Gallo does Bush inpersonation in court

Robert Gallo has just testified in the criminal case of Andre Parenzee, charged with endangering three women by having unprotected sex while being HIV-positive:

I just got finished reading Bob Gallo's testimony in the Parenzee
case. For all the good his testimony will do, the prosecution might
as well have called George W. Bush to the stand. I get the feeling
that Gallo unwittingly associated himself with Bush in the eyes of
the court.

First of all, he couldn't pronounce Eleni Papadapolus- Eliopolus'
name, which prompted the judge to instruct him to refer to her
as "The Witness." Very Bush-like.

Then, shortly into cross-examination, Gallo makes the bone-head
decision to insult the judge himself in the following exchange:

BORICK: Again I want to put a suggestion to you that's been made in
this court and that is that in effect the whole argument that HIV
exists rises and falls on the first experiments conducted by
Montagnier.

GALLO: That's silly, of course. You know that; I mean everybody
knows that that's sitting in this courtroom.

HIS HONOR: Not everybody, Dr. Gallo.

GALLO: That's sad commentary. Was it Your Honor who made it?

HIS HONOR: I made that comment.

GALLO: Well I would regard that as a sad commentary.

I get the feeling that we dissidents may find ourselves in debt to
George W. Bush, because Gallo's performance in court the other day is
likely to draw comparisons to Bush -- his inability to pronounce the
names of Australian witnesses, his assertions of knowledge of facts
not in evidence -- these similarities between Gallo's testimony and
Bush's approach to Middle Eastern policy (particularly in Iraq,) may
well play in Parenzee's favor.


BACKGROUND TO GALLO'S CLAIM THAT HIV CAUSES "AIDS"

In March 1987, President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac appeared in the East Room of the White House to announce that their governments had settled the question of whether scientists at the Pasteur Institute of Paris or the National Institutes of Health had invented the blood test for the virus known as HIV.

The answer, it appeared, was both. The names of the Pasteur scientists
were added to the American patent on the AIDS test, and the focal agreement that formed the core of the settlement declared that both countries' scientistshad independently "succeeded in isolating a human retrovirus whichproved to be the causative agent of AIDS."

Just eight days later, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern
New Mexico, a scientist specializing in the genetic analysis of viruses
sent senior officials at the National Institutes of Health a confidential
memo warning that "a double fraud" had been perpetrated on the
scientific community.

The Los Alamos scientist, Gerald Myers, had compared the genetic codes of the French and American AIDS viruses and determined they were not independent discoveries but had undoubtedly come from the same patient.

Moreover, Myers said, the American virus and its progeny could not
have been isolated from a pool of blood samples from several AIDS patients, as the NIH publicly had maintained.

"I suggest that we have paid for this deception in more than the
usual ways," Myers wrote. "Scientific fraudulence always costs
humanity ... but here we have been additionally misdirected with regardto the extent of variation of the virus, which we can ill afford..."

WHAT THE PRESS SAID ABOUT ROBERT GALLO

‘ The tale of Dr. Robert Gallo’s role in the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS is one of those stories that wouldn’t be believable as fiction...Science Fictions is bursting with allegations leveled at Dr. Gallo, his associates, rivals and enemies, that include deception, misconduct, incompetence, fraud, sabotage, back-stabbing, double-dealing, overstatements, half-truths, outright lies, a clandestine affair with a co-worker, a bribery attempt, denials, evasions, coverups and serial rewritings of history.’
— New York Times

‘ Scrupulously researched and sweeping... Science Fictions documents enough treachery, negligence and megalomania to make even the most trusting of readers skeptical of the scientific establishment.’
— Washington Post

‘ A gripping work with important implications...With incredible tenacity, Crewdson reveals a biological research scandal that was significant, frightening and, most of all, a testament to one reporter’s quest to separate science fact from fiction.’
— Chicago Tribune

‘ Crewdson’s work is the most powerful and revealing since James Watson’s The Double Helix...This is an awesomely documented prosecutorial brief that concedes no credit to its target and yields him no doubts. If the Gallo camp has a rebuttal, let’s hear it.’
— New Scientist

‘ No one knows whether someone in Gallo’s lab stole the French virus or if it contaminated their samples through sloppy practice, and it really doesn’t matter… And as Crewdson shows, the biggest discoveries in Gallo’s career — his claim to have identified the virus that causes AIDS and the patent on the AIDS blood test — both belong to someone else.’
— Baltimore Sun

‘ Robert Gallo’s hour was not the brightest for American science. In fact, it may be one of the darkest. The two-decade-long sequence of events described in John Crewdson’s new book resembles more the actions of a megalomaniac intent more on self-promotion and profit than on a way to stop the AIDS epidemic.’
— San Diego Union-Tribune

‘ I could hardly put the book down out of a mounting realization that this was more than a story about human vanity and political corruption. Science Fictions is ultimately a scientific detective story, with dramatic plot twists, inspired sleuthing, and unlikely heroes. It’s a crime with many victims, and one that is well worth the effort to understand.’
— Washington Monthly

‘ John Crewdson, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, has written a detailed history of the events that led scientists to the cause of AIDS - and it makes unpleasant reading for anyone who thought science was simply about the pursuit of truth. Instead, a picture emerges of deliberate falsehoods, exaggerated claims and denigrating criticism.’
— The Independent (London)

‘ Crewdson’s squalid tale of grasping self-interest in the face of a devastating epidemic is told through court documents, reports from internal NIH and congressional investigative committees and interviews. The enormous amount of evidence which the author has gathered in favor of the French seems convincing.’
— Los Angeles Times

‘ Science Fictions is about scientists behaving very, very badly. Crewdson’s research is thorough, his writing brisk.’
— Edmonton Journal

‘ A compelling case that Gallo claimed and obtained recognition for research that had, in fact, been accomplished by the French...this book is a successful indictment of Gallo, whom history will probably judge to have been guilty of excessive zeal in the pursuit of scientific glory.’
— Montreal Gazette

‘ Was Gallo’s behavior so extreme as to be anomalous, or was it to some extent encouraged by what Crewdson calls a “hypercompetitive” scientific culture? If Science Fictions forces scientists to address these difficult questions — and it should — it will have served its purpose.’
— New York Times Book Review

‘ Science Fictions is a profoundly disturbing account, demonstrating that even brilliant minds may trade truth for fame or fortune...John Crewdson has written a masterpiece.’
— Providence Journal-Bulletin

‘ Comprehensive and compelling...The level of drama here is unprecedented…Crewdson is able to weave a story that is impossible to put down.’
— Publishers Weekly

‘ A meticulous account of slippery science that develops slowly into a panoramic view of the biomedical world.’
— Kirkus Reviews

Gallo on the stand: Fauci's nightmare

Scientific celebrity offers no valid defense to HIV?AIDS critique save bluster

77 pages, finally, of dead paradigm for the "denialists" to dissect

The entire transcript from Bob Gallo's somewhat undignified appearance via video in front of the Australian Supreme Court judge in Adelaide on Monday morning (Sunday evening Feb 11 in the US) is now available at David Crowe's Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society home page, in the form of a pdf of a rather smudgy typewritten document. (Is the Adelaide Supreme Court unable to afford a computer for the court stenographer to use, or is this the cramped hand of tradition? Readers are advised to use Adobe and not some other display software for maximum clarity).

The 77 page comedy is raw meat for the baying hounds of AIDS "denialism" (that is, any intelligent person willing to read the scientific literature critically, or the books of Peter Duesberg, Harvey Bialy, Rebecca Culshaw, Stephen Davis, or the many other critics and authors celebrated by this blog and by You Bet Your Life) to tear apart.

And therein lies the unprecedented status of this document and the court grilling that gave rise to it: this is the first time in history that the prophet of the HIV?AIDS scientific cult, the chief instigator of what persuades billions that TB is not TB, drugs are not drugs, malnutrition is not malnutrition, etc but everything from a cold to a traffic accident that brings down man or woman is AIDS if HIV is present, has been put on the spit and roasted by anyone, journalist, legislator, or activist, let alone a lawyer defending a client from this scientific fairy tale (we speak judiciously, our phrase arising from a review of the best scientific literature in the field).

In fact, a prime reason why HIV?AIDS has lasted longer in circulation than a daily paper used to wrap fish is precisely the alacrity with which Bob Gallo has till this point evaded difficult questions about his unlikely scientific boondoggle, such as "why is AIDS gay in the US and Europe and heterosexual in Africa and Asia?"

One of the most remarkable effects of Peter Duesberg's initial broadsides fired from the pages of the highest scientific journals into the flank of Gallo's as it were royal HIV?AIDS yacht was, in fact, that Gallo developed a mysterious nervous ailment.

This unfortunate health challenge prevented him appearing at the same scientific conferences as Duesberg, even when he was scheduled as the keynote speaker. The instant Gallo heard that Duesberg was going to attend, the ailment immediately created a sensitivity to family responsibilities that demanded his presence elsewhere.

This unusual psychological tic apparently was transmitted in the end to virtually every major figure in HIV?AIDS science, including even that renowned tormenter of macaques and failed microbicide developer John P. Moore of Cornell, who actually posted a warning on the site he started last year devoted to combating AIDS "denialism" with what he represents as AIDS Truth. The notice tells readers that he will stoutly resist any application from journalist or "denialist" to get him to defend the status quo, since it needs no defense::
We will not:

Engage in any public or private debate with AIDS denialists or respond to requests from journalists who overtly support AIDS denialist causes. The reasons are:

1. The debate has been settled: HIV causes AIDS, AIDS kills, and AIDS can be treated with significant success by the use of antiretroviral therapy.
etc etc.
Meanwhile Anthony Fauci Director of NIAIDS at NIH, invaded by the same meme, has long made the evasion policy official for all bureacrats, scientists and public affairs spokespersons under his rule, ever since he blatantly advertised it in the American Association for the Advancement of Science monthly bulletin, reporting that he had told his sister that any journalist who raised the topic would not get the time of day from any scientist at NIH.

Now we have a public appearance of Gallo in the hot seat with a defense lawyer demanding answers, a questioner not showing any of the signs of lapdog acquiescence which has so far marked mainstream science journalists enquiring into the rationale which supports Gallo's profitable paradigm.

The result is to blow away the camouflage that has hitherto concealed the sheer absurdity of what Gallo has persuaded the world to swallow and reveal it, so to speak scientifically and medically, as the biggest block of stale Swiss cheese ever palmed off on an unsuspecting public as prime beef.

Gallo fudges in Clintonesque style

The full 77 pages is worth ploughing through if you are familiar with the unplanned caper which somehow has expanded into a global religion outpacing Christianity, since the comic pirouettes danced by Gallo in his masterly evasions of the true science of AIDS (ie that signalled by the literature that has piled up since his 1984 claim, which now contradicts the authority that spawned it at every turn) are a wonder to behold.

Where evasion won't do the trick he brings on the heavy guns - enough scorn and derision to freeze the bones of any innocent enquirer, though in this case, the skeptical questioner being an Australian lawyer intent on freeing his client from the shackles of Gallo's imprisoning pseudo-theory, there is not the usual effect seen when it is imposed on the lapdog lickspittles of the Western press.

For unlike them the Australian lawyer is not frightened into worrying about his career for having doubted the celebrated double Lasker winning, most referenced, international conference leading, jet setting, prime source on HIV?AIDS, the co-discoverer of HIV himself, the retired if slightly tarnished star of the National Cancer Institute and now grand old man of retrovirology (as far as the media and Wikipedia are concerned) and leader of virus hunting in the world today as professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology and head of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, the former being now the flagship of a chain of such centers of research into human virology which is spreading around the world in response to Gallo's suggestion in his book, "Virus Hunters" (Basic, 1991).

Today rethinkers around the world are poring with jaundiced eye over the remarkable document that has resulted. One who cannot contain his excitement is Michael Geiger, who writes "I just read Gallo's transcript and I am stunned and amazed. I am not sure if Gallo was defending HIV or if this was simply a roundabout way to do a public admission of guilt or perhaps a practice session for upcoming trials."

Here are a few prime excerpts:

1) Gallo's empire building propaganda initiative for a ring of Institutes of Human Virology around the world is successfully metastasizing globally with sister institutes now in place or promised in seven major cities: "there is one now in Nigeria, in Bejaia and one in Monterey, Mexico that will be ready this coming year, one plant for Guaitara, Mexico, ideas for one in Brazil and ideas being discussed for one in Beijing, and one in Jakarta, Indonesia."(p4)

Of interest is his use of the word "plant", as in industrial plant designed to make product to sell, with poetic overtones of "plant" as in "fake supporter or product or report inserted into a group or system or a newspaper to lure, decoy, entrap, swindle or defraud the unsuspecting victim, and also "colonize" (see any dictionary).

2) A vaccine, Gallo says, is still, after 22 years, one of his "two closest or greatest current interests" (p4 and 5) but he seems unable to confirm any real progress other than the usual eternal excitement over the prospect, and his explanation of how it might work may even suggest to some readers that his ability as a leading scientist is a little overpromoted:
"We are all vaccinated against polio but, if we all have a vial of polio within fluid to drink, we'll all get infected. You're not protected against infection, but our immune system will have some weeks for recall, and it will clear the virus and the problem is over. With HIV it is too late; within a few days it's integrated its genes so, if we make a vaccine after two or three weeks, too bad, you've got viral genes in your body. When that vaccine response goes down that virus is going to take off again, so I'm of the school that says it's all or nothing at all. We have to go for broke. We have to develop a vaccine that develops antibodies that blocks at the entry of the virus into the cell, and that is really difficult."
Having thus described the problem as being the ability of the insidious HIV to enter and hide from antibodies in the cell, Gallo goes on to describe the difficulty of developing "sterilizing immunity" ie a vaccine that blocks the virus from entering the cell as one that is confounded by the rate at which HIV changes into other varieties of itself, even "micro variants ad nauseam, just endless micro variants" within an an individual. "These are the challenges of a vaccine"...which he believes he may now have solved.
"We have learned out how to make antibodies that are broad across the different strains of HIV. It doesn't mean we have the answer because this immune response will have to last and we haven't achieved that yet."
But as to the challenge of the defense in this case that "
if you know so much about HIV ..why haven't you found a cure for it ... you know, I would say that is just silly...If I know everything about Mt Everest there is to know; every cape, every rock, every stratum, every bush or every tree, I still can't climb it until you develop the helicopter for me... After all, there are many microbes that have been around a long, long time that we desperately need vaccines for that have been around much longer than HIV. Malaria being one obvious example; a bacterium that is a parasite - a bacterium tuberculosis is another one. How many examples would one want. The question has no meaning."
Gallo's optimism is always inspiring - is there any reason why some kind of 'vaccination' might not work in the future against malaria, if the nanotechnologists really get going? - but we wait to get through the entire transcript to find out if anyone asked him how a vaccine against the insidious hiding and multimutating HIV might work any better at provoking useful antibodies than HIV itself.

Perhaps he should be put in touch with Dr Fauci - are they on speaking terms these days? - whose great achievement recently as noted here earlier was to acknowledge that HIV provoked T-cell multiplication, as one might expect.

Since as Duesberg has long pointed out the arrival of the antibodies reliably provoked by HIV results in wiping out the level of HIV in the blood to undetectable levels, and the number of T cells inhabited by active virus is at most 1 in 10,000, and more likely 1 in 100,000, precisely why one needs a vaccine remains one of the many "conundrums" of HIV?AIDS science, upon which Gallo's account throws no light at all, as usual.

Of course, here we are speaking medically and scientifically. There is clearly (to those in the field from David Ho downwards) a very important financial and economic reason why a vaccine development effort should continue 'ad nauseam', to coin a phrase, and that is, AIDS scientists have to eat and pay for their labs, grad students, air travel, wives, children, dogs, cars, and vacations.

Since we are only on page 8 of 77, this post will now end, and the rest of the transcript will be dealt with in a multi-post sequel, in recognition of its importance of a document which contains the seeds of the final downfall of a vexed and vicious paradigm - if the world is ever persuaded to pay attention.

Will it be persuaded? Not if the brave Fauci and his staff at NIAID have anything to do with it, that we predict. But perhaps they are preoccupied with this year's HIV/NET meet, where one of the topics behind the scenes will no doubt be the reduction of funding for various important activities of the movement to bring AIDS drugs to a world where "everyone has AIDS", including the dwindling supply of dollars for the vaccine effort compared with the hopes and dreams of those involved.

More coming up: Our further posts on the Transcript will include an admission by Gallo that 40% incidence is not good proof of HIV causing AIDS ("Kevin Borick: Do you agree that the isolation of HIV from only 40% of patients is not proof that HIV causes AIDS? Robert Gallo: I would say of course, in and of itself 40% isolation of a new virus I would not say is the cause.")

Other admissions include using a misleading electron micrograph photo, that looking for HIV in patients is looking for a needle in a haystack, that cell particles may be confused with virus, and so on. But it is also clear that Gallo's skill at fudging and confusing the issue is as high as ever, and for rethinkers to get excited about his testimony as finally pulling the lid off the can of worms that is HIV?AIDS for the public to see clearly is premature.

Rather, it is more his attitude which is the giveaway, and Gallo's obvious fast talking. The evasions will be clear to the knowledgeable who read the transcript closely, but whether Judge John Sulan was able to keep up is another question. Our impression is that the defending counsel Kevin Borick was thrown by Gallo's shell game, and wasn't quite as fast to nail the right shells as he could have been. But the Judge seems to have tried to help him, and this bodes well for the prisoner.

We calculate that the judge is likely to send the case to appeal, and pass a few remarks of a skeptical and critical nature in doing so.

If so, the appeal might just end with an acquittal on the grounds of non-science, even if the letter of the law was broken as it stands in Australia by the prisoner flouting its rule to tell sexual partneers of his HIV positive status.

If that happens, it is hard to see how Dr Fauci and his colleagues can continue to sweep the truth about HIV?AIDS under the carpet any longer.