Behind the News
Harper’s Races Right Over the Edge of a Cliff
The magazine is scorned for an article advancing a discredited theory about AIDS.
By Gal Beckerman Wed 8 Mar 2006 11:13 AMThe essay on AIDS in this month’s Harper’s magazine by Celia Farber starts off like a scientific whodunit — as Farber herself puts it, the tale she tells sounds eerily like the “Constant Gardener,” the recent movie based on a John Le Carre novel about evil pharmaceutical companies engaged in unethical human testing.
In the first half of her article titled, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science,” Farber describes what led to the death of a pregnant HIV-positive woman who was taking an experimental drug, Nevirapine, to avoid transmitting the virus to her unborn child. The drug’s toxicity, which had never been properly tested, killed the woman, and Farber traces the negligence back to tests in Uganda that were improperly conducted on human subjects. She also tells the story of a whistleblower at the NIH who was attacked for exposing the faulty trials.
It’s an engaging piece of investigative journalism that exposes deep problems with the standards of medical research when it comes to AIDS. As she writes, “the emergence of the syndrome in the 1980s sparked a medical state of emergency in which scientific controls, the rules that are supposed to bracket the emotions and desires of individual researchers, were frequently compromised or removed entirely.”
Her argument is that AIDS has become an industry and a certain kind of sloppiness has entered the search for new anti-retroviral drugs. So far, so good, and if this were the only story Farber hoped to tell, we might well be tipping our hat to her.
But she goes on to use the Nevirapine trial as a launching pad for what she really wants to say — that big pharmaceutical companies have basically invented the concept of AIDS in order to sell their product, which, being extremely toxic, is what is actually killing people who are diagnosed HIV-positive.
She doesn’t take responsibility herself for this startling — some might say preposterous — thesis, but rather approvingly points to UC Berkeley virologist Peter Duesberg, who has taken much heat for questioning the causality between HIV and AIDS. Duesberg has gained a name as a “denialist” for asserting that AIDS is actually a “chemical syndrome, caused by accumulated toxins from heavy drug use,” or that “75 percent of AIDS cases in the West can be attributed to drug toxicity. If toxic AIDS therapies were discontinued … thousands of lives could be saved virtually overnight.” And, most bizarre to our ears: “AIDS in Africa is best understood as an umbrella term for a number of old diseases, formerly known by other names, that currently do not command high rates of international aid. The money spent on anti-retroviral drugs would be better spent on sanitation and improving access to safe drinking water.”
Farber takes up that banner and complains that AIDS researchers “have spent many billions of dollars in the last twenty years on HIV research and practically nothing on alternative causes or co-factors.” Which, again, would be a legitimate complaint to make — were it not for the implication that HIV as the cause of AIDS has been invented for the sake of keeping certain scientists and pharmaceutical companies in business.
The article has inspired great anger among “so-called AIDS activists,” as Farber dismissively refers to them, who are seething at Harper’s decision to give Farber such a prominent soapbox. One example is a letter from Gregg Gonsalves, director of Gay Men’s Health Crisis: “Farber is a well-known AIDS denialist and publishing her work is akin to giving the folks at the Discovery Institute a place to expound upon the ‘science’ of intelligent design, Charles Davenport a venue to educate us about the racial inferiority of the Negro or Lyndon LaRouche a platform to warn us about aliens, bio-duplication, and nudity.”
The debate between the public health community and the “denialists” is an old one. What’s most interesting in this latest dustup is that the Nation has decided to join the incensed scientists in shaming Harper’s for running the Farber piece.
On the magazine’s blog, The Notion, Richard Kim claims that Farber does not do justice to the varying approaches taken by those researching AIDS, writing that “conspiracy theories like Duesberg’s warp and exploit some of the best political interventions made by AIDS activists: that patients should be engaged with their medical diagnosis and treatment, that clinical drug trials should be grounded in sound ethical practices, that the emphasis on virology has circumvented immunological approaches to AIDS and that attention to the effects of poverty, malnutrition and other diseases is vital to preventing and treating AIDS.”
Kim also writes that “it’s a shame that a magazine as well respected as Harper’s has shirked its duty to report on these issues and instead published Farber’s article.”
We have to agree. The if-it’s-conventional-wisdom-it-must-be-wrong ethos that Harper’s has come to embrace in the last days of the counterintuitive Lewis Lapham as editor has served the magazine poorly here, giving space to an idea that, as Kim points out, has been widely refuted for years — and one that, frankly, has been consigned to the dustbin of crackpot theories.
In short: when the Nation, of all places, is criticizing you for your knee-jerk anti-establishmentarianism, it’s a pretty good bet that you have probably wandered off the deep end.
Next time, Harper’s should be more careful about giving so much legitimacy — 15 pages of it — to such an illegitimate and discredited idea.
CJR
mark36
Wed 15 Mar 2006 08:25 PMWait, there's a problem here. You are willing to tip your hat to her exposure of a "certain kind of sloppiness" in the AIDS drug testing industry (that would be a "lethal sloppiness"), which comprises the first 10 pages of her essay, but then claim that Harper's gave 15 pages to "an illegtimate and discredited idea." The entire essay is only 15 pages long. Do you think the first 10 pages should have been relegated to more marginal channels as well?
doublecheck
Wed 15 Mar 2006 10:13 PMIf those who question conventional views on AIDS have been discredited, then the following should be easy to come by:
• The scientific paper showing that HIV is the probable cause of sickness in those said to have AIDS (the paper that Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis contends no one seems to be able to locate)
• Electron micrographs of purified, isolated HIV.
• The validation of the HIV antibody tests by isolation and purification of HIV from patients testing positive on the tests.
• An explanation of why HIV tests have such different criteria across countries that someone testing positive in Africa might not test positive in New York.
• An explanation of why the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test is licensed for diagnosis of HIV in infants (by checking for claimed protein fragments of HIV) when it is not allowed for diagnosis in adults.
Assertions about supposed discrediting of scientists who raise such concerns abound, but reproducible scientific results to answer such basic questions are scarcer than the proverbial hen’s teeth.
Along with many respected scientists, I have called for a simple, commonplace thing, used for virtually every policy created by our government with the single apparent exception of AIDS policy:
• An audit and review to double check the policy and to see if it can be improved to provide a better outcome for those who are sick.
If current AIDS policy, which has yet to provide a cure or vaccine despite well over $100 billion in U. S. spending alone, is rock solid, its proponents should have nothing to fear from a reexamination. I can assure you that the dissenting scientists are very confident and look forward to it.
www.aidspetition.org
E-mail: info@aidspetition.org
BrianFoley
Fri 17 Mar 2006 12:17 PMWhile Harpers apparently does not have room for rebuttals to the Celai Farber disinformation, a web site has been created specifically do deal with this article:
http://www.aidstruth.org/
WoodwardKH
Mon 27 Mar 2006 07:52 AMFarber's main thesis is that HIV / AIDS research has been thoroughly bungled. That's what the story at the beginning (which is hardly half the length of the piece) illustrates, and that's what her "conspiracy theories" support. Duesberg is more or less tacked on at the end (again, he doesn't get nearly the space you suggest; merely the last word) in an effort to show how contrarian science is dismissed by what has become a political issue instead of a scientific one. Or, how it can't be risked in the face of a cutoff in funding. As Farber says herself, "Regardless of whether Duesberg is right about HIV, his case...lays bare the political machinery of American science, and reveals its reflexive hostility to ideas that challenge the dominant paradigm."
Mark Poole
Thu 6 Apr 2006 09:31 AMI have to agree. The references to Duesberg's theories were peripheral to the general story, which was about inconsistencies, bungles and coverups in AIDS drug research and the politics of whistleblowing in the FDA. It seems that most people who commented on the issue here and over at The Nation did not actually read Celia Farber's story.
SS
Tue 9 May 2006 07:33 PMI'm no cellular biologist, but I can smell defensiveness and fear as much as anyone else, if not better, as my field is organized religion. The response to AIDS "denialists" sounds like the reaction I often get to religionists when I call into question their views. No interest or effort in determining the truth is expressed, but questioning the sanity or the moral character of the questioner lies at the top of the agenda. That is not the way science works. So to see a scientist like Duesberg have his career demolished for a hypothesis makes absolutely no sense. It happens all the time when someone goes after religion, but for it to happen in the scientific community is pathetic. In any case, this person "Gal" adds nothing to the discussion. He is just parroting the convictions of one side, albeit the popular one. Why didn't CJR get a qualified individual to write on this subject? Who needs another witch hunter? This article is nothing more than a blow by blow brought to you by someone who wants a particular fighter to win. Again, science doesn't work that way. And since this issue is a matter of the science, not of our identity as AIDS denialists or Gay health activists, let's stick to the science. Oh, and insinuating that people are crackpots, and worse, has zero substantive value. The scientific method doesn't give a hoot what we call anybody, or even what we think, if our theories cannot fit the empirical evidence.