Can you see why a person looking over all of the literature on this from the scientific community would question your point of view?
No, because I've never made an argument. Everything I've ever put into print was brick by brick by brick by brick, things that happened, people died, scientists and doctors said X, Y, and Z. The Harper's article opened with the story of Joyce Ann Hafford, who is a black woman in Tennessee who was killed by nevirapine [a drug used to treat HIV-1 infection and AIDS]. Her baby was saved; she was killed. They told her family she had died of AIDS. I was thinking as it went to print, let's see what happens now, let's see if it is seen for what is on the page, or if they still will come at me with what gets called my arguments. I don't make arguments. I report facts, things that happened. It's shoe-leather reportage. And what I would like is for people to look at that and for people to say, "Did she make that up? Did she make this person up?" Well, if she didn't make it up, then indeed we have something to worry about, and it's really not her personality that we need to worry about. It's that we live in a culture where a woman can be killed like a guinea pig. It's what happens when the NIH sponsors this kind of trial and similar trials, where people are dying every single day in human experimentation around the world.
Right, but human experimentation and clinical trials is a whole other issue compared to HIV and AIDS.
But do you understand that I've never said HIV doesn't cause AIDS? What I've said is not everybody agrees that HIV causes AIDS. That is an objective description of the landscape of AIDS dialectics.
Some believe that perpetuating so-called AIDS dissident beliefs may be costing lives. Do you believe this could be true?
I need to make a very important distinction right away, in order to answer that—it's a distinction of reportage, between what actually happens and what we impose upon what happens. That very core is composed entirely of transparency; that's where reporting begins. In 1987 the nation's top retrovirologist, according to Robert Gallo, Peter Duesberg, published a paper disputing the emerging beliefs that a) retroviruses caused cancer, and b) that a retrovirus was the cause of AIDS. That was, to my ear, news, plain and simple. If your job was to report on the scientific landscape of AIDS, that certainly was an event. Like a giraffe appearing on Wall Street. The unexpected, the anomalous—that is the building material of the writer, in most traditions. You start with a conflict and you seek resolution in order to learn the lesson. A split had taken place, an epic rift in virology, in fact, and I was standing there.
Yes, there is a risk in interviewing people who are "wrong," but there is a perhaps greater risk in not interviewing them because they might be wrong—in surrendering that process to the self-declared authorities, powers that be, industries. It didn't used to be the end of the world in science if somebody was wrong.
What we're really looking at here is the death of the scientific process and spirit in a time of great terror. As Charles Stein, the poet, said, "Everything is true by inversion." We must have the courage to look at things from all angles.
You asked: What if the scientists who you have interviewed, who you report on, are wrong? My answer: Then they're wrong. I can't erase them from existence. They are. That's the first thing. What I am saying, in direct answer to your question, is yes, it is possible that the thousands of scientists who oppose the HIV paradigm from many angles are wrong. When I began interviewing these unheard voices, I could not have known whether they were right but rather didn't demand that they prove they were right before I sounded them out. I sounded them out to explore the question, to get to the bottom of it. Two decades later, the question has grown like a vast funnel around the world now, and gets bigger and bigger.
How did Gallo come to stand at that podium? What did he hold up? Was it a retrovirus? Was it the same as [French virologist Luc] Montagnier's? Most importantly, how was the test built? What did it test for? How were those original proteins chosen, and what did they signify? Do they signify the same things today? I have come right up to the edge of the ultimate existential shock, in recent years, studying the micro-facts of the HIV tests, and the history. The shock is: Have we been testing for a piece of ourselves? Something that was always there, in our DNA? What is a "retrovirus"? What is "reverse transcriptase"? Why do the human genome guys say we have 98,000 retroviruses in our genome and why, at AIDS Inc., does no one care about those but only the 98,001st? Duesberg's quip is that on the 98,001st, they hit the jackpot.
What are you planning to write about in the future?
I've got two books that I'm writing proposals for that have nothing to do with this. I actually don't want to address what they're about just yet, but I'm moving entirely in the direction of simpler people-based stories. Don't we all want to write about people? I do not have a fetish about science. And I certainly, certainly do not wish to stay on this topic any longer. I feel that I've been somewhat chained to it.
You know, I think this is Thoreau stuff, this is American transcendentalist stuff. It speaks to who are we as a culture. Are we self-defining as a culture? Are we interested in evidence-based reality, or are we swept along by mass fears? I mean, really, this is the stuff of science fiction. This is what science-fiction writers write about. I think the main difference between me and science writers who are more liked, more popular, more palatable, is that I am alarmed. And that is something that is more of the tradition of science-fiction writers that say, Oh my God, our technologies have come to dominate and control us. And that is what I feel that this story is. The technology has come to rule us like it has come alive. But we have misunderstood the technology that we've built.
Do you have any regrets about your career?
[Laughter] Not really. I complain a lot, but it's been a fascinating, amazing journey.