Wrongful Death: The AIDS Trial

by Stephen Davis

  Chapter Forty-Two

  For most of the trial, the Global News Network had been the main source of TV coverage. Apparently, the other major networks weren’t prepared to give credence to the idea that something other than HIV might cause AIDS, or that the subsequent death of 300,000 young American men and women by the drug AZT may turn out to be genocide.

  Tonight is different. Tonight, one of the most trusted names on TV is hosting a one hour special on ABC. Beverly Williams has undoubtedly interviewed more statesmen and stars than any other journalist in history. She is so well known that her name and a brief biography are listed in the American Heritage Dictionary, and her interview with Monica Lewinsky in 1999 was the highest-rated news program ever broadcast by a single network.

  Who knows? Tonight might set a new record, for tonight she is turning her spotlight on the AIDS trial, which has so far been watched by more people around the world than the Olympics; and her guest is Dr. Peter Duesberg.

  Bill and Sarah made sure dinner was over and the dishes cleaned up in time. Even eleven-year-old Peyton had expressed an interest in watching. Just as the three of them are taking their seats in the living room, Ms. Williams begins the program.

  “Dr. Peter Duesberg was once one of the world's leading virologists and a pioneer in research on retroviruses. Born and educated in Germany, he has been a Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. The scientific community stood up and took notice when he isolated the first cancer gene in 1970, and mapped its genetic structure. He was then elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 and is also the recipient of a seven year Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health. In his lifetime he has received such honors as the Merck Award, California Scientist of the Year, and First Annual American Medical Center Oncology Award. He was even being considered for a Nobel Prize. But in the last twenty years, according to him, he has been vilified, abused at conferences, and had seventeen funding applications turned down for research. Publication of his work in scientific literature has been denied and his scheduled appearances on talk shows were repeatedly canceled at the last moment.” Williams turns toward Duesberg. “Welcome, Dr. Duesberg, and thank you for granting me this interview after all the hassles you’ve been through.”

  Dr. Duesberg, now seventy years old, is still a handsome man with receding hair made of more salt than pepper. He looks directly at Williams and adjusts his glasses.

  “It is my pleasure to finally make it on your program, Ms. Williams.”

  “Dr. Duesberg, what happened?”

  Duesberg laughs a little and shakes his head at the enormity of the question. Then he decides to give an equally generalized answer. “I disagreed with Dr. Robert Gallo about HIV.”

  “And that was enough to essentially destroy your life?”

  “Apparently.”

  “How and when did all this begin?”

  “Officially, it started in April of 1987, about a month after my first article appeared in Cancer Research magazine questioning the HIV-AIDS connection. A combined effort between the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health tried to create a strategy to, in their words, counter my assertions. First, they tried to publicly debate me. Then they adopted the silent strategy, hoping the media would stop covering me. Both these strategies failed miserably over the next year, and the last time they engaged me in any public forum was a written debate that appeared in Science Magazine in July of 1988.”

  “I would have thought the scientific research community would have welcomed debate among respected members, to insure that their findings were accurate and reliable.” Beverly Williams is really good, Sarah thinks. She can ask that kind of question, challenging the position of her guest without it sounding like an attack, and at the same time seem like she’s pointing fingers in the other direction.

  Duesberg didn’t flinch. “Normally, you would be right. But not in this case.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was asking questions they couldn't answer satisfactorily – embarrassing questions about their theories and the research they claimed supported them. I kept hearing statements from them like, ‘the evidence that HIV causes AIDS is scientifically conclusive,’ but hardly anyone would ever produce the evidence itself. And if they did, the evidence actually said the opposite of what they claimed. I was starting to get media coverage, and other people were getting more curious as well. They must have decided that the only way to stop me was to deny me any access to the press at all. If no one would print me, or carry me on TV or radio, then obviously I couldn't stir up trouble.”

  During the conversation between Williams and Duesberg, different cameras were producing various pictures, first of Duesberg speaking, then Williams listening, then Williams asking a question, then Duesberg waiting to answer, and so on. Somewhere, at some time, some producer had decided that no single camera angle should last more than eight seconds or the audience would get bored. When shooting musical concerts to be watched by the younger generation, that time frame had been shortened to two seconds, probably to match the kids’ attention span. Fortunately, tonight there was a bare minimum of jumping from one camera to another so that what was being said was allowed to be more important than the pictures.

  “You're claiming that you were systematically denied access to the media. Can you prove that?”

  “Absolutely. The very first time was shortly after the Science article in 1988. The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour sent a camera crew and interviewed me in December of that year. The story was supposed to air on February 8th, 1989. It never did. Instead they ran a few minutes of my interview followed by a lengthy diatribe by Dr. Anthony Fauci, personally attacking me.”

  “It's not unusual for an interview to be edited, and time given to the other side for rebuttal.”

  “But usually the rebuttal is about the content of the assertions, not an attack on the person themselves.”

  “True.”

  “Good Morning, America then flew me to New York for an in-studio interview. I was in my room at the Barbizon Hotel the night before the interview was scheduled when I got a call saying that something had come up and the interview was cancelled. The next morning, in the time slot I was supposed to have, Dr. Anthony Fauci was preaching the standard HIV-AIDS hypothesis.”

  “So you're beginning to see a pattern, yes?”

  “Yes. It then happened the same way twice with CNN. And even a national Italian TV interview was stopped. And this continued over the years. In 1992, Larry King scheduled a half-hour interview with me. By this time, I was starting to get suspicious. So a few hours before the live broadcast, I called the producer and asked if everything was still on schedule. He said how surprised he was that I would call, because something urgent had just come up regarding the election and they needed the time. But when I turned on Larry King Live that night, there was nothing about the elections. Instead there was Dr. Anthony Fauci with his usual HIV pitch.”

  “Were you ever successful in getting your views on national TV?”

  “Twice. One was in March of 1993, on an ABC program called Day One. But I was told by one of the producers of that show that Dr. Fauci had tried to get the show cancelled a few days before the broadcast as well. The other was also on ABC, on Ted Koppel's Nightline. They promised me that the whole show would be mine and they would not allow Dr. Fauci on the air with me. They even hired a recent Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Kary Mullis, to interview me. But when it was aired, there was Fauci again, taking up half the time and not even responding to any of the questions or issues I had raised. Just attacking me personally, as usual.”

  “Did you have any better success in the print media – newspapers, magazines?”

  “Hardly. A senior writer for Newsweek interviewed me in 1987. The story was pulled when Newsweek arranged for a special honorary dinner for Dr. Robert Gallo. Four years later, after an editorial in Nature Magazine, Newsweek again sent ph
otographers to take pictures for the story they were finally going to run. The article was cancelled again within days. The New York Times mentioned my name a total of three times in the seven hottest years of this debate. The Washington Post had two mentions, one of which was a hostile article without even talking to me. Rolling Stone Magazine was in my lab at UC Berkeley when a call came in canceling the interview. Harper's Magazine cancelled a major article in 1990 after having commissioned it from a free-lance reporter who spent three years on the piece. Another free-lancer spent many months writing a story for Esquire that was also killed at the last minute.”

  “What about your home country of Germany?”

  “Bild der Wissenschaft cancelled an article by their star reporter without explanation. Der Spiegel attacked me in 1993 and 1995 and refused to let me respond to the attacks.”

  “But surely you must have found some way to speak up in the scientific publications or research conventions?”

  “Again, you would think so, but it was even worse there. Dr. Gallo and other scientists started refusing to attend conferences if I was going to be there. And if you’re putting on the conference, whom are you going to choose, between the hero who is supposed to have found the cause of AIDS and some unknown doctor who has a different opinion from the rest of the world? So as long as Dr. Gallo wanted to go to some conference, he could keep me away. Or if I insisted, he would bow out. In New York in 1989, when I showed up, Dr. Gallo excused himself because of sickness in his family, he said. In Germany in 1990, Dr. Gallo excused himself because of sickness in his family, he said. Again in Germany in 1993, Dr. Gallo excused himself three hours before he was supposed to deliver the opening address, because of sickness in his family, he said. I began to get very concerned about the health of Dr. Gallo’s family.”

  “They were afraid to meet you in public? How strange!”

  “My questions embarrass them, which is why they didn't let me in the scientific journals, either. As a member of the National Academy of Sciences, I, like every member, have a right to publish papers in their journal called Proceedings, without standard peer review. But somehow they got me banned even from the Proceedings. One editor rejected a paper for what he called ‘lack of originality.’ Another paper was ‘too controversial.’ Another was ‘too long.’ The last time I submitted to the Proceedings, they sent my paper to three anonymous reviewers prior to publication. Two of the three voted to block publication. Mind you, this is in a journal where I have the right to publish without any review. But one reviewer said that my paper had a potential for being harmful to the HIV-infected segment of the population, even though he admitted that he was no expert in the field. None of the three could point to any factual errors in the paper itself. I resubmitted this same paper when a new editor took over at the Proceedings. This time he sent it to four reviewers, who all voted to kill it. Twice more I submitted the paper to the Proceedings. Twice more it was rejected. So I became the second member of the National Academy of Sciences in its 128-year history to have a paper rejected from its journal.”

  “Who was the other member of the Academy to be rejected?”

  “Dr. Linus Pauling, who had argued that Vitamin C might prevent cancer.”

  Williams shuffled through a few note cards in her lap and found the one she was looking for.

  “I said at the beginning of the program that you had 17 research grants refused. Tell us about them.”

  “In 1985 I had been awarded a special seven year grant by the National Institutes of Health. In 1990, two years before it expired, I was told that it would not be renewed, as two-thirds of them automatically were. At least they were honest and admitted the reason was that I had questioned the cause of AIDS. But the interesting thing was that there were ten people who reviewed my grant and rejected it. One was Dani Bolognesi, who was a consultant for Burroughs Wellcome, who manufactured AZT; and another was Flossie Wong-Staal, a former researcher for Dr. Gallo. I found out that three of the ten had never even reviewed my grant and therefore didn't vote. And a fourth had given his vote by phone to the group, and he had voted to support me. After I lost that grant, there were sixteen others….”

  Williams realizes that Dr. Duesberg could probably tell her a long story about each one of them, and he was obviously going to take full advantage of this opportunity on national TV, after many years of his media blackout. She had decided, after his previous trials and tribulations, to give him free rein and just let him talk. But there’s a limit, and so she broke in gently. “How about just telling us about the highlights from one of them....”

  “Well, let's see.... Along with a respected inhalation toxicologist, Professor Otto Raabe, I proposed to test the health hazards of nitrites – poppers – on mice. Three years in a row this proposal was rejected, because, they said, of the lack of preliminary experiments. But preliminary experiments are not a requirement for a grant application. A good friend, the director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, Dr. Harry Haverkos, even volunteered to re-write the proposal for me so there was no chance there was anything inherently wrong with it. But, he said, he could not re-write the name Duesberg on the bottom. It was rejected again.”

  “Did you ever try to get the White House or the President involved?”

  “Yes. Jim Warner was an advisor to President Reagan at the White House. He heard about me in 1988 and arranged to sponsor a public debate. This would have forced the HIV issue into the public spotlight. But even that debate was cancelled a few days beforehand. Warner told me it was by order from above.”

  “Are you disappointed, are you bitter that more of your peers didn't join you in your fight?”

  Duesberg looks like he had considered that question numerous times over the past two decades, and recently reached this conclusion: “After what they did to me, would you have risked losing your reputation, your standing, even your livelihood to back me up?”

  Now that the facts were on the table, Williams had reached the part of every interview when her special expertise took over. The next few minutes were what set her apart from the thousands of other journalists.

  “After all of that, how do you feel, Dr. Duesberg, now that the truth seems to be coming out in this trial?”

  “I'm very sad. I almost wish I had been proven wrong all these years. Instead, it is being confirmed that we – and I mean the medical and scientific research community as a whole – are responsible for the unnecessary deaths of over 300,000 people. How could I feel joy, or even vindication, that I was right, when the results of the last twenty-five years have led to such tragedy?”

  “But don't you feel that you did the best you could to try to get your viewpoint out there?”

  “I would like to think so. But the best I could was not good enough, now was it?”

  “Well, Dr. Duesberg, I think we in the media owe you a tremendous apology for our part in your tragic struggle for the truth. Although I was not one of those who rejected an interview with you, I did not pursue one, either, when perhaps I could have and should have. And I think the entire worldwide media must take responsibility for not doing our job in this case. So I would like to say to you, Dr. Duesberg, I'm sorry.”

  There’s a tear that falls from the left eye of Beverly Williams. Duesberg obviously does not know how to respond to it any more than he does to Williams’ apology. He just sits there, stunned and quiet, while ABC goes to commercial.