘Reappraising AIDS Board of Directors’ to discuss AIDS and then sends him a list of questions, Rasnick doesn’t consult the Perth Group before answering; he turns for help to fellow ‘board’ member Charles Geshekter, a historian, instead. The answers they return to the South African government assume and affirm the existence of ‘HIV’ and are riddled with errors. In mid-March the Perth Group fix Rasnick’s and Geshekter’s mess in a submission of their own.
In February 2000 Giraldo succeeds Rasnick as ‘President’. The newsletter of that month announces:
THE RA GROUP has elected to modify its name and the name of this publication. Effective May, 2000, the RA Group will be known as ‘The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of AIDS,’ and the name of this publication will return to its original title, ‘Rethinking AIDS.’ Board members decided that the new names are less unwieldy than the current ones.
A statement ‘About the Rethinking AIDS Group’ again lays down the Duesberg line:
We have identified solid scientific reasons to conclude that: 1 HIV may be entirely harmless [etc].
In the internet archive, ‘Rethinking AIDS’ and not ‘Reappraising AIDS’ appears on the masthead of PDF copies of the newsletter even before May 2000 – such as the February 2000 issue itself. The PDF version of the hardcopy February 2000 newsletter also omits the new ‘President’ announcement and the scientific statement under ‘About the Rethinking AIDS Group’, which the PDF version explains is ‘the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of AIDS, also known as the Rethinking AIDS Group’.
The newsletter name change back to Rethinking AIDS actually occurs in April 2000.
In conformity with the objective of the 32-member Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, set out in their open letter in 1991 that ‘a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis be conducted’, Mbeki convenes a two-meeting colloquium of orthodox and dissident AIDS expert scientists, clinicians and others in May and July 2000.
Effect is given to the Group’s suggestion, ‘We further propose that critical … studies be devised and undertaken’, in that the conduct of pre-absorption and purification experiments is agreed to test the HIV theory of AIDS at its fundamentals.
Bialy, a member of Mbeki’s AIDS Advisory Panel and the Rethinking AIDS Group ‘Board of Directors’, hijacks and buggers the pre-absorption experiment, turning in worthless results; and he collaborates (in the betrayal sense) with AIDS orthodox South African scientist Professor William Makgoba and South African officials to make sure that the second experiment proposed by the Perth Group, that an attempt be made to isolate ‘HIV’ by purification, is never performed.
Rasnick, a fellow member of both the AIDS Advisory Panel and the Rethinking AIDS Group ‘Board of Directors’, and like Bialy a close ally of Duesberg’s, involves himself in Bialy’s scheming to wreck the most important upshot of the AIDS Panel meetings, the ‘critical … studies’, to the extent that he flies in to discuss the pre-adsorption experiment with Bialy and his collaborator Dr Roberto Stock at a meeting in Johannesburg on 28 October 2001 behind the Perth Group’s backs.
In July 2001 the Rethinking AIDS Group publishes its final Rethinking AIDS newsletter.
The last time any content is uploaded to the Rethinking AIDS Group’s rethinkingaids.com website is November 2002.
In about August 2003 the Rethinking AIDS Group loses it website domain to a commercial domain name reseller, who puts up a page with links to orthodox AIDS sites.
The Rethinking AIDS Group is finished.
Part Two
The formation of the new Rethinking AIDS group by David Crowe in 2006
David Crowe
To begin, a recapitulation of the history of the defunct Rethinking AIDS Group.
In early 1991 the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis formed to co-sign a letter to four leading scientific and medical journals, in which they proposed ‘a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against’ the HIV-AIDS hypothesis.
The Group included Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and Peter Duesberg with radically opposing positions on the existence of ‘HIV’, but the letter was framed sufficiently broadly to encompass both. By the time it was submitted on 6 June, the Group’s number had grown to thirty-two, including non-scientists and physicians. The letter was rejected. Many more people subsequently subscribed their support for the Group’s proposal, increasing over the years to about two and a half thousand.
A year after the letter, a handful of proponents of Duesberg’s harmless passenger virus story formed an ‘Editorial Board’, without consulting Papadopulos-Eleopulos and the other members of the Group, and began publishing a newsletter called Rethinking AIDS in the Group’s name. ‘Editor’ Harvey Bialy promoted the Duesberg line from the first issue on.
In July 1998 the newsletter ‘Editorial Board’, including individuals not part of the 1991 Group, renamed itself the ‘Board of Directors’ of the ‘Rethinking AIDS Group’, and the following month David Rasnick, Duesberg’s research collaborator and proponent of his passenger virus science, was cited as its ‘President’.
***
In late 2004, following the disintegration of the ‘Rethinking AIDS Group’ then under ‘President’ Roberto Giraldo, Rasnick decided to build another organization to promote Duesberg’s harmless passenger virus line on AIDS. In David Crowe, ‘President’ of the ‘Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society’, Rasnick found just the man to achieve this. Wowed by Crowe’s superior intelligence, vast scientific knowledge, strategic insight, communication skill, diplomatic tact, organizational ability, unwavering fidelity to the truth, uncompromising integrity, ramrod financial probity, attractive and engaging personality, commanding personal presence, sparkling wit, infectious laugh, and motivational hairdo, since you don’t get to be elected ‘President’ of such an important organization without these outstanding leadership attributes, Rasnick rang him up and asked him to get it on.
No one told him Crowe’s ‘Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society’ is a society of one self-crowned businessman in the cellphone industry, with a website, a telephone number and a fax machine.
In ‘The Truth about David Crowe, Rethinking AIDS and the RA 2009 Conference’, posted briefly on his ARAS website in July/August 2009, Crowe claimed:
The truth is that Rethinking AIDS was dormant, not dead, by around 2005. It had a board of directors, with Etienne de Harven as president, but it is true that it was not very active.
Etienne de Harven
He told a different story in a post to the AIDSsoc discussion forum on 2 February 2006:
I don’t know when the board was reconstituted, I only became aware of this when I was asked to join. … At present the board does not have a functioning decision-making process. I have mentioned this several times but it keeps falling on deaf ears.
The reason Crowe couldn’t say ‘when the board was reconstituted’ was because the disintegrated ‘board was’ never ‘reconstituted’ at all. As will appear below, the defunct board’s composition was very different from the new one being formed. And the new ‘board’ was merely a list of names hand-picked by Rasnick for inclusion as members of the new organization he was forming.
With no ‘functioning’ board to consider the matter, no vote was passed appointing Crowe as a member of the new ‘board’ – nor of anyone else whom Rasnick chose for it. In the formation of the new Rethinking AIDS group there was no pretence at constitutionality, legality, democracy, representation, accountability to the international AIDS dissident community and so forth. The trick was simply to assemble a small group of individuals around Duesberg, call it a ‘board’, and pass it off to the world as the international operational executive committee of all the world’s AIDS dissidents.
Contrary to Crowe’s false denial of the fact, the Rethinking AIDS Group was indeed ‘dead’ as an organization: it had stopped publishing newsletters, quit posting articles to its website, abandoned its website domain, and had ceased all and any other activity. More than ‘moribund’, which is to say dying, as Crowe’s new Rethinking AIDS group member Henry Bauer later described it, it was stiff and cold – which is why the US Internal Revenue Service delisted it on 20 March 2006 in a bulletin of organizations that had ‘failed to establish or have been unable to maintain their status as public charities or as operating foundations’.
Henry H. Bauer
Crowe’s claim in ‘The Truth’ that
David Rasnick asked David Crowe and Bryan Owen to join the board to help him revitalize the organization
was also untrue in that there was no ‘organization’ – whether hardly active, or asleep, or dying – for Crowe to ‘revitalize’. It had demised. What Crowe did was form a new organization under the mantle of the old – just as the preceding Rethinking AIDS Group itself passed itself off as the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis co-founded by Papadopulos-Eleopulos.
In ‘The Truth’ Crowe claimed further:
After their appointment the board stayed in place until 2008 when the resignation of Bryan Owen and death of Christine Maggiore opened up two new spots on the board which were filled by Drs. Henry Bauer and Helen Lauer
But this was not ‘The Truth’ either, because there was ‘no appointment’ of Crowe and Owen to the ‘board’. All that happened was that ‘David Rasnick asked David Crowe and Bryan Owen to join the board’, as Crowe himself recorded – and they did, just like that.
Nor did the ‘board [stay] in place until 2008 when the resignation of Bryan Owen and death of Christine Maggiore opened up two new spots’. Bialy, who was on the list of people Rasnick wanted as directors, quit before the first ‘board meeting’ in June 2006, and after it a third ‘new spot’ was ‘opened up’ when Duesberg’s wife Siggi quit too.
That Crowe was effectively in charge of the new organization he was forming and that he was doing all the moving was suggested in an AIDSsoc post of his on 4 February 2006, in which he responded to criticism concerning the lack of representation of gay men on the new ‘board’:
The Board is in a slow transition and having one (or preferably more) gay men, and more HIV-positive people on the board is one of my priorities. I believe that Christine is the only HIV+ person on the board right now.
Crowe’s assurances were false inasmuch as there was no such ‘transition’ afoot, and ‘having one (or preferably more) gay men, and more HIV-positive people on the board’ wasn’t ‘one of [his] priorities’ at all: none were invited to join the ‘board’ at any stage. No ‘gay men’ ever made it onto Crowe’s ‘board’, and when the ‘only HIV+ person on the board’ passed away, she was replaced by a HIV negative person. But if you’re basically dishonest and you’re trying to be popular like a small town politician, you don’t stint at saying sweet-sounding things you don’t mean and making heart-warming promises you’ve no intention of keeping.
On 4 February 2006, following my earlier post, ‘How about getting some Africans aboard like Sam Mhlongo?’, I noted (not yet aware that the new ‘board’ was quite different from the old):
it seems to me from over here that the revived RA operation is effectively being controlled by Duesberg partisans, or else it’s not being properly controlled at all, with these guys pulling moves unaccountably and undemocratically. … Everybody needs to know that Mbeki is entirely with Perth now, and not California (where he started) … Since Australia is where it’s at scientifically, and South Africa politically, why no representation?’
Michael Ellner in New York confirmed the same day:
RA was never a representative, constitutional, or democratic association. It has always and continues to operate under the shadow of a “Duesbergian orthodoxy” which is highly invested in the “reality” of these “harmless little passengers”. Quite frankly, after reviewing the Perth and Lanka papers on this subject – I have come to believe that “retro-V’s” are nothing more than a figment of the imaginations of the virologists who believe in them.
But considering that Crowe proudly bills Duesberg on his Rethinking AIDS website as having
isolated the first cancer gene through his work on retroviruses in 1970, and mapped the genetic structure of these viruses. This, and his subsequent work in the same field, resulted in his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986
there’s obviously no prospect that his Rethinking AIDS group will ever face the embarrassing fact that retroviruses are ‘nothing more than a figment of the imaginations of the virologists who believe in them’. On the contrary, in January 2010 Crowe posted an infantile lesson from Etienne de Harven about ‘Human endogenous retroviruses’ on the Rethinking AIDS website as an example of the quality of science it supports and propounds. Right after the Perth Group presented evidence that there’s no proof they exist.
Then nominal president of the new Rethinking AIDS group, De Harven, heartily supported my criticism in an email to me on 14 February 2006:
I agree 100% to ALL what you say!
And I must give you some explanation...
You are right: in spite of all my efforts, the “revived RA” is effectively being controlled by Duesberg “partisans” (to use your word!). I keep explaining to all the Board members that the revived RA should be world wide, “from ZA to India and from Perth to Berkeley” as I said many times! Nobody, in that “clan” is listening to me, and being the president is no help!! In November, when I was working very hard, trying to set up that Board meeting in New York, three extreme situations forced me to cancel the meeting. All were generated by H.B [Harvey Bialy]. First, H.B. gave me the order to add in the RA Bylaws that ALL RA Board members are 100% committed to the idea that HIV is existing but is harmless, and that all Board members should immediately pass a vote on this, prior to the New York meeting!! Of course I immediately refused! He then started to send me most aggressive and insulting messages... Then came his utterly ridiculous idea of a “Petition” to Science and Nature for a Duesberg/Baltimore public debate! I told him that I would give him a chance to explain his petition idea during the New York meeting, but that it was out of the question to move in that direction prior to the meeting! Finally, he self-appointed himself as the “Editor” of the RA web site! I told him that I was the only one who could have appointed him for that position and that I had never done so! B. Leppo helped me on this issue, and told H.B. that Bryan Owen was the only webmaster for RA.
After that, H.B. stopped calling himself the “editor”, but never stopped placing Bryan under the most aggressive pressure to post on the RA site whatever he wanted, including his “petition” and other pieces of junk!!
I had promised Bryan to send him a “Foreword from the President” for the site. But I find this site so poor as to lose all my incentive to write a front page for it! This site should rather be called a “Berkeley Newsletter”, as I once sarcastically said!
I love and respect Peter Duesberg as much as you do. But he keeps silent, letting his “partisans” arrange for RA to resemble a Berkeley club, excluding the rest of the world!! In October, I asked Val Turner to attend the New York meeting. I could not invite him officially, since, for reasons I never understood, he (nor Eleni!) are Board members. Val kindly answered that he could not make it on those dates...
Board members? Who are they? Good question! The present list of Board members is exactly that I received from Dave R. when he passed on the presidency to me. Don’t ask me how come some prominent dissidents are missing! I don’t have the faintest idea of the precise history of RA, since nobody ever transmitted to me the archives! And don’t ask me what’s happening with RA $$, because nobody ever bothered to send me any financial report. I was asked (by Dave!) to keep Siggi Duesberg as Treasurer. I accepted reluctantly, because 1) she is not a Board member, and 2) I see potential conflicts of interest with Peter D’s lab... Tell me how you think about that ?
I was (and actually still am!) planning to submit to the Board for approval a list of “RA Correspondents”, for their input into the RA website, and for the effective stretching of RA world wide. That list includes yourself, Neville Hodgkinson, Djamel Tahi, Anju, Marc Deru and a few more... But I really hesitate to write to them (that’s why you hear about this for the first time!) because I am not at all proud of the RA site as it looks now... If somebody would write to me, asking me to contribute a manuscript for that site, I would hesitate a lot... I also want to suggest the appointment of a few new Board members. But do you think that it will ever be possible to reconcile the Perth and Berkeley groups ?? Personally, I doubt it very much. And, personally, I think that a “reactivated RA” that would not include Val and Eleni would be meaningless...
Back to that famous (or infamous!) Bialy’s petition (that has been actually removed from the RA site and substituted with your message!!!), I am almost sure (but I cannot find definitive proof of that in my email November archives!) that H.B. had sent it to all Board members. But the problem with our Board members is that they just don’t respond or react. They just stay put! I barely hear from them! It is like with the drafts I made of new RA Bylaws! Out of 15 Board members only two (namely Dave R. and Charles G.) took the time to respond, with several constructive criticisms or corrections.
Bryan put my latest draft of new RA Bylaws on the site; please, give them a look and give me your comments! The only Board members who always kindly answered my requests for advice and support are Dave R., Christian Fiala, Roberto G. and Gordon S. (But with my dear friend Gordon I have another problem, because he keeps regarding Aids as an infectious disease!!!...) “They” are all holding their breath for the publication of Celia Farber’s paper in the March issue of “Harpers”. The title of her paper is “The Passion of Peter Duesberg”... Well, we shall see...
De Harven’s statement that ‘Dave R. … passed on the presidency to me’ bears out that the ‘Rethinking AIDS Group’ had died, because had it still been alive ‘the presidency’ would still have been Giraldo’s, and not Rasnick’s to have ‘passed on’ – the Rethinking AIDS Group had no constitution limiting a president’s term, and no one succeeded Giraldo before the organization went to pieces.
This is how de Harven came to be ‘President’; Rasnick simply appointed him. On 28 July 2009 de Harven puffed up his account: he was ‘nominated’ by Rasnick and
I was appointed by the Board soon thereafter, my term starting on March 1st, 2005. The composition of the Board was transmitted to me without any modification.
All this is demonstrably untrue. De Harven couldn’t have been ‘appointed by the Board’ because as Crowe recorded a year later on 2 February 2006, ‘At present the board does not have a functioning decision-making process’ – echoed by de Harven on the 14th: ‘the problem with our Board members is that they just don’t respond or react. They just stay put! I barely hear from them!’ And the ‘composition of the Board’ was substantially different from that of the expired Rethinking AIDS Group, as will be seen below. The fact is de Harven was simply invited by Rasnick to be part of the new organization that he’d asked Crowe to form, just as Crowe and the other ‘board members’ were.
Although given the grand titular position of ‘President’, de Harven found Crowe and Rasnick firmly in control of the new Rethinking AIDS group: they dismissed his urging that membership of the ‘board’ be more internationally and philosophically representative, and when de Harven suggested that I be invited to join (he told me) they rebuffed him with their opinion that there were enough ‘board’ members already. The disingenuousness of this pretext and the animus it veiled is disclosed by the fact that the ‘bylaws’ that were in the process of being drawn up provided for a maximum of twenty-one members, a number of positions that has never been close to being filled.
As de Harven was quick to learn, the new Rethinking AIDS ‘board’ practically functioned, like the previous one had, as a support group for Duesberg. Facilitating Crowe’s control was that most of the individuals lending their names to the ‘board’ were ciphers playing no active role on it and were nominal members only.
When the Perth Group asked Crowe for representation on his new ‘board’, he replied:
that can’t happen until the existing board members can conclude your participation will be cooperative. I certainly don’t want to see your participation come at the price of Duesberg’s.
Here was Crowe making unambiguously plain, even through his verbal slime, his political choice to back the Perth Group’s scientific opponent and to prop up his harmless passenger virus science, which they’d junked a decade earlier, and the truth about ‘HIV’-AIDS: there is no virus.
Part Three
The Rethinking AIDS group’s first ‘board’ meeting
The new Rethinking AIDS ‘board’ held its first meeting on 10–11 June 2006 in New York. Indisposed by a car accident, President De Harven couldn’t attend so Crowe, being an eminently moderate sort of person, presided as ‘Moderator’.
The ‘Report’ of the meeting disconfirmed de Harven’s claim that the new ‘board’ was the same as the defunct one ‘without any modification’ – likewise Crowe’s implication to the same effect: ‘the organization … had a board of directors, with Etienne de Harven as president [which] David Rasnick asked David to join to help him revitalize’.
As at January 2001, when the then ‘moribund’ Rethinking AIDS Group was croaking out its last newsletter before its decease, its fourteen-member ‘Board of Directors’ comprised Roberto Giraldo, Paul Philpott, David Rasnick, Charles Thomas, Harvey Bialy, Celia Farber, Russell Schoch, Tom Bethell, Charles Geshekter, Gordon Stewart, Peter Duesberg, Mark Cradock, John Lauritsen, and Christine Maggiore.
Tom Bethell
Charles Geshekter
Gordon Stewart
Only six of them were listed as ‘board’ members of Crowe’s new Rethinking AIDS operation, according to the ‘Director’ list published in the ‘Report’: Giraldo, Rasnick, Geshekter, Stewart, Duesberg, and Maggiore. (As de Harven mentioned, a seventh member of the defunct ‘Board of Directors’, Harvey Bialy, who was listed by Rasnick for the new group ‘board’, dropped out before the first ‘board’ meeting.)
Crowe was now billed as a ‘Director’. So was Duesberg’s wife Sigrid: new ‘Director’ in charge of the cash being put up by new ‘Director’ Bob Leppo, long-time financial backer of Duesberg and Rasnick too – and as we say over here in Africa, the hand that feeds is the hand that rules. Other new ‘board’ members listed were Etienne De Harven as ‘President’, and Claus Koehnlein, Christian Fiala, Frank Lusardi, and Bryan Owen.
Duesberg’s wife Siggi and Owen would leave, and Maggiore would pass away in 2008. To replace the three vacancies, Crowe brought in three safe new ‘board’ members: Henry Bauer, who would sound off in Crowe’s support in opposing the Perth Group; Helen Lauer, who, equally usefully to Crowe, would remain unconcerned and unengaged; and ‘Non-Voting Board Representative Sandra Mason Treasurer’, who nobody had ever heard of, whose opinions didn’t matter enough to be counted, and who as a ‘Board Representative’ represented no one other than Crowe.
The ‘Report’ from the meeting recorded that
The Perth Group provided a summary of their contributions to the HIV/AIDS debate, including lists of scientific and popular publications. They had requested that it be uploaded to the RA website, but there were concerns over some of the statements (mainly the first and last paragraph). … There was no support for putting this document on the website.
The ‘concerns over some of the statements’ were Crowe’s alone; he’d state them later on, opportunistically flip-flopping and repeatedly contradicting himself (discussed below).
On the other hand,
Dr. Peter Duesberg gave a very well received presentation comparing the infectious and chemically-induced theories of AIDS during the open portion of the meeting. It will be placed on the RA website.
Neither the ‘presentation’ nor the ‘RA website’ mentioned that the ‘chemically-induced theories of AIDS’ were not Duesberg’s, but were the Perth Group’s – and uninformed ‘RA website’ visitors could have learned this had Crowe not rejected the Perth Group’s request to put a summary record of their work online.
To create a veneer of faux legality and legitimacy to his moves in gathering personal power over the international AIDS dissident movement and in seizing the political hill, Crowe cooked up some ‘bylaws’. The main thing was to invent an estate to command:
Signatories, past and future, of the initial 1991 RA statement shall automatically be considered as “Members of the RA Group”
The scam had several crooked legs. For a start, the unpublished letter that Papadopulos-Eleopulos and other members of her Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis signed in 1991 was not an ‘RA statement’: the Group and Rethinking AIDS were different associations formed fifteen years apart, whose only members in common were Duesberg and Stewart. Nor for that matter was Crowe’s new Rethinking AIDS group the same as the preceding Rethinking AIDS Group which had disintegrated under Giraldo. Crowe’s misrepresentation of the Group’s letter as an ‘RA statement’ didn’t make it such any more than telling a lie about something makes it the truth.
Crowe’s chicanery in purporting to create a two-and-a-half-thousand member organization under his charge (first indirectly via de Harven as his powerless dupe, and then directly) merely by writing a deeming provision into his ‘bylaws’ to incorporate the 1991 Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, as well as the individuals who’d subsequently signified their support for its proposal, was so crass as to be ridiculous. One acts to join a genuine organization; one isn’t ‘automatically … considered’ a member, except for the purposes of creating a false public impression that the organization comprises more than the few individuals acting to form it. And to make a fake entry on your CV to mislead your business associates. Hence Crowe’s false claim heading his press releases, on 8 April 2009 for instance:
Rethinking AIDS--an international group of more than 2,600 scientists, doctors, journalists, health advocates and other.
It isn’t.
A ‘board’ signifies a committee directing an enterprise of a larger company of people, a management committee chosen by and answerable to a membership. Crowe’s use of the word ‘board’ is accordingly a deceptive misnomer, because he and his ‘board’ don’t represent and direct any membership beyond themselves. Fact is Crowe’s Rethinking AIDS group has no members besides its ‘board’: the members of the ‘board’ comprise the members of the group and vice versa. The ‘board’ and the group are identical and indistinguishable. And since most of the ‘board’ members are almost entirely inactive, the Rethinking AIDS ‘board’/group functions essentially as Crowe’s alter ego, his corporate ego. (When the members of the ‘board’ vote against him he twice ignores them as irrelevant.)
Crowe’s habit of operating behind corporate personae to generate power over others and to further his personal agenda can be seen in his pretence of posing as ‘President’ of his Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society of one individual, him; his use of his commercial company Cellular Networking Perspectives Ltd, of which he’s sole director and shareholder, as a cover for his illegal financial deals (coming up); and in his behaviour as treasurer and board member of the Alberta Greens, refusing to accept a party vote ousting him, and running out of the hall with all the party’s books of account to hold a furtive meeting in the car park outside, as if he were still in office, to scheme against his successor (coming up).
The ‘Report’ recorded further:
Nominations for board positions were deferred until a conference call in September. The revised bylaws require nomination by any two board members plus a vote for approval of a two thirds majority of the entire board.
Crowe made no provision in his ‘bylaws’ for AIDS dissident scientists and activists around the world, whom he claimed to be the members of his new organization, to propose, to second, and to elect representatives to act on their behalf, speak in their name, and direct and control strategic policy and the scientific line to be taken in attacking the false science of the AIDS orthodoxy. Similarly, there was no constitutional, democratic provision to remove him or other members of the ‘board’. Only the small Duesberg claque that Rasnick and Crowe had assembled as ‘board’ members were given these powers. (To the extent that de Harven has opposed the Perth Group; has worked to marginalize them even as he claims ‘a “reactivated RA” that would not include Val and Eleni would be meaningless’; has plagiarized and then ignorantly corrupted their science; and then, projecting his guilt, has falsely accused them of plagiarism – he’s naturally at home in Crowe’s Rethinking AIDS group.)
Neither ‘in September’ 2006 nor at any other time was there any ‘nomination’ of any member(s) of the Perth Group ‘for board positions’ by Crowe or any other member of ‘the existing board’. Apparently Crowe and a majority of other ‘existing board members … concluded’, following a debate of the matter, that the Perth Group’s ‘participation’ would not likely ‘be cooperative’ with his Duesberg club.
For the same reason there was never any ‘nomination’ of any of the Perth Group’s known supporters, such as veteran American AIDS dissidents Michael Ellner, Rodney Knoll, and Christine Johnson, all battling in the trenches for many years while Rasnick and Crowe were still in bed asleep. In fact in September 2006 there was no ‘nomination’ of anyone else to join the ‘board’ at all. Crowe had enough token members for his show already.
In ‘The Truth about David Crowe’ Crowe divulged the real truth of the matter, the honest truth for a change, namely that giving Papadopulos-Eleopulos a position on his ‘board’ had always been out of the question for him. In his opinion the leading, most brilliant, most rigorous, most radical, most prolific, most productive, and most important scientist of the AIDS dissident movement was unsuitable:
Eleni Eleopulos rarely communicates with other rethinkers and therefore board members are not familiar enough with her communication style to understand whether she could be a cooperative member of the board.
As a core founding member of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, whose first paper on the subject had lent the Group its name, Papadopulos-Eleopulos was unsuitable in his estimation.
Crowe’s claim here was a characteristically blatant lie told to manufacture a transparently false justification for excluding and marginalizing Papadopulos-Eleopulos to his and the Duesberg club’s advantage. Papadopulos-Eleopulos has always communicated readily with other AIDS dissidents, old and new, as any number of Rethinking AIDS group members can attest and eager novices such as Sadun Kal too. She doesn’t use email herself, but no one who has approached her through her long-time corresponding associate Turner or other Royal Perth Hospital colleagues concerning any matter of substance has ever alleged she’s uncommunicative or that she communicates in any sort of unsatisfactory ‘style’. On the contrary, she has a famously warm, direct, helpful, informative, and often delightfully wry ‘style’.
Even if it were true, which it isn’t, Crowe’s lying reason for excluding Papadopulos-Eleopulos from his ‘board’ would have disqualified many of his silent ‘board’ members who ‘rarely communicate with other rethinkers’, Duesberg among them.
As far as Crowe was concerned, Turner’s (actually the Perth Group’s) criticism of his sabotage of the Parenzee case disqualified him as a possible member of his ‘board’ too:
David [Crowe] has stated his personal view that until Val Turner stops attacking board members (not just himself) and instead chooses to enter into constructive dialog he obviously cannot be considered as a potential board member.
Crowe’s habitual segueing from his ‘personal view’ to the views of other members of his group, when it was obvious that he hadn’t actually canvassed them and was falsely and presumptuously imputing his own to the rest, revealed his ‘board’ for the sham it is.
His dishonest mischaracterization of Turner’s (in fact the Perth Group’s) criticism of his disastrous interference in the Parenzee case as unconstructive querulousness, and their critiques of other ‘board’ members’ defective science and scientific misconduct as ‘attacking’ them insinuated personal pettiness, whereas the Perth Group’s criticism has consistently been perfectly professional and the record shows it.
Crowe’s basic take-home message was that for as long as the Perth Group remained critical of his and his ‘board’ members’ bad science, dismal judgement and corrupt ethics, there would be no room for the world’s leading AIDS dissident scientists in his Rethinking AIDS group.
Although the Perth Group hadn’t suggested that their ‘participation’ should ‘come at the price of Duesberg’s’, Crowe’s choice of words (in Part Two) indicated his appreciation that inevitably it would, in that the Perth Group had shown Duesberg’s harmless passenger virus science to be wrong, and were the Perth Group admitted to the ‘board’ it would be sooner rather than later that he’d have to face up to this and concede it, or stubbornly retire from the scene, or be ignominiously ousted. Like a cabbage past its sell-by date removed from the shelves at the grocery and thrown into the tip.
In sum, Crowe knows very well that the Perth Group are right, but he doesn’t want them in his group, because he doesn’t want the scientists among his ‘existing board members’ surrounding him shown up as clueless bumblers. It’s an illustration of the oft-observed principle that able people surround themselves with able people, whereas inept people surround themselves with inept people to protect themselves; it’s in their nature to do so.
The ‘Final revision’ Crowe made to the ‘bylaws’ on ‘January 24, 2007’ contained a striking new clause. Seeing as Leppo had been funding Duesberg’s and Rasnick’s cancer research, Crowe figured he’d make a grab for some of his cash for himself too. It was as easy as writing a new ‘bylaw’ requiring the treasurer to divert some of the organization’s operating funds provided by Leppo into Crowe’s personal bank account – for which favour, and to still any objection, Crowe also stipulated in his new ‘bylaw’ that the treasurer could help himself to some too. With a slice of the cash also paid to the webmaster. Since why should they spend their valuable time working on the problem of AIDS for nothing? Like the rest of us do.
Crowe’s ‘revision’ to his ‘bylaws’ richly provide:
The Board of Directors will include three paid Officers, elected by the Board, namely: one President, one Treasurer, and one Webmaster.
Besides Crowe, no other member of the ‘Board of Directors’ was actively running his Rethinking AIDS group in any sense, as de Harven found out and noted while president; in fact they weren’t even performing the most basic oversight function. So none had any cause to complain about Crowe’s open embezzlement of Rethinking AIDS operating funds or about the open bribes he fixed to buy off potential critics and discontents.
Crowe’s conduct as ‘President’ of the Rethinking AIDS ‘board’ to the Perth Group’s prejudice is partly explained by his conflict of financial interest (his other motives will be canvassed below). To continue earning his income from working to prop up, promote, protect and defend Duesberg’s junk science, Crowe is bound to work against the Perth Group and their correct science, the science he knows to be correct, or Leppo will nominate someone else to replace him and pay him instead.
To distract from his glaring financial conflict of interest corrupting his every move, Crowe contrived up a fatuous diversion couched in home-brewed, cod legalese:
All members of the Board of Directors shall personally certify that they have absolutely no conflict of interest with any of the manufacturers of ARV drugs and/or of “HIV” tests.
As if there was any real prospect of such a conflict, and any sanction available to penalize a contravention of the rule beyond being asked to leave the circle. As if Crowe’s entire Rethinking AIDS operation wasn’t hopelessly compromised from the beginning by having its Duesberg-supporting funder Leppo on the ‘Board of Directors’ – a voting member of the group manifestly much more equal than the others – to direct the organization’s scientific and strategic policy and its operations.
The ‘Report’ of the meeting also noted that:
David will coordinate with Siggi to determine whether establishing RA as a membership charity (501c3) is possible … Action: Investigate requirements for board meetings based on IRS requirements and the BBB ‘Gold Standard’ for charities.
The reason for this is that, as already mentioned, the IRS had deregistered the previous Rethinking AIDS Group when it dissolved and lapsed and consequently stopped submitting annual financial statements, and Leppo understandably wanted his financial support to be tax deductible, as before.
Leppo remains the Rethinking AIDS group’s sole financial supporter, as far as the IRS is concerned, and hasn’t been duped by Crowe’s attempt to fudge this fact by recycling a hundred dollars from his ‘President’s’ salary back in to the coffers to build a different impression, and by soliciting all of $58 from two other people via his Facebook cause page. Where he wrote a year back:
I am still working on accepting donations. I have our treasurer contacting the IRS to change our status to a public charity. Only then will Causes allow us to accept donations. However, anyone can donate via
http://rethinkingaids.com
. Your donation will help convince the IRS that we have more than one major donor. Thanks for your patience!
Concerning what one would have imagined to be the all-important ‘RA Role in Scientific Analysis’, given that Crowe repeatedly touts ‘RA’ as a ‘scientific organization’,
There was no time for this discussion although many other discussions over the weekend touched on this area.
‘Scientific Analysis’ was evidently much less important to Crowe and his Rethinking AIDS group than such pressing, immensely relevant personal growth issues, for which there was ample discussion time, as (no, I’m not making this up, Crowe did):
“What has happened to me as a result of my involvement?” Directors are requested to send the answer to the question to Anthony [Liversidge, Duesberg’s adoring champion, and insulting detractor of the Perth Group, at his Science Guardian blog].
The main reason Crowe made ‘no time’ at the meeting for ‘discussion’ of the critical issue of whether ‘RA’ should play a ‘Role in Scientific Analysis’ is because whereas searching, radical ‘Scientific Analysis’ was the very object of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis co-founded by Perth Group leader Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos in 1991, the contrary purpose of Crowe’s Rethinking AIDS group formed a decade and a half later was precisely to suppress it, and work to suppress it he constantly did.
For instance, the ‘Report’ minuted a proposal by ‘Neville Hodgkinson [following] a meeting with Christian Fiala’ that the Rethinking AIDS group should convene a ‘conference exploring and highlighting challenges to the HIV/AIDS theory’ focusing directly on the problem that ‘At present there is no recognised standard for establishing the presence or absence of antibodies to HIV in human blood’ – in other words pertinently addressing the lack of proof that ‘HIV’ exists as a gold standard for ‘HIV antibody’ tests, and that there can therefore be no ‘HIV antibodies’, as the Perth Group pointed out to Duesberg a decade earlier in their Continuum debate, but which he persisted in disputing at incalculable cost to scientific progress in discrediting the false science of AIDS. Hodgkinson’s and Fiala’s conference proposal found some support:
Roberto Giraldo said it would be good if this could take place next year, as it could help set the scene for [the XVI International AIDS] conference in Mexico in 2008.
There was obviously no support for such a conference expressed by Crowe, according to the ‘Report’, because if the isolation question was addressed and resolved it would be the end of Duesberg and the collapse of his Duesberg-orientated Rethinking AIDS group. This would mean Crowe would have to go back to being ‘President’ of his one-man Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society. And ‘activist with GARLAN’, as he puts it impressively – the dead Yahoo forum he tried to get going for the discussion of legal strategy, concerning which, as a businessman, he considers himself especially knowledgeable. Needless to say, there was no Rethinking AIDS conference on the ‘HIV’ question held the ‘next year’ in 2007.
And when Crowe and Rasnick were organizing their first Rethinking AIDS conference in Oakland, California, in November 2009, and the Perth Group asked him to set up a debate there between themselves and Duesberg on the ‘HIV’ isolation issue, Crowe refused. Indeed, he contrived to ensure the Perth Group’s science on the missing virus problem wasn’t presented at the conference at all. For his part Rasnick left the issue clean off the speaker programme; and it was only following an outcry among AIDS dissidents that Crowe moved, maladroitly, to try cooling things down by asking de Harven to present an unauthorized, uncredited, plagiarized, bastardized, mangled version of the Perth Group’s science on the subject, despite their opposition. Only pouring fuel on the flames in doing so.
And when again in January 2010 Martin Barnes and Georg von Wintzingerode repeated Hodgkinson’s and Fiala’s proposal for the critical debate the Perth Group craved (I’m quoting from different mails):
Georg has suggested a panel with Eleni and Peter. … Georg and I proposed in our letter that Val and Eleni and Peter resolve the existential issue in private … … We consider it essential that this be resolved. … They could communicate in person, send envoys, email, whatever dialogue method they choose. … I think the current situation is intolerable. It is a major reason why we are not taken seriously.
Crowe was predictably opposed, and raised vacuous ‘concerns’ about it, coating them all in the sickening poisoned syrup of a cheap cockroach trap. On 26 January 2010 he wrote Barnes:
I certainly think the idea of a conference in Vienna in 2010 is wonderful.
I have concerns about the resolution of the existential question. I’ll just ask my questions and give my opinions and you can think about them (or not).
· It seems that you have changed from the desire to have a public debate to having an ongoing dialog between holders of different viewpoints. Will this be public, how?
· I don’t think it’s right or realistic to presuppose that the outcome will be a unified position. It is certainly not scientific to have this goal although it’s reasonable to have it as a hope or desire.
· Is the purpose to pick people whose opinions you want to unify or to provide a public forum whereby rethinkers can decide which position they support?
· Let’s assume that the handful of people who participate in this process unify their positions. Is it then your intent to somehow make this position an official dogma of the rethinking movement? How will people who do not hold this position, despite the agreement of a few, be treated?
His stupidity and dishonesty leap off the page: the self-imagined natural leader of men handing down pearls of advice. Garbling the most transparently manipulative, misrepresentative, irrelevant and clueless drivel. With his perverted gift for setting the positive negatively, the negative positively. The entire point of science, as opposed to religion and politics with their ‘official dogma[s]’, is to thrash out competing views and claims by presenting and arguing the evidence for them in debate, at the conclusion of which the one is proved right and the other is proved wrong. So as to settle the scientific controversy in question – in casu, whether ‘HIV’ has been proved to exist or not – and arrive at the correct scientific conclusion on this critical issue, and thereafter attack the HIV-AIDS paradigm with an unanswerable, impregnable ‘unified position’ on the matter. After twenty years of fruitless, self-stymieing criticism with a muddle of antagonistic ‘position[s]’ on the existence of ‘HIV’. Science is debated; correct science is arrived at by debate. In science debate is obligatory, and science averse to debate is not science. But to the businessman and smalltime politician, ‘it is certainly not scientific to have this goal of ... a unified position’ on whether ‘HIV’ exists or not. Such a goal, achieved through debate, is ‘certainly not scientific’. It’s ‘not scientific’, oh no, ‘certainly not’. It is neither ‘right’ nor is it ‘realistic’.
Concerning ‘Establishing Cooperative Relationships and Outreach’, the June 2006 meeting ‘Report’ similarly recorded:
There was no time for this discussion, although many other discussions over the weekend touched on this area.
Again Crowe made no time for discussion of future cooperation and communication with the leading AIDS dissident scientists he had excluded from his group because he didn’t want it; he was committed to selling the opposing Duesberg line. In the years to follow, Crowe avoided ‘Establishing Cooperative Relationships and Outreach’ with the Perth Group at every one of the several opportunities arising to obtain their scientific input. He was never interested in the Perth Group’s scientific acumen and judgement, and on the occasions they provided it unsolicited he dismissed it.
Apparently the idea of the meeting was to impress Leppo by looking busy, with a troupe of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides led by Eagle Scout Crowe on summer camp, building flagpoles and everything, holding earnest fireside discussions of charitable projects to carry out – without achieving anything meaningful at the end of it all. More than a dozen ‘Actions’ were enthusiastically discussed and agreed; only one, the formation of a ‘PR task force’, was actually performed:
David Crowe will work with Tom Di Ferdinando and Bryan Owen to develop an RA website calendar. … Bob Leppo suggested having an ability for people to respond to the rebuttal [‘of Gallo et al to Celia Farber’s Harpers article’] on the website. It was also suggested that we write to Gallo and request a response. …Christine Maggiore moved that we should develop a mission statement, seconded by Roberto Giraldo. Unanimous approval. … Christine Maggiore moved that we develop interview bios for the entire board, seconded by Charles Geshekter. … Christine Maggiore will organize a PR task force. … Bob Leppo moved that RA board authorize the RA foundation to make grants for a wider range of purposes, including films and video. Seconded by Charles Geshekter. … Roberto Giraldo moved that the RA foundation make grants for Brent Leung’s film based on available funds. Seconded by Christine Maggiore. Unanimous agreement. … Charles Geshekter agreed that RA should provide background information to lawyers and recommend expert witness … Roberto Giraldo agreed. … There was extensive discussion of what an advisory board really was. It was agreed that it should contain high profile people who would not be expected to work actively for RA. It was agreed that a minimum number should be arranged (e.g. 3) before going public. Email discussion of potential candidates was recommended. … Bob Leppo moved, seconded by Roberto Giraldo, that we create a task force on fund raising. Bryan Owen and Siggi Duesberg should be on it.
The ‘PR taskforce’ idea epitomized the difference between Papadopulos-Eleopulos’s Perth Group and Crowe’s Rethinking AIDS group – the latter thinking and working as a grinning, glad-handing businessman in retail, imagining that the AIDS juggernaut can be halted with anodyne press releases consistently ignored by the media; and the former thinking and working as a highly focused physicist, her mind in overdrive: working on establishing correct science first and foremost; uniting all forces behind it, tuned like a laser; and facing the orthodoxy with the sharpest blade available, rammed home into the only clear chink in its armour: the missing virus problem.
Veteran AIDS dissident journalists Joan Shenton and Neville Hodgkinson, who flew over from England to attend the meeting, were told to wait outside while ‘Director’ Crowe and his elite met privately for ‘confidential’ deliberations during the ‘Closed Session’ held on each of the two days of the meeting. As the ‘Report’ explained, they only had ‘Guest’ status at the meeting. Also told to wait outside were Michael Ellner and Tom Di Ferdinando of HEAL New York, the original and oldest AIDS dissident organization in the world. What all these stalwart AIDS dissidents have in common is their staunch support for the Perth Group and their correct scientific observation that, contrary to Duesberg and his followers’ claims, there’s no proof ‘HIV’ exists. That’s why Crowe excluded them.
Most ‘confidential’ of the matters discussed was a ‘Confidential Report on Parenzee Case’, a then pending appeal application in Adelaide, Australia, which Crowe had learned about and was busting to get involved in. To his dismay it was resolved at the conclusion of the debate that he and Rethinking AIDS should stay out of it. In contempt of the resolution against him, Crowe proceeded furtively to involve himself in the case – with disastrous consequences, resulting in the most damaging reversal suffered by the AIDS dissident movement since Harvey Bialy torpedoed and sunk the pre-absorption and isolation experiments agreed at the second meeting of Mbeki’s International AIDS Advisory Panel in July 2000.
When criticized by the Perth Group for his conduct in sabotaging the case, Crowe responded by posting a notice on the Rethinking AIDS website claiming his ‘board’ had endorsed his conduct in defying its resolution to stay out of it. This is to say, his Rethinking AIDS group had considered the Perth Group’s complaint in the light of his replies, and had resolved that their complaint was misconceived, unfounded and insupportable by any right-thinking person and that Crowe’s abortion of the case was above reproach, in fact it was exemplary. The Rethinking AIDS group concurred in and approved of Crowe’s ruinous advice to defence counsel Borick to change the agreed trial strategy midway through the trial; to call Rethinking AIDS group scientists Duesberg and de Harven to contradict the Perth Group’s evidence, and each other (in the result he didn’t); and to cross-examine the prosecution witnesses on the basis that, contrary to the Perth Group’s testimony, ‘HIV’ indeed exists but is harmless, as Crowe wanted Duesberg to testify.
As was only fitting, the June 2006 meeting ended with ‘Closing Remarks (Peter Duesberg)’ – Crowe’s star scientist, propounding a theory of ‘HIV’ that nearly everyone present knew to be scientific trash. Crowe clapping along with everyone else, grinning his ingratiating grin, knowing Duesberg, Rasnick and Leppo are where the money is, soon to be jingling in his pocket.
Part Four
Crowe’s Rethinking AIDS website
On 13 June 2006, two days after the Rethinking AIDS group meeting ended, its website appeared. It had taken long enough. According to the WHOIS database, the ‘Domain Name … rethinkingaids.com’ was ‘created on’ on 24 January 2005 (‘Creation Date’). As mentioned in Part One, when the previous Rethinking AIDS Group disintegrated, its website went down and its rethinkingaids.com domain was acquired by a commercial reseller, and then another. According to the web archives read with the WHOIS database, the ‘Rethink AIDS’ (sic) group purchased the domain from the reseller between April and July 2005 (reportedly for $500). The registration information was changed to show the new administrator: new Rethinking AIDS ‘board’ member ‘Bryan Owen’.
The website’s ‘Welcome’ front page featured a link to the Perth Group’s affidavit in the Parenzee case, concisely setting out their case against the existence of ‘HIV’. But not for long. Crowe took it down a few months later to prevent visitors to the website reading it, at the same time that he was persuading Parenzee’s defence counsel Kevin Borick behind the Perth Group’s backs to alter the defence strategy that Borick had agreed with them – from one crisply demonstrating that there’s no proof that ‘HIV’ exists, as they had solidly deposed to and stood cross-examination on unscathed, to one premised squarely on the existence of ‘HIV’ as a harmless virus, as Duesberg claims. Since Crowe considers telling the readily demonstrable truth under oath in court the wrong thing to do; he thinks it’s better to tell the judge lies.
The website’s ‘About RA‘ page repeatedly screwed up the history of scientific dissent from AIDS orthodoxy, wrongly claiming that the original four sentence open letter that Papadopulos-Eleopulos had signed in 1991, among ‘32 scientists with advanced medical degrees’ (untrue) was ‘published in Science (17 Feb. 1995, vol. 267, pp. 945-946)’ (it wasn’t); and when the Perth Group pointed this out, Crowe thanked them and corrected his website, but not his press releases in which he repeatedly persisted in telling it wrong.
What Crowe left unchanged in ‘About RA’ was his opening line:
In 1987, Dr. Peter Duesberg published a paper on cancer research, in which he made the case, almost as an aside, that HIV (a retrovirus, the same class of virus suspected at the time to cause cancer) cannot be the cause of AIDS.
Any uninformed visitor to the Rethinking AIDS website would understand that ‘HIV’ exists as a ‘retrovirus’, and had only to click on Duesberg’s hyperlinked name to see his website and read all his papers contending that ‘HIV’ is a harmless passenger virus neutralized by ‘HIV antibody’. Nowhere in his ‘About RA’ page does Crowe mention the Perth Group’s prior identification of the root trouble with the HIV theory of AIDS, namely that, contrary to Duesberg’s incorrect claim, there’s no proof that ‘HIV … a retrovirus’ exists at all. In fact there’s no mention in the page of the Perth Group and their incomparably more thorough and rigorous scientific work in critiquing and refuting the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS. (For a long time the Perth Group’s website wasn’t even listed among the links elsewhere on the Rethinking AIDS website.) Uninformed visitors would never know that the Perth Group are the generally acknowledged scientific leaders of the AIDS dissident community in terms of their rigour and intelligence, and, unlike Duesberg, their open readiness to defend their claims and debate with anyone in any forum; and they would never know that the Perth Group had critically examined Duesberg’s ‘case’ that ‘HIV [is] a retrovirus’ and had blown it to pieces.
After reading this criticism of his ‘About RA’ page in my ‘tokoloshe letter‘ of 23 July 2009, Crowe conceded in his reply ‘The Truth about David Crowe’:
Anthony Brink certainly has a point that the “About Rethinking AIDS” page could be improved but he has never suggested this to the RA webmaster let alone specific changes that could be made. Constructive and accurate suggestions are usually implemented, especially if specific text is proposed, and he could have thus so easily disproven his suspicions.
It was a cameo of Crowe’s compulsively dishonest ‘communication style’. Firstly, he writes the ‘text’ for his RA website and is entirely in charge of its content, not ‘the RA webmaster’ Lusardi, who posts on his instructions – hence the corrections Crowe himself made to the errors the Perth Group pointed out to him. But you’d understand from his devious reply that Lusardi was responsible for having airbrushed the Perth Group out of the historical/scientific AIDS dissident frame. And that it was somehow my fault for not telling Lusardi how to paint them back in.
Despite conceding my ‘constructive and accurate … specific … point’ concerning his glaring omission of the Perth Group and their work on his ‘About RA’ page, Crowe proceeded to do nothing to fix it to ‘disprove’ website visitors’ ‘suspicions’ that ‘RA’ – as explained by his ‘About RA’ – page was all about promoting Duesberg’s passenger virus science, which the Perth Group had comprehensively examined and shown to be unsound. Crowe’s assurance that ‘Constructive and accurate suggestions are usually implemented’ was a lie: the leading scientists of the AIDS dissident movement remain unmentioned nobodies on Crowe’s ‘About RA’ page today.
Even though (he’s always telling us) he well understands and unreservedly accepts that the Perth Group have shown Duesberg to be fundamentally wrong in claiming ‘HIV’ has been proved to exist, Crowe trumpets Duesberg’s comprehensively refuted harmless passenger virus nonsense on his ‘About RA’ page as the science of Rethinking AIDS, and at the same time omits any mention there of the Perth Group and their correct science. The latest feature article posted on Crowe’s instructions at the top of the Rethinking AIDS homepage quotes boxer Tommy Morrison parroting Duesberg: ‘HIV doesn’t hurt anybody ... It’s a passenger virus, it doesn’t do anything.’
Former Rethinking AIDS president Etienne de Harven had hardly to spell out the obvious on 28 July 2009: ‘we cannot deny that Peter had a dominant influence’ in the Rethinking AIDS group. Hence his earlier remarks on 14 February 2006 that the Rethinking AIDS website ‘should rather be called a “Berkeley Newsletter”’ and that as ‘Duesberg … keeps silent … his “partisans” arrange for RA to resemble a Berkeley club, excluding the rest of the world!!’. Crowe himself admitted to Jim Wolfe on 28 March 2006:
Regarding Rethinking AIDS, the organization does have a somewhat Duesberg bias but I am working to try to make it more amenable to Perth Group views without supporting attacks on Duesberg who has given so much, and who is such a wonderful person in so many ways.
Which, hosed down, means the ‘Rethinking AIDS … organization’ is biased against the Perth Group and their science – and plainly so. Nobody was ‘attacking’ Duesberg, but by portraying the Perth Group’s comprehensive refutation of his claims concerning the existence of ‘HIV’ in this way, Crowe justified keeping the Perth Group and their missing virus science at the margins.
It was obviously inherently impossible ‘to make’ a club propagating Duesberg’s harmless virus science ‘more amenable to Perth Group views’ that this science was fundamentally defective. And this why Crowe never did ‘make’ his Rethinking AIDS group ‘more amenable’ to the Perth Group, because Duesberg’s and the Perth Group’s scientific ‘views’ are radically antithetic, antipodal, antagonistic and incompatible.
Nine months later on 3 December 2006 Crowe wrote Wolfe again:
I have been quietly lobbying for Rethinking AIDS to be more friendly to the Perth Group viewpoint. Unfortunately it is a bit stacked towards the Duesberg viewpoint, but slowly more is being added.
This hypocritical show was right after Crowe had rejected the Perth Group’s request for representation on his Rethinking AIDS ‘board’. In the light of which it wasn’t surprising to hear:
Unfortunately the group is rather drifting. Apart from the website it really has not accomplished very much.
Although at the June meeting Crowe rejected the Perth Group’s summary record of their work and their plea that it be read in the original (and not de Harven’s plagiarized corruption of it), it nonetheless made a brief, belated appearance on the Rethinking AIDS website on 22 August 2006 via a link entitled The Perth Group on the chronology and content of the Perth Group contribution to the HIV/AIDS debate. A few months later, however, when in early 2007 the revamped, current RA website was substituted, Crowe took the document down. When the Perth Group requested he restore it for the information and advice of visitors to the site, he refused, on the basis, he said, that they were claiming ‘scientific priority’, implying that such claim was false. A year later in an email to Turner on 1 May 2008 Crowe had forgotten his ‘concerns’:
I have sensed that you are very concerned about the scientific priority of questioning the existence of HIV. I think it’s pretty clear that it was your group that first raised this.
Arbitrarily lording it over the Perth Group one minute. The next sucking up to them. Then reversing himself again: when de Harven foolishly accused the Perth Group of having plagiarized their missing virus science from Stefan Lanka, Crowe backed him. Instead of deploring his shameless, baseless charge, Crowe pretended de Harven ‘did have some evidence’ that they’re scientific plagiarists. Knowing he didn’t, knowing he couldn’t have, because de Harven’s accusation was clearly false: ‘it’s pretty clear that it was your group that first … question[ed] the existence of HIV’.
Crowe’s conflation on his website and repeatedly in his press releases – ‘Rethinking AIDS: The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis (“RA” or “the Group”)’ – is contrived to deceive people into believing the two groups are one and the same, and that he leads the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis that Papadopulos-Eleopulos co-founded in 1991. With the same fraudulent intent, Crowe conflates her and her fellow ‘founders’ of her Group with ‘key members’ of his Rethinking AIDS ‘board’ by listing their names up in the same paragraph. The false impression he creates is that Papadopulos-Eleopulos is part of his Rethinking AIDS group, led by him.
Even after the Perth Group formally dissociated from Crowe and his Rethinking AIDS group on the grounds of ‘irreconcilable scientific and ethical differences’ (mentioned below), Crowe persists with these frauds to maintain and perpetuate these misapprehensions. But fraud comes naturally to David Crowe.
Subsequent to a vote of the general membership of the Alberta Greens in September 2008 ejecting Crowe from their management board as Chief Financial Officer, the new board uncovered a horrifying can of financial worms with grave criminal and civil ramifications for the party. Inter alia, for the purpose of securing a loan, Crowe and his board had falsely represented to a bank that the party was incorporated, well knowing it wasn’t. And without the knowledge of the other members of the board Crowe and another had secretly made illegal loans to the party in contravention of applicable election law. On 7% interest too, which is to say Crowe was privately profiting financially from his involvement with the party, just as he does from his Rethinking AIDS group. Crowe appreciated the gross irregularity of signing the loan agreement twice wearing two different hats – on one hand in his personal capacity as lender and on the other in his fiduciary capacity to the party as CFO: a textbook case of conflict of interest. So with the low cunning of the practised criminal, Crowe contrived to cover his traces. First, in place of his own name on the loan agreement as the lender he entered his company Cellular Networking Perspectives Ltd (never mind that money-lending to political parties was ultra vires and therefore unlawful in terms of his company’s founding memorandum), and then signed on his company’s behalf without stipulating his name in clear print. But here’s the best part. His fraud would have been too obvious had his signatures matched, so he signed the dotted line twice in completely different fashion, the one signature being his name written out clearly (which he scanned and pasted in as a graphic file), the other being full of swirling circles to look like someone else signing, only you see the same sort of giveaway ‘D…’ at the start and ‘…we’ at the end.
These and many other serious financial irregularities were disclosed in the financial documents and statements obtained by the new board. The rest of them Crowe unlawfully withheld; and unable to comply with financial reporting legislation, the new board was consequently forced to deregister the party in July 2009 for this and other reasons arising from Crowe’s management of the party. Latest news is that on 31 March 2010 Crowe was sued for an order compelling him to turn over the financial statements he didn’t want his successors to see.
As at 10 April 2010, Crowe continues to bill himself as ‘Treasurer, Green Party of Alberta’ on his Rethinking AIDS website, despite his ouster more than a year and a half before.
When I exposed Crowe’s grave misconduct in the HIVAIDSPARADIGM discussion forum, Rethinking AIDS ‘board’ member and webmaster Frank Lusardi deplored my ‘despicable’ and ‘vile campaign’ against this ‘perfectly decent man’. But of course: Crowe had bought his support by fixing him a salary from the Rethinking AIDS operating account as well.
Lusardi is in the Duesberg club: in his review of Rebecca Culshaw’s book Why I Quit HIV at amazon.com, he claimed that she had ‘Not[ed] the long recognized near impossibility of isolating HIV particles even from advanced AIDS patients.’ Which is to say it’s very difficult but not impossible to isolate HIV particles – as Duesberg wrote in his 1989 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
Due to Extremely Low Titres, HIV Can Be Isolated Only With Great Difficulty From AIDS Patients … virus isolation, although possible in up to 80% of AIDS cases is technically very difficult … It depends on reactivation of dormant proviruses from one or a few latently infected lymphocytes among millions of uninfected lymphocytes from AIDS patients.
In fact, what Culshaw noted at pages 45-46 of her book, after the Perth Group, was that
The tests have never been verified against the presence of HIV because, to date, there is no clear evidence that HIV has been isolated in such a manner as to be acceptable as a gold standard for antibody tests.
By which she meant proof of purification, as the Perth Group have explained,
separation of viral particles from everything else and proof of their existence as shown by clear electron micrographs
Jim West recalls to me that when he, Lusardi, Jonathan Campbell, and Mitchel Cohen were fixing to take the orthodoxy on at a professional HIV-AIDS forum, and he emphasized the need to
narrowly focus on the simplicity of no isolation … Frank immediately dropped out.
In his 28 July 2009 email de Harven recounted:
In March 2008 my presidential term was up, and I didn’t want to volunteer for a second term. David Crowe was the only candidate, and his nomination was strongly pushed by Bob Leppo. He was unanimously appointed by the Board.
Here was the paid reward Crowe had fixed for himself for working so loyally as a political asset and servant of the Duesberg passenger virus club; for constantly acting against the Perth Group’s in their endeavour to demonstrate the real, fundamental problem with the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS, the missing virus problem; and for his tireless efforts in helping the medical industrial complex stabilize the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS by stabilizing the myth of ‘HIV’.
Part Five
The Perth Group dissociates from Crowe’s Rethinking AIDS group
On 16 September 2009 the Perth Group responded to Crowe’s insistence on associating them with his Rethinking AIDS group’s scientific ignorance and incompetence – the final straw being their dismal leaflet ‘The AIDS Trap‘ – by formally dissociating from him and his group.
Crowe’s historical achievement had been to rupture the AIDS dissident movement into two fundamentally opposed camps: the Perth Group with their clear scientific and strategic focus on the root scientific problem with the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS, supported by all the world’s scientifically literate AIDS dissidents, versus Crowe’s flyblown rump Rethinking AIDS group selling Duesberg’s harmless passenger virus science that doesn’t stand scrutiny, supported only by a cult of personal hero worshippers.
Plus de Harven’s bumbling, contradictory version of the Perth Group’s science which he’d taken uncredited and then bungled, at the same time going around telling people that they are ‘WRONG’.
Plus Henry Bauer’s attempt to play it both ways by conceding in a published article and in his book that ‘HIV’ has ‘never been properly isolated’ as the Perth Group have demonstrated right from the beginning; next, as Duesberg’s co-author backing his diametrically opposing passenger virus story; and then writing and publishing an article based squarely on the Perth Group’s work, but riddled with errors and contradictions, and reiterating their case that there’s no gold standard for the ‘HIV’ tests, which is to say ‘HIV’ has never been isolated to function as such. Only he doesn’t say it in his paper, because if he did it would be all the more obvious that he was just parroting their original scientific work and insights.
To stay politically onside in Crowe’s group (he wants to succeed him as ‘President’), Bauer supports Crowe’s opposition to the Perth Group’s plea for a debate with Duesberg to resolve the critical issue that has divided and hamstrung the AIDS dissident movement: whether ‘HIV’ has been proved to exist, as Duesberg claims, or hasn’t, as the Perth Group demonstrate and Bauer himself accepts.
Incredibly, the retired Professor of Science Studies sees no point in discussing this crucial scientific disagreement concerning the core of the AIDS construct, no need to settle it. He thinks it’s a good idea for his Rethinking AIDS group to attack the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS with a gaggle of inconsistent, contradictory theories and claims. So he told Michael Ellner on 20 August 2009:
A fundamental misconception seems to be that RA as such, or the RA Board as such, should strive to take a definite position on a scientific question (the existence or non-existence or lack of proven existence of “HIV”. The organization, originally the Group, was formed to push for THE RETHINKING OF THE HIV CAUSES AIDS HYPOTHESIS. Religious groups may insist on a dogmatic answer to central questions. Scientific organizations don’t. ... Insisting that RA somehow move to settle questions regarding the nature of “HIV”is to wish it to become like a religious sect.
The impotent quality of the old academic huckster’s argumentation hardly warrants comment. On 28 January 2010 he persisted in the HIVAIDSPARADIGM forum:
There is no reason to assume or to believe that the existential question is ripe to be settled.
In a post two days earlier, he put up an explanation of why he claims to think there is no benefit, scientific or otherwise, to resolving the ‘central’ ‘HIV’ question:
Media and mainstream would listen to us no better if we were to all agree that HIV is a harmless passenger virus, or if we were all to agree that HIV has never been shown to exist, or if we were to all agree that HIV doesn’t exist. It’s an ACADEMIC argument and issue, in both meanings of “academic”.
In fact it’s a pivotally important issue: depending on where you start, the arguments against the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS are totally different: once you give them their virus, the debate is quickly lost.
Rethinking AIDS group member Helen Lauer shares Bauer’s thinking. In an email to Duesberg and others, Lauer included, Sadun Kal quoted her on 2 August 2008:
I read through and immediately thought: If “most people don’t even know that such a debate even exists,” why bother them about it?
It was all an echo of Crowe’s email to Kal and others on 27 May 2008, expressing the same ‘thought’:
I don’t believe in an inward strategy which bases so much on an internal debate that the outside world will pay no attention to.
Val Turner mailed Crowe on behalf of the Perth Group on 3 December 2008:
If the dissidents are to gain any credibility the various scientific differences must be resolved. The most important question to address is the existence of HIV.
On this either you agree or disagree. It’s about time you stated your position and acted accordingly.
Concerning ‘the existence of HIV’ Crowe had already ‘stated [his] position’ on it many times: Duesberg’s passenger virus science is completely wrong, ‘HIV’ has never been isolated. But instead of ‘act[ing] accordingly’, Crowe propounds Duesberg’s bad science on his website and in court. As for the Perth Group’s insistence that the ‘various scientific differences must be resolved’ especially ‘the existence of HIV’, Crowe disagrees, he told Kal, because he reckons no one in ‘the outside world’ has any interest in this critical issue. Completely missing the Perth Group’s point.
To Celia Farber and Torsten Engelbrecht the Perth Group wrote on the same day:
We agree with Torsten’s four points.
# We are NOT at all successful in fighting the HIV=AIDS dogma
# The rethinkers on earth are NOT united
# We have practically NO money to finance effective/concerted actions/campaigns
# We do NOT have the power to reach public opinion
To these we would like to add one of our own. The only way for us to become united is to address and resolve the seminal issue. The existence of HIV. As Michael Ellner said in his email July 25th, the existence of HIV “has become the entire movement’s soft spot”. And it’s about time everybody stopped backing every horse in the stable. To extend Michael’s email in regard to Peter D, everyone “has an obligation and responsibility to respond” to the existence question. …
Celia we … agree we are fighting big money and our side has to be of one mind. But we also must remember the basis of the big money is science, as bad as it may be. We have to fight science with science. And, unlike the opposition, we have to be 100% scientifically accurate with every single word we write if we want to be believed. Being right is only 3% of the answer and the remaining 97% is politics. But without the 3% the race doesn’t start.
Crowe, Bauer and Lauer disagree with this analysis, and the rest of the Rethinking AIDS group too, apparently. Certainly Christian Fiala.
At the June 2006 Rethinking AIDS group/board meeting he and Neville Hodgkinson proposed that a dedicated conference be held ‘exploring and highlighting challenges to the HIV/AIDS theory’, focusing on the implications of the conventional ‘HIV’ antibody test kit disclaimer, ‘there is no recognised standard for establishing the presence or absence of antibodies to HIV’ – implying that ‘HIV’ has never been isolated and thereby proved to exist.
In an exchange of email in December 2009/January 2010, Georg von Wintzingerode proposed to Martin Barnes that such a conference be held
in Europe. … Neville Hodgkinson … said so also years ago already. … Concentrating on the “HI”-V-isolation and purification would also help. I asked Peter Duesberg when I met with him last summer in Mannheim, whether he would be available for a panel together with Eleni on that topic and he said he would be available.
The best place for it would be
Vienna, due to the fact, that the next ortho-Event [the 18th International AIDS Conference] is going to take place in Vienna in June/July timeframe.
Crowe told von Wintzingerode and Barnes that
Christian Fiala was thinking of an event in Vienna, somewhere near the time and place of the orthodox event. It would seem like a good focal point.
Barnes informed Fiala that he and von Wintzingerode were
interested in helping you organize the conference in Vienna in June that you have proposed. … Georg has suggested a panel with Eleni and Peter.
Fiala acknowledged the offer of support, and Barnes and von Wintzingerode responded with numerous specific suggestions, most importantly:
Existential Question: We consider it essential that this be resolved. We would like to suggest a process, beginning immediately, of exchange between the Perth Group, Duesberg (maybe de Harven, and Maniotis) with a mandate of information exchange and discussion by internet or in person with the required goal of a unified, understandable position to be presented at the conference.
The suggestion was now to resolve the ‘Existential Question’ before the conference rather than during it so that the dissidents at the conference would speak the best, settled, correct science established by debate. Barnes and von Wintzingerode had evidently grasped the Perth Group’s argument that the AIDS orthodoxy has to be attacked with a clear, consistent, scientifically accurate position on ‘HIV’.
As mentioned in Part Two, Crowe opposed any ‘information exchange and discussion by internet or in person’ between the Perth Group and Duesberg to ‘resolve the essential … Existential Question’. So, in the end, did Fiala. As conference organizer, together with ‘the main contact person … Uta Santos-König … [a] GP in Vienna’ (and neophyte in the AIDS controversy), Fiala did nothing to facilitate a debate between the Perth Group and Duesberg, as von Wintzingerode and Barnes had urged, to ‘resolve the essential … Existential Question’ – notwithstanding, according to von Wintzingerode, Duesberg’s expressed willingness to participate.
Indeed, Fiala sent no invitation to Papadopulos-Eleopulos at all – neither to debate Duesberg nor even to address the conference; the leading scientist of the AIDS dissident movement was snubbed and excluded yet again.
But not the Duesberg club: Duesberg, Bauer, David Rasnick, Claus Köhnlein, Marco Ruggiero, and Celia Farber were all invited. Among them Harry van der Zee too, a homeopath who reckons that with his marvellous
PC1 remedy … for HIV/AIDS … in Africa … the AIDS epidemic can be called to a halt.
Like fellow Rethinking AIDS group members Crowe and Rasnick when organizing their November 2009 conference, Fiala didn’t consider Papadopulos-Eleopulos good enough or suitable enough or desirable enough to present her Copernican scientific insights on the missing virus problem herself. Instead, Fiala invited two physicians, Heinrich Kremer and Juliane Sacher; three journalists, Hodgkinson, Joan Shenton, and Janine Roberts; a mathematician, Rebecca Culshaw; and a health group director, Lluis Botinas – all of whom more or less support her science on the matter, but none of whom actively support her in her strategic focus on Montagnier’s claim to have isolated ‘HIV’ in 1983.
Pulling the same trick that Crowe had done at his Rethinking AIDS conference in 2009 to divert attention from the core problem with the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS, the inconvenient truth that ‘HIV’ has not been proved to exist, the inconvenient truth threatening to collapse his Duesberg club, Fiala sent an invitation to Papadopulos-Eleopulos’s collaborator Turner – but only to give
a presentation from your side about testing and the problems with HIV tests
and not about the ‘essential … Existential Question’.
As with Crowe’s Rethinking AIDS conference in 2009 (his ‘board meeting’ in 2006 too), again Papadopulos-Eleopulos was not invited, and again her collaborator Turner was – but to speak only to the unreliability of the tests, and not the Perth Group’s basic science on the isolation issue, in regard to which everyone knows she’s done all the original work.
After discussion with his colleagues in the Perth Group, Turner asked Fiala who
the other participants are and the topics of their presentation.
They were obviously interested to know whether de Harven would be present at the conference too, even though not mentioned in the list of invitees. Would the cellphone businessman and self-imagined legal expert Crowe be there to tutor the conference on how to lose cases involving alleged transmission of ‘HIV’? Fiala was unwilling to say, for Turner got no reply, not even to a reminder; and he declined to attend accordingly.
On 22 April Papadopulos-Eleopulos wrote to Fiala mentioning that she was ‘disappointed’ that he had not invited her, because when
we heard that Georg and Martin were planning a dissidents’ meeting … to coincide with the next International AIDS conference ... I was very excited and looking forward to participating, especially that they were talking about discussing our disagreement with Peter in regard to the evidence for the existence of “HIV”. Our only worry was that the meeting would be high-jacked by Crowe.
Having not been invited to speak, she asked if she might at least
distribute, at the entrance to the venue, our latest publication? It deals again with more questions regarding the isolation of HIV by Montagnier.
In his reply on 2 May, Fiala ignored her implicit plea. Sure she could distribute her paper at the door. She could even
also give a talk, for example on MTCT.
A talk on the virus Duesberg claims is transmitted from mother to child. But not ‘regarding the isolation of HIV by Montagnier’. Fiala certainly didn’t want her to ‘give a talk’ on that, on the fact that Montagnier never isolated any virus, and that Duesberg was flat wrong in uncritically allowing and claiming that he did.
Nor was there any apology for not inviting her; she was invited, he said:
We are trying to bring some critical aspects in the public debate. ... Therefore we have contacted a number of people in the field. Obviously you and Val were among them. In an email 13 April Val informed us that none of you could participate which we accepted with regret.
But Papadopulos-Eleopulos wasn’t ‘among them’, and Turner never ‘informed us that none of you could participate’.
One didn’t have to look far to discover Fiala’s reason for killing Hodgkinson’s proposal that von Wintzingerode and Barnes had taken up and sharpened: that Duesberg and the Perth Group should confer to debate the critical issue of whether ‘HIV’ has been proved to exist. Santos-König, the ‘main contact person’ for the Vienna conference, told Turner that ‘christian fiala [sp. sic] of course will also talk’. About what, Fiala himself announced in his conference press release in March: why, he had a brand new theory of ‘HIV’ to share, a brand new theory all of his own: ‘HIV’ wasn’t a ‘nasty retrovirus’, he told us:
Has the virus become harmless? No, it has always been harmless – an endogenous virus (i.e. produced naturally in the body) such as may occur in any healthy placenta. Faulty interpretations of observations will inevitably lead to flawed conclusions.
That’s for sure. Hadn’t he understood the Perth Group’s point, supported by evidence, made to de Harven and Andrew Maniotis?
At present there is no evidence that proves the existence of endogenous retroviruses. This is at least one point of agreement between the Perth Group and Gallo. During the Parenzee trial, Gallo said a number of times, by definition, a particle can be considered to be a virus if, and only if, evidence exists that it is transmittable. Responding to a question put to him by Kevin Borick he stated: “…endogenous retroviruses aren’t viruses as your first witness [E.P-E] properly said, they are particles, they have never been transmitted. A virus is something that infects, that you prove goes from person. A to B. Short of that they are particles. Where a virus at least has to be transmitted in vitro in the laboratory, it goes from one cell to another, it’s never been demonstrated for endogenous retrovirus”. (T1298).
Even Duesberg rejects Fiala’s new theory, and correctly so for different (wrong) reasons. In an email on 10 November 2009, Barnes’s paraphrased what he told Crowe’s Rethinking AIDS conference a couple of days earlier:
Duesberg said that since the sequence for HIV is not in the human genome, what is being measured as HIV could not be an endogenous retrovirus.
Which Duesberg confirmed the next day:
The information that the sequence of HIV is not part of the human genome is from the Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK.
In his invitation to Turner, Fiala mentioned:
we are expecting a huge interest as the international conference expects 25 000 participants, among them 2 000 media people. And we will most probably be the only critical event during that time.
Any of the ‘2000 media people’ or other ‘25 000 participants’ swinging through Fiala’s circus stand to be treated to a tragi-comic scientific Punch and Judy Show along the following lines:
Duesberg: The HIV theory of AIDS is wrong because rather than being deadly, HIV is a long-established, non-pathogenic passenger virus, neutralized by antibody after asymptomatic, perinatal or non-perinatal infections. By ‘non-perinatal infections’ I mean via sex and blood transfusions. I was wrong to say Montagnier ‘achieved the isolation’ of this virus in 1983; I realize now, having heard the Perth Group on this, that he didn’t prove the existence of HIV by isolation as he claimed he did, and I initially said he did, but it doesn’t matter because the existence of HIV has subsequently been proved genetically. It’s also been proved by crystallography (this is my latest ‘answer‘ to the Perth Group). As you can see, I keep changing my story and coming up with new ones. You say the Perth Group have shot my new stories down too? Well now you know why I’ve been avoiding a debate with them: there’s one thing I can never do and that’s admit I was wrong about HIV; that would suggest the whole of retrovirology is in trouble and I’m not about to make a concession like that. Think what it would mean for the whole of molecular biology! And for me as a professor teaching it for a living! I’ve got far much too much at stake to concede such a thing.
Chorus of Rasnick, Bauer, Köhnlein, Ruggiero, Farber, and van der Zee: That’s right! HIV is a long-established, non-pathogenic passenger virus, neutralized by antibody after asymptomatic, perinatal or non-perinatal infections. Peter Duesberg is a professor of cell and molecular biology and member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He’s got status and he’s got credentials. He’s the man to rely on!
Rasnick: Just one thing. Peter is completely wrong to say HIV is transmitted ‘readily’ between ‘the most sexually active homosexuals’, but with ‘extremely low efficiency’ between heterosexuals. As I said to Joseph Sonnabend in a letter I posted to the internet forum of Mbeki’s AIDS Advisory Panel, ‘If AIDS is sexually transmitted in the USA then HIV prefers to cause AIDS in men. A very smart virus … I have shown you evidence that HIV is not sexually transmitted.’
And although I agree with Peter that ‘a French virus team … discovered a retrovirus in a homosexual man at risk for AIDS, which a year later became the accepted cause of AIDS (Barré-Sinoussi 1983)’, I also disagree with him about this because actually ‘HIV has never been obtained from a human being.’ I repeat, it’s ‘never been obtained from a human being’ – by which I mean ‘infectious viable virus ... obtained ... directly from the patient ... from a sample of blood [after you] spin it in a centrifuge’. Since I’m only a chemist, and way out of my depth here, I wasn’t aware that one never obtains ‘infectious viable virus’ in this way, but from cultures. I hope nobody points out my ignorance in front of everyone at the Vienna conference. Or that I contradict Peter on the sexual transmission of HIV. Or that I contradict myself on whether HIV has ever been found in a person.
Bauer: I just want to clarify that although I agree with Peter that ‘HIV is a long-established, non-pathogenic passenger virus, neutralized by antibody after asymptomatic, perinatal or non-perinatal infections,’ I also agree with the Perth Group that it isn’t, because as I said on my blog on 19 April 2010:
‘HIV’ has never been isolated or proven to exist.
And this is why I’ve taken to putting ‘HIV’ in inverted commas these days, as the Perth Group do.
Fiala: You are all wrong. HIV is actually part of us. We’re made up of viruses, partly, and HIV is one of them. It’s one of the viruses we’re made of. I don’t have any evidence for this, but I’m sure I’ll find some if I go looking. And when I do, I’ll write a paper about this exciting new theory of mine. Science is going to publish it on its front page!
Yes I know I agreed with the Perth Group in 2001 that HIV has never been isolated by purification and thereby proved to exist. And I know I agreed with them about this again in 2004. Well I was wrong, they’re wrong about that. They are wrong to say HIV has never been isolated by purification and thereby proved to exist. Last year I changed my mind and agreed with Peter that it does exist after all, just as Montagnier, Gallo and all the AIDS experts say, with the small twist that actually HIV is a long-established, non-pathogenic passenger virus, neutralized by antibody after asymptomatic, perinatal or non-perinatal infections. This year I changed my mind once again and decided that not only are the Perth Group wrong about HIV, so is Peter, because HIV is an endogenous retrovirus produced naturally in the body.
To me we’re basically in a political battle against the AIDS orthodoxy, so in disproving the HIV theory of AIDS science is completely unimportant . We have to be political about this. All we have to do is say: The HIV theory of AIDS is wrong! We don’t agree with it! We must fight it! We must all fight AID$ Inc together! It doesn’t matter if we talk scientific rubbish. It doesn’t matter if we contradict ourselves and contradict each other every five minutes. We’re AIDS dissidents.
Chorus of Kremer, Sacher, Hodgkinson, Shenton, Roberts, Culshaw, and Botinas calling across the stage: These clowns are an embarrassment to us!
And so on – one can just imagine, cringing, as the ‘2000 media people’ or other ‘25 000 participants’ visiting Fiala’s AIDS dissident conference all roar with laughter at the ridiculous AIDS dissident movement. Since ‘President’ Crowe and his Rethinking AIDS group think it’s ‘healthy’ for the AIDS dissidents to knock each other about quarrelling, like Punch and Judy, as I said, while everyone watches with amusement. And this is why ‘President’ Crowe and his Rethinking AIDS group do nothing to facilitate a resolution of the crippling internal controversy concerning the existence of ‘HIV’.
(According to the conference website put up in early May, the speaker list, still provisional, had changed a bit; and again towards the end of the month: de Harven was now slated to give a talk on Papadopulos-Eleopulos’s work: ‘Questioning the very existence of HIV’. Only he wouldn’t be saying it was her work.)
As for Duesberg – like Gallo, unwilling to defend his science – Crowe asked Kal on 27 May 2008:
Do you want me to force him to debate if he doesn’t want to?
He wrote similarly to Turner on 1 May 2008:
I’m not trying to stop anything. I have just stated that I am not going to participate in a ganging up on Peter Duesberg and others who genuinely believe that HIV does exist.
To Crowe, exhibiting the crippled psychology of a bullied school nerd, calling on Duesberg to defend his claims as a scientist, like a scientist, in a debate with the Perth Group is ‘ganging up’ on him.
In fact it’s apparent from his exchange with Michael Nitsche that Duesberg doesn’t ‘genuinely believe’ in his retrovirus at all. And this is why he acts like Gallo, about whom he complained to Celia Farber: he
literally runs away from me. Usually when you challenge a major hypothesis, you get a rebuttal, but here it’s total avoidance. They don’t want to talk, they don’t want to be seen by me.
Thus does Duesberg (to echo Crowe’s language) ‘behave in exactly the same way that the establishment currently does against all of us’ – by refusing to engage with Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her Perth Group and those AIDS dissidents who ‘challenge [his] major hypothesis’ that ‘HIV’ is a harmless passenger virus. Such grossly unscientific behaviour is permissible in Crowe’s view; since Duesberg has made so many ‘sacrifices’, we must excuse his disgraceful scientific misconduct.
Duesberg has suggested that the reason he won’t behave like a scientist should and respond properly to the Perth Group’s challenge to his ‘major hypothesis’, their identification of his defective and false scientific contentions, is because debating the evidence for the existence of ‘HIV’ would be a very sad thing to do:
It seems tragic that over 99% of AIDS researchers study a virus that does not cause AIDS and that the few who don’t are now engaged in a debate over the existence of a virus that doesn’t cause AIDS.
More than ‘tragic’, it’s harmful, he told HEAL founder Michael Ellner in May 1998, ringing him up to demand he cancel Stefan Lanka’s speaking tour of HEAL chapters around the US, at which he was presenting the Perth Group’s science. Contending there’s no proof ‘HIV’ exists would cause the AIDS dissident movement immense damage, Duesberg insisted.
Bauer agrees; the Perth Group’s identification and public assertion of the missing virus problem can
only reinforce the mainstream insistence that we’re cranks.
So reckons the Loch Ness Monster fan.
In the conclusion of their criticism of Crowe’s fatal interference in the Parenzee trial, the Perth Group recorded:
In 20/3/2008, that is, a year ago, we asked you two questions.
“Our questions are:
· Since the “HIV” experts, including Montagnier and Gallo, admit:
o to prove the existence of a virus, it is necessary to purify the particles and to show that they have unique RNA.
o To date, no “HIV” experts including Montagnier and Gallo, have proof of purification and admit that there is no unique RNA.
why should the dissidents give to the “HIV” experts that which they admit they do not have and debate with half-truths?
· It is possible for the dissidents to be proven correct by debating with half-truths?”
After a reminder you responded on 31/3/2008: “I do plan to respond comprehensively to this. Unfortunately this has come at a very busy time for me, and obviously I need to put extensive thought into a response”.
Despite our repeated requests we still await your response. These are straightforward questions of pivotal significance for the dissident movement. Is your tardiness because (i) the answers require much scientific knowledge; (ii) the answers are obvious but run contrary to vested interests; (iii) other reasons? Regardless of any excuses, how can the movement achieve its goal when the leader is either unable or unwilling to answer such crucial questions?
In the more than two years that have passed since the date the Perth Group posed their questions to him, and despite repeated reminders, Crowe has not honoured his undertaking to ‘respond’ – either ‘comprehensively’ or at all. The reason is obvious. He cannot answer honestly without conceding the burden of the Perth Group’s argument. And as is well known, he’s not honest enough to do a thing like that.
On 30 November 2008, in reply to Turner’s charge the day before that
Your interference in the Parenzee case was highly counter productive to say the least.
Crowe blurted stupidly:
Clearly we disagree on many strategic issues related to court cases. …
I would love for someone to develop sure-fire legal tactics which is why I spend a lot of time communicating with lawyers. But so far everyone agrees this is an uphill battle. But still worth the struggle! …
My tactics, yes. Given that none of us have yet been successful in overturning the paradigm one could either assume that none of us have the right tactics, or that it’s impossible, or that it’s very difficult and we have not achieved our goals yet. …
I’m just very committed to trying to organize the rethinking movement into a cohesive force. Some of the things I’ve done I’m very proud of. Some I just hope everyone’s forgotten because they fell flat or in retrospect just seemed dumb. But sometimes you have to do something before you know whether it’s going to be effective.
Crowe’s clear implication was the Perth Group hadn’t employed ‘sure-fire legal tactics’ in demonstrating that ‘HIV’ has never been isolated and thereby proved to exist, but never mind because he was still working with his lawyers on coming up with some, although unsuccessfully so far, but better than the Perth Group’s trial strategy of raising an answerable scientific defence, which was not ‘right’, and the failure of the case that he’d sabotaged by changing the scientific foundation of the defence midstream only proved it. But introducing contradictory science into the case wasn’t among the ‘dumb’ things he’d done, which he ‘hope[s] everyone’s forgotten’ – he thought, and still thinks, it was a very clever thing to do. The thing is to ‘just [be] very committed’ to spiking your best guns.
And the best way to ‘organize the rethinking movement into a cohesive force’ is to criticize the conventional theory of AIDS in a scientifically incoherent way, such as he does, and as Fiala is fixing to do at his dissident conference in Vienna in July 2010.
Crowe responded to the Perth Group’s vote of no confidence in him and his group, to his dismissal notice by the leading scientists of the AIDS dissident movement, by pretending nothing had happened, nothing had changed. Nothing appeared on his Rethinking AIDS website acknowledging the development, and in an email on 8 December 2009 he claimed in the teeth of the facts:
There is no scientific rift between RA and the Perth Group. There are members of the RA board who have sided with the Perth Group on the isolation issue …
In truth – for he was lying again – none of the ‘members of the RA board have sided with the Perth Group on the isolation issue’ in any real sense: none propound the Perth Group’s science on the ‘isolation issue’, none support them on the vital strategic importance of pressing ‘the isolation issue’ in attacking the orthodoxy. On the contrary, the ‘members of the RA board ... sided’ against ‘the Perth Group on the isolation issue’ in supporting Crowe’s disastrous advice to Parenzee’s counsel Kevin Borick to abandon the defence strategy he’d agreed with the Perth Group, centring precisely on ‘the isolation issue’, and to proceed, after they’d testified that ‘HIV’ hasn’t been purified, on the basis that it has been, only it’s harmless as Duesberg claims.
The board is there to run the organization not to define the scientific positions that board members or other members of RA must take. I agree that focusing on AID$ Inc. is more important, which is why I am ignoring most of the messages that are attacking RA and its board members.
As already pointed out, Crowe’s ‘organization’ has no ‘other members’ other than his ‘board’, so the ‘board’ is the ‘organization’. In practice, Crowe and his ‘organization … take … scientific positions’ opposed to the Perth Group’s ‘scientific position’ that Montagnier never isolated any retrovirus, be it ‘endogenous’ although not ‘HIV’ per de Harven or a harmless passenger virus per Duesberg.
On his Rethinking AIDS website and in head-on engagement with the orthodoxy, Crowe himself propounds Duesberg’s ‘scientific position’ that ‘HIV’ exists as a harmless passenger virus – evident from the questions Crowe drew for Borick to put to Gallo in cross-examination (which he falsely denied having drawn), and in the grounds of further appeal he drew for Borick when thanks to him the appeal was lost: nowhere does Crowe challenge Gallo’s isolation claim; rather he supports it by suggesting Gallo stole his virus from Montagnier, and one can’t steal what doesn’t exist. This is how Crowe supports ‘AID$ Inc’. This is how he makes his money.
The entire point of the Perth Group’s critical difference with Crowe goes to ‘focusing on’ the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS in the correct, most effective way possible, with the best, unanswerable science. Crowe prefers Duesberg’s easily refuted science instead. He then portrays the Perth Group’s criticism of him for doing this as an unproductive distraction from ‘focusing on AID$ Inc’.
Crowe’s support for – and in defiance of his ‘board’, his attempt to hijack – Janine Roberts’s worthless letter to Science about Gallo not having found any virus, is a shambles I’ve addressed elsewhere (see further).
In view of Crowe’s refusal to acknowledge the Perth Group’s dissociation from him and his Rethinking AIDS group on his website or in any other manner, they asked him to announce it to his November 2009 conference by way of a simple one line statement. Again Crowe refused. The result was that, apart from those on the Perth Group’s mailing list, people attended the conference under the misapprehension that the Rethinking AIDS group is an ‘umbrella organization’ (per Bauer in the HIVAIDSPARADIGM forum on 25 July 2009) representing the entire AIDS dissident movement, rather than the Duesberg club, excluding the Perth Group as our leading scientists.
Among the conference attendees misled by Crowe was Bauer himself: many months later, on 10 February 2010, he revealed on Celia Farber’s ‘The Truth Barrier’ blog that he’d been oblivious of the the Perth Group’s move – which only showed, he said, that the Perth Group were not ‘grown-up’ like him, a ‘fact’ they were not able to ‘hide’ by ‘thinking’ before acting. As he does. And clever him.
Part Six
Who does he think he is? The ludicrous conceit and make-believe world of David Crowe
Apart from the money he does it for, Crowe’s motivation to work at frustrating and marginalizing the Perth Group may be found in his self-conception as more astute in the determination of correct, effective scientific strategy than the Perth Group are. He actually thinks he’s a more intelligent person. And believes we need him. He’s convinced he’s the indispensable leader of the international AIDS dissident movement.
To begin with, unlike the Perth Group and their supporters, he’s a ‘practical’ person, he announced in a statement emailed on 21 January 2009:
Practicality is, unfortunately, not a characteristic of all scientific dissidents.
We need him to manage us, in other words. Especially since no other AIDS dissident has his unique ‘organizational skills’, as he claimed on 22 August 2009 in reply to Jonathan Campbell’s criticism of his decision to exclude me as the Perth Group’s nominated speaker to present their science at his Rethinking AIDS group conference in November:
Not only that, your aim appears to be to destroy RA 2009. While it’s clearly not a perfect conference how can any sane dissident believe that the movement’s better off without it? Where else are the organizational skills to arrange something like this? If such people or organizations exist why haven’t they done it before?
Crowe’s estimation of his unprecedented ability to arrange conferences springs from his evident ignorance of the numerous international AIDS dissident conferences that have been convened around the world over the years, most recently in Ekaterinburg, Russia, in May 2008, for which I coordinated the selection and invitation of the foreign speakers.
But the Perth Group are not only impractical, the leading scientists of the AIDS dissident movement are also too egotistical to be part of his ‘board’. In an email to Liam Scheff on 1 August 2009 Crowe claimed,
many dissidents are too self-directed and opinionated to work in any organization. That’s okay by me, RA can cooperate with people who can’t or don’t want to see themselves as part of it. Unfortunately, and this is a criticism, many dissidents are too unstrategic to recognize that the accomplishments of RA (such as the RA 2009 conference) will bring us all forwards and would rather destroy it than see it go forwards in what they consider a less than perfect form. … If I was to go, who would lead RA? Would the rethinkers be better off without a scientific organization?
All this fence yapping and whipped dog whimpering was directed at the Perth Group, ‘too self-directed and opinionated to work’ with him and his ‘organization’; lacking the necessary ‘practicality’ and ‘organizational skills’; and ‘too unstrategic’ in doing science – from the mouth of the jabbering fool who advised Parenzee’s counsel to fundamentally change his defence strategy in the middle of the hearing; to concede the orthodox experts’ claim that ‘HIV’ has been proved to exist right after the Perth Group had testified it hadn’t; to cross-examine the orthodox experts on this basis; and to call Duesberg and de Harven after the Perth Group had given their testimony to introduce a welter of contradictory testimony to really impress the judge and clinch the case.
Crowing about the ‘accomplishments of RA (such as the RA 2009 conference)’, the letter to Science (see extensive critiques and discussion here), and The AIDS Trap brochure could not convert their failures – ‘(such as the RA 2009 conference)’ in particular, completely ignored by the orthodoxy and the media – into successes; and far from ‘bring us all forwards’, Crowe’s towering ‘accomplishment’ as boss of his Rethinking AIDS group had been to alienate the universally acknowledged leading AIDS dissident scientists, with one inept, counterproductive ‘accomplishment’ after another, to the point of fomenting a permanent division in the AIDS dissident movement.
Perhaps appreciating his contemptible incompetence at some subconscious level, Crowe acknowledged that his ‘organization’ is ‘less than perfect’ – only in science, ‘less than perfect’ facts and arguments adduced on account of ‘less than perfect’ scientific strategy by muddled amateurs with grandiose self-estimations are like a failed hunting shot, both useless and frequently disastrous.
Crowe’s cringing offer to the Perth Group after being rejected by them, ‘RA can cooperate with people who can’t or don’t want to see themselves as part of it’, was pathetic. Cooperation is a two-way street, and after dissociating from Crowe, Duesberg, de Harven, and Bauer and the rest of the Rethinking AIDS group by reason of ‘irreconcilable scientific and ethical differences’, the Perth Group would hardly ‘cooperate’ with them. As if they were equal players anyway.
The reason the Perth Group ‘can’t or don’t want to see themselves as part of’ Crowe’s Rethinking AIDS group is that they are not in fact ‘part of it’, no matter how he words his ‘bylaws’ to ‘see’ them ‘automatically … considered’ ‘part of it’, and then falsely claims to the world on his website and in his press releases that they are ‘part of it’. Even after they’ve announced that they are decidedly not ‘part of it’.
The answers to Crowe’s self-serving questions, ‘If I was to go, who would lead RA? Would the rethinkers be better off without a scientific organization?’ are easy. Were Crowe ‘to go’, ‘RA’ would soon enough sink like the rudderless ship of fools it is.
So arrogant, so presumptuous, so egocentric, Crowe’s questions obscure the blinding fact that AIDS dissidents already have a ‘scientific organization’, a real ‘scientific organization’ doing real scientific work, propounding real science, led by an uncommonly brilliant scientist and scientific and forensic strategist, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her Perth Group.
But not in the opinion of the cellphone businessman. The Perth Group aren’t as ‘brilliant’ as he is when it comes to formulating scientific strategy, since they don’t agree with him that one should contend against the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS by advancing contradictory scientific claims. They don’t think ‘high enough status’ is more important than the best known, clear science presented in wholly truthful, impregnable expert testimony.
Immediately after the Perth Group’s dissociation from Crowe’s Rethinking AIDS group on 18 September 2009, Crowe wrote Barnes, underscoring his conviction that he’s right and the Perth Group are wrong to focus on the fundamental defect of the ‘HIV’ theory of AIDS, the isolation problem:
I hope mainstream dissidents will understand that being brilliant in one area does not mean that people are necessarily brilliant in others. Scientific brilliance does not imply strategic brilliance.
In a mail to Jason Hart on 26 June 2009 Crowe himself identified the question of correct strategy as the fundamental bone of contention between him and the Perth Group:
Our differences are more strategic than scientific.
Put to him at my urging that
the isolation issue IS the central issue, and I know that many others agree
Crowe responded:
I believe that it is one of the important issues, but not the only one.
Only, we never claimed ‘the isolation issue’ is the ‘only one’, we identified it as the ‘central issue’. Thus did Crowe deviously avoid the point by dint of the classic crooked debating trick of setting up a diversionary straw man, his standard manoeuvre when taxed in argument.
First of all, for many people, arguing that HIV does not exist as the first step towards deconstructing the dogma is many steps too far. You have to be prepared to start by questioning the evidence for the accuracy of the tests, sexual transmission, the toxicity of the drugs, and so on. Eventually, somewhere down this road, the light will go on. Some people may be able to start right here, but not everyone. … To put it another way, it’s like an atheist parachuting down through time and landing in a medieval village in France and starting a discussion about whether God exists. I would hazard a guess that many people whose eyes are just opening would have difficulty with this being the only approach.
In a court room, as opposed to a business lounge, the case must be proved or disproved, and arguments based on ‘the evidence for the accuracy of the tests, sexual transmission, the toxicity of the drugs’ are nowhere nearly as cogent as demonstrating that there is no proof that ‘HIV’ exists – establishing which renders all other arguments and debates, with their practically uncontainable, unmanageable complexities and elements, redundant in one undercutting stroke. We ‘have to be prepared to start’ anywhere, anywhere but at the beginning, he reckons; this is the best way to make the judge’s ‘light ... go on’.
I think it is a strategic error to put all our eggs in this one basket.
The multilayered lie conveyed by Crowe’s inapposite figure of speech takes some unpacking. The Perth Group didn’t ‘put all our eggs in this one basket’ in the Parenzee case, as Crowe implied. They didn’t confine themselves to showing ‘HIV’ has not been proved to exist. They dealt with the antibody tests and why they can’t be relied onto prove ‘HIV’ infection. They dealt with the fact that there’s no proof that ‘HIV’ is sexually transmitted. But central and foundational to the defence case was their contention that there’s no proof that ‘HIV’ exists. And for this reason the tests can’t be relied on to prove infection with ‘HIV’ via sex or any other way. Crowe’s contrary advice to defence counsel Borick was to stop the advance and shift into reverse gear after the Perth Group had completed their testimony and stood cross-examination on it, and to proceed on the basis that their evidence was wrong: ‘HIV’ does exist.
What Crowe meant to say with his basket of eggs talk was that when up against Achilles with all his strength and power, it is a strategic error to aim at his heel, at the only point where he’s defenceless. This is what Crowe thinks.
As mentioned, Crowe’s concept of sound strategy is to lead a series of expert witnesses holding radically different, opposing, contradictory scientific views so that they can contradict one another and destroy the credibility of each other’s evidence and thereby cause the collapse of the case. To Crowe’s way of thinking, it’s a ‘strategic error’ to lead the Perth Group in court to testify that ‘HIV’ has not been proved to exist, and that for this reason the tests cannot be used to diagnose ‘HIV’ infection, and there’s nothing to sexually transmit; just as it’s a ‘strategic error’ to keep other dissident scientists propounding opposing, contradictory views out of the case. The right strategy to follow, in Crowe’s opinion, is to lead de Harven after the Perth Group to inform the court that they are ‘WRONG’ in claiming that Montagnier never found any retrovirus, because he ‘unquestionably’ did, only it was a ‘Human Endogenous Retrovirus’. And to lead Duesberg to testify, in line with his claim in his famous 1987 Cancer Research paper, that both the Perth Group and de Harven are wrong in that Montagnier most certainly did achieve the ‘isolation in 1983 of a retrovirus … HIV’ from his human subject. So that the AIDS dissident expert witnesses walk out of court covered in each other’s eggs. The case a mess on the floor.
In addition, this amounts to the imposition of a new dogma, which I will not support. I have even seen some more radical supporters of “HIV Existence is the only issue” want to force Dr. Duesberg and others to recant. That is not only distasteful from a human perspective given what Peter has contributed to the movement and the sacrifices he has made but it would be to behave in exactly the same way that the establishment currently does against all of us.
Thus does Crowe persistently falsely characterize agitation by supporters of the Perth Group’s appeal for a debate with Duesberg – cladding his opposition to it with irrelevant mediaeval religious allusions in order to put it down it as ‘distasteful’ and inhumane. And because Duesberg has ‘made ... sacrifices’ (he’s certainly been punished), Crowe considers that his basic scientific errors – incalculably counterproductive in the resolution of the infectious AIDS myth – should not only not stand unchallenged but should be propounded too, even though he knows that they are completely, fundamentally wrong.
Crowe’s abysmal thinking on this score had been already laid out in his response to Sadun Kal’s immediate identification of this immense impediment to progress against the AIDS orthodoxy that Duesberg and his small iron ring of Rethinking AIDS group protectors pose. On 17 March 2008, in a monument to his mendacity, his disingenuousness, his contemptible pusillanimity and general mediocrity, Crowe replied to his letter to the Rethinking AIDS group:
I disagree with Dr. Duesberg on the issue of the existence/purification/isolation of HIV. However, I see him as a great hero on all other issues. Strategically, I think you need to ask yourself just what you will accomplish by tearing the dissident movement apart over whether we should tear Duesberg apart. First of all, I’m not going to join in that blood sport, and apart from being a waste of energy, I’m wondering just how you think Duesberg is stopping people from questioning the existence of HIV? If not, just how important is it to divert your attention from the external threat, AID$ Inc., and turn your guns on your own movement?
And, on 30 May 2008, when Kal persisted:
This is my last email to you because of the nature of your communications. I think you are being incredibly arrogant. You’d be satisfied if “everybody” acknowledges that something is amiss with Mr. Duesberg’s attitude. And you “personally can’t see why he should still be taken seriously as a HIV scientist” (ironic since you don’t believe HIV exists). This, despite his massive contribution in the form of books, journal articles, presentations, talks, and huge quantities of time, over the past 20 years. And a contribution that continues to this very day, if you would only pay a little bit of attention.
A ‘huge ... contribution’ to entrenching the misconception that there is a virus in the world called ‘HIV’ and to setting back the Perth Group’s observation that there isn’t. The stupidity speaks for itself.
In his mail to Hart, Crowe continued:
The disagreements that the Perth Group have with David Crowe are strategic, having little to do with the existence of HIV. David does not agree that [the] RA 2009 [conference] would be successful if the existence of HIV was the only issue. David does not believe that court cases can be successful if they are based solely on the existence of HIV.
Dishonestly justifying his refusal of the Perth Group’s request to convene a debate between Duesberg and themselves on the ‘existence of HIV’ Crowe falsely implied they’d stipulated this should be the ‘only issue’ on his conference agenda; they hadn’t. And to justify his fatal interference in the Parenzee case by introducing Duesberg’s harmless passenger virus line to contradict their evidence, Crowe falsely misrepresented the Perth Group’s forensic strategy in the case in the same way. It wasn’t ‘based solely on the existence of HIV’; both in their affidavit and in oral testimony they dealt with the antibody tests and sexual transmission as well. But it was certainly ‘based’ on the fact that there is no proof ‘HIV’ exists. What Crowe meant was that in his opinion the Perth Group’s strategy of basing the defence on this pivotal, crucial, decisive fact cannot be ‘successful’, it’s an unsuccessful strategy to follow. It’s wrong. The Perth Group are wrong. Their science is all very well in theory but it must be kept out of court.
In a mail to Claus Jensen on 8 December 2009 Crowe was explicit about this. He gave his reason for considering the Perth Group wrong in wanting Gallo cross-examined on the isolation question and compelled to concede that ‘HIV’ has not been purified and thereby shown to exist. What he told Jensen explained why he went so far as to secretly formulate Borick’s questions for him to make sure he avoided raising and pressing the pivotal isolation issue with which Gallo could have been floored:
I see some danger in trying to get a hostile witness to admit that HIV has never been purified, and that this means therefore that HIV’s existence is purely hypothetical. When I’ve tried anything like this everyone immediately jumps to, “Well, what were all those people dying from in Africa then?”.
I commented on Crowe’s cretinous assertions to some associates:
His line, ‘I see some danger’, captures it all.
He’s so completely clueless about the nature of cross-examination in court as opposed to a chat over lunch with his business acquaintances.
The lunch mate can change the subject, get up and go.
The witness can be grilled until he’s sobbing.
The one is free to move as he likes, the other is stuck at the end of an alley and has to deal with every bullet fired at him.
He can’t even shut up, or you get the judge to admonish him: Answer the [expl.] question.
As Eleni has said to me, the ‘AIDS expert’ can be ‘forced’; he’ll admit there’s been no purification ‘when forced’ in the witness stand, because presented with the evidence he can’t do otherwise.
This is the fundamental difference between chatting about HIV-AIDS and litigating about it that eludes Crowe.
And, I ought to have added, a witness under cross-examination must answer all questions put to him; unless to ask for clarification, he may not avoid answering them by putting questions to counsel of his own.
This is the trouble with businessmen mistaking themselves for lawyers and then acting on their ignorance.
In his mail to Crowe, Hart (and I) put to him:
All the Aids experts agree purification is necessary.
‘No,’ replied the cell phone businessman running the Rethinking AIDS group:
No. This is certainly not true of the mainstream. They simply don’t talk about purification. There are only very rare instances of this among the mainstream. Generally they will simply claim that HIV is fragile and purification is impossible, which implies strongly that they don’t believe purification is necessary.
The Parenzee case exposed Crowe’s persistent, stupendous ignorance on this critical point, because all the ‘mainstream’ experts, Gallo included, had been unanimous with the Perth Group that purification is essential to proving the existence of a virus. And Crowe bought the transcripts of the ‘mainstream’ experts’ evidence, Gallo’s included, so he could have seen for himself.
In the light of which, who would disagree with Crowe’s observation to Hart:
It’s not an issue of authority. It’s an issue of knowledge. The world has a bigger problem with people spouting opinions on things they are not actually all that knowledgeable about.
– further exemplified by his clueless grounds of appeal to the Criminal Appeal Court which he drew for Parenzee’s counsel Borick, after blowing the application for leave to appeal. And moreover by his persistent willful ignorance concerning the potent oxidative quality of semen.
On 1 October 2009 Crowe wrote to Jensen again about the failure of the Parenzee case that he’d wrecked:
if people involved in the trial in various capacities shared their observations and thoughts I am sure that new strategies would emerge.
This is to say, if Crowe and others ‘involved in the trial’ such as the Perth Group only had a chat about it they would likely come up with ‘new strategies’ better than the Perth Group’s bullet-to-the-heart strategy of showing that there’s no proof that ‘HIV’ at the centre of the case exists, ‘new strategies’ more effective than the Perth Group’s strategy of gunning at the one point the orthodoxy cannot defend, as their evidence in the Parenzee case tested under cross-examination confirmed.
In Crowe’s opinion the contention that ‘HIV’ has been proved to exist but is harmless, as against the contention that ‘HIV’ has never been proved to exist, are not fundamentally and radically contradictory, opposing and mutually destructive approaches to take at trial. No, he opined to Sadun Kal on 27 May 2008, there are only ‘small differences’ between them. And ‘we should not magnify’ them, he told de Harven the next day. Why, he explained to Kal,
the difference between a virus that does not exist and between one that exists, but only in small quantities and that is anyway not pathogenic, is not that great.
This is why Crowe’s advice in litigation, how to win a case, is to lead evidence that ‘HIV’ has in fact been proved to exist right after evidence that it hasn’t. And also, after evidence that ‘HIV’ hasn’t been proved to exist has been led, proceed to cross-examine the conventional experts on the premise that it has been proved to exist. Just as long as we have a ‘common goal’, Crowe reckons, that’ll be enough to win the judge – even if Perth Group, Duesberg and de Harven are against kicking the ball in different directions, the Perth Group forwards, de Harven sideways, and Duesberg backwards into our own net.
As the self-imagined legal expert substituting for Canadian barrister Chris Black at his RA2009 conference, Crowe presumably delivered a lecture on how to win a case this way.
Another thing. In an email to Jim Wolfe on 3 December 2006 Crowe alleged:
The court has heard from both Val Turner and Eleni Eleopulos. From comments the judge made the lawyer is concerned that the judge will not accept Eleni as an expert witness, likely on the basis that she is neither an MD not a PhD and because she is a physicist not a profession directly related (in the judge’s opinion) to HIV/AIDS.
In truth, ‘the judge’ never made any such ‘comments’ expressing such an ‘opinion’ either during their testimony or cross-examination (he did so only in his judgment, after Borick had himself implicitly repudiated her evidence and expertise, on Crowe’s advice, by taking up Duesberg’s harmless virus line in his further conduct of the appeal, both in the hearing and in the next rounds before the Criminal Appeal Board). On the contrary, in an email on 22 December 2006, copied to Crowe, English solicitor Clifford Miller quoted ‘the lawyer’ Borick stating:
In my opinion the Judge appears to accept Eleni’s expertise.
Crowe’s claim to Wolfe was a blatant lie. It was a blatant lie told to justify his attempt to involve his Rethinking AIDS group scientists Duesberg and de Harven in the case to contradict and discredit Papadopulos-Eleopulos’s evidence on the key, pivotal isolation question, just when the case was going well.
Even as he pretended to Wolfe in the same mail:
One of the things I’ve been trying to do is get some affidavits from other scientists who will support Eleni’s expertise to provide expert opinions attesting to the expertise of Eleni [sic].
This was untrue: he took an affidavit from de Harven, not ‘attesting to the expertise of Eleni’, but contradicting her, and from others he absurdly claims not to remember.
But pointing out his stupidity, his dishonesty and his disastrous incompetence, he whined to Jonathan Campbell on 18 and 22 August 2009, was
doing … damage … to the movement as a whole. [It was] pursuing a course that is strategically, factually and morally wrong.
But never mind the Perth Group, Crowe told Barnes in his September 2009 email:
We need to move forwards and hope that they eventually realize that they need to rejoin the main thrust of AIDS dissent.
The Perth Group need only to wake up and appreciate what they’re missing, and to fall in line with the ‘mainstream’ Rethinking AIDS group, the ‘main thrust of AIDS dissent’ driven by Peter Duesberg, David Rasnick, Henry Bauer, Helen Lauer, Roberto Giraldo, Bob Leppo, Gordon Stewart, Frank Lusardi, Claus Koehnlein, Charles Geshekter, Christian Fiala and Etienne de Harven, all led by the cellphone businessman David Crowe.
.....
Notes:
1. See generally The Unbelievable Mediocrity of David Crowe: Why Rethinking AIDS has the president it deserves
2. On 28 April 2010, apparently in reaction to the revelations contained in this critique, Crowe emailed ‘more than 350 people’ as president of his Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society (a society of one-member, him) asking them for their money, and to his Rethinking AIDS group too, slipping in the assertion –
(disclosure, I’m also the unpaid president of that organization)
– contradicting the bylaws of his Rethinking AIDS group he drew:
The Board of Directors will include three paid Officers, elected by the Board, namely: one President, one Treasurer, and one Webmaster.
It may be true that Crowe is unable to draw a salary from his Rethinking AIDS group’s funds at the moment, because they’re finished. On 14 March 2010 he said the RA2009 conference ‘stretched us to our financial limits’, which is to say he’d spent all the money Leppo gave him on his Rethinking AIDS conference. Hence his call for donations, so the ‘President’ of the Rethinking AIDS group can get ‘paid’ as an ‘Officer’ as his ‘bylaws’ provide.
3. In a post on the Times Higher Education blog on 7 May 2010 Crowe was back to propounding Duesberg’s harmless, rare virus science:
The scientific literature shows that the evidence for pathogenicity of HIV is weak ... Literature shows that there is either hardly any HIV present in people with AIDS or none at all. Don’t believe me, read the science [links to his website http://aras.ab.ca].
In fact the best ‘scientific literature’ on the subject of ‘HIV’, from the Perth Group, ‘shows’ ‘HIV’ doesn’t exist on the available evidence. But Crowe won’t say so. No ‘HIV’ in inverted commas for him.
More of his bullied schoolboy mentality spilled out in his absurdly inapposite and histrionic characterization of peer review as a censorship tool:
The great thing about peer review is that it is such an effective tool to beat your critics to a pulp with, and the blood is so easy to wash off.
These notes will be updated with developments
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