“. . . Patricia Goodson has actually performed a public service. It is important for people to know that AIDS denialists do indeed still exist.” — so wrote University of Connecticut Prof. Seth Kalichman, who seems to wish they did not. Although some dispute the label “denialist,” Prof. Patricia Goodson of the Department of Health & Kinesiology at Texas A&M University has documented that we who question the science of “HIV” and “AIDS” do indeed still exist. “How Positive Are You” co-host Elizabeth Ely would even welcome a debate on the substantive points, especially whether there is an accurate test for “HIV.”
The very day in September 2014 that the open access journal Frontiers published “Questioning the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis: 30 Years of Dissent,” alarm bells began to ring. The journal responded to complaints by issuing a Statement of Concern and launching an investigation into the ethics of Prof. Goodson’s article. In the end, it only downgraded it to “Opinion” and published Dr. Kalichman’s February 2015 response.
Prompted by “serious effects” from HAART drug therapies as reported in the popular media (some these concerns are documented here) and by a couple of people close to her, Prof. Goodson had “decided to go back and check and see if some of the scientists who were questioning in the beginning, such as Dr. [Peter] Duesberg for instance, were still questioning.” They are, but this is “not very well known,” she says, especially in her mainstream-oriented field of public health education/social science research. Since her review of the unresolved questions appeared, she has received messages from grateful colleagues and students, even ones who held firmly mainstream views on AIDS. They didn’t know the history, and they didn’t know that these questions were still out there.
“I envisioned that there would be a lot of debate,” she says, and open access journals aim to stir up spirited post-publication buzz. A “review” does not present any original data. This one concluded that the issues were still alive and further research was needed to help resolve them.
“There had been numerous complaints from ‘prominent people in public health’ saying that my article stood to ‘cause an issue in public health,'” says Prof. Goodson. “If something like this stands to ‘cause an issue in public health,’ I think that we need to revisit public health. To me that is a telltale sign that something’s not well here, the patient’s not doing too well.”
Says HPAY co-host David Crowe: “In the end, it was, I think, a major victory for the right to have open discussions about public health.”
Interested listeners can learn more about questions raised by mainstream researchers conspicuously not mentioned in the response article. Neither Dr. James Chin nor Dr. Luc Montagnier assert that HIV does not cause AIDS. Rather, Dr. Chin has questioned the quality of epidemiological data supporting global AIDS statistics. Dr. Montagnier has stressed the importance of co-factors and has stated, “our immune system will get rid of the virus in a few weeks, if you have a good immune system.”
Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus Dr. Henry Bauer posted on his blog a discussion of the possibility, which we mention, that UCONN psychology professor Dr. Kalichman conducted undercover research under the persona “Joseph Newton” for his book Denying AIDS. A photo of Newton posing with Dr. Duesberg appears in the comments section of the blog and can also be viewed here. For comparison, a photo of Dr. Kalichman appears on this page, which also confirms him to be the editor of the journal AIDS and Behavior. This is the Henry Bauer who published a review of the state of Loch Ness Monster research. You got a problem with that?
Regarding the treatment-as-prevention strategy known as PrEP, see our Episode 87.
This is a joint Podcast with David’s own show, “The Infectious Myth” on the Progressive Radio Network. His version, published March 3, 2015, is here.
NEWS UPDATE, November 2, 2015: Was it the business model or Goodson’s article? Frontiers gets “blacklisted” as possibly “predatory” open access journal. You decide. Our news article.
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