Is Boxer Tommy Morrison's Cut-Man the Dumbest Guy on the Planet?

Boxer Tommy Morrison tested HIV positive in 1996. Sadly, he had to stop boxing and gave up a three fight deal worth over $38 Million.

When Earvin 'Magic' Johnson faced the same tragedy, I remember feeling great sadness for him, his sport, and his fans. I was living in Chicago in 1991 and in case you do not remember, in 1991 Chicago was focused on Michael Jordon and NBA Basketball.  Magic Johnson's announcement that he was retiring from the LA Lakers after testing HIV positive stunned the world. Perhaps outside of LA, no place could have been more devastated than Chicago.

Those of us working in AIDS research at the time knew everything in our city had changed. I remember thinking how basketball must be a pretty low-risk sport when it comes to HIV transmission. No question, B-ball is a high contact rough sport. But aside from President Obama's recent lip injury, I am not sure when the last time was that I saw a player bleed on the court much less on a fellow player.

In my life I suppose I have been more of a fight fan. When I was 15 years old I watched the King, Muhammad Ali, train in Miami Beach. I met him. I watched him work out. I watched him spar. I saw men bleed when they sparred with Ali...and they were wearing head gear! 


Unlike basketball, boxing is a no-brainer when it comes to HIV transmission risk. Not just for a Tommy Morrison's opponents, but for his trainers, refs, announcers, press and probably the first couple rows of fans. The most basic rule in HIV prevention is stay away from HIV infected blood. That is pretty simple. I am not sure how a bleeding boxer cannot expose others to his blood?

Tommy Morrison's AIDS denialism seems to be a mix of ignorance and Rethinking AIDS propaganda. He says he tested positive for HIV antibodies, but not the virus. He also says that tests for the virus, mistakenly referring to viral load, fail to find HIV. He is also challenging the validity of HIV antibody tests for diagnosing HIV infection. It is really that sad.

So what happens if Morrison fights and opens a cut? Who is responsible?  What happens next? The fight continues? And who is his cut man -  the person charged with stopping his bleeding between rounds? I know I have a few suggestions for the job, and one of them lives in Canada. After all,  David Crowe has been out front promoting Mr. Morrison's cause. Or how about David Rasnick? He is on record saying that he would be happy to be injected with HIV. Putting the old guy in Morrison's corner would be his chance.

You may be wondering if anyone is taking Mr. Morrison's claims about his HIV status and his desire to step back in the ring seriously. Well check out this article just published in the Montreal Gazette.  Pretty scary shit.

Boxing lesson: Morrison's fight against blood test a teaching moment for Canadians

By TERRY MICHAEL, Freelance February 5, 2011

"What if most everything you think you know about HIV and AIDS is wrong?"

That's the message U.S. boxer Tommy Morrison is sending to Canadian sports fans -and the world-in a confrontation with the Regie des alcools, des courses et des jeux. The gaming board is asking the 42-year-old fighter to take an HIV blood test to qualify for meeting Eric Barrak in a main event Feb. 25 at Pierre Charbonneau Centre.

Regulating a sport that often draws blood, RACJ says Morrison must submit to a test much of the world wrongly believes indicates presence of a pathogenic virus, a string of genetic code in nucleic acid covered in protein. Basing its claimontheworkof Dr. Robert Gallo, the U.S. government 27 years ago announced "the probable cause of AIDS" was indeed such a virus. President Ronald Reagan's Health Secretary, Margaret Heckler, told a press conference April 23, 1984, that immune systems of gay men were collapsing from a retrovirus Gallo claimed to isolate, a virus he said was transmitted through blood during sex.

A researcher at the National Institutes of Health, Gallo's ethics were later the subject of two government inquiries and a major Chicago Tribune investigation of the claim he discovered the "AIDS virus" and "AIDS blood test." When hailed by Heckler as discoverer of HIV, Gallo had published not a single peer-reviewed scientific paper backing his claim. In what might be termed a split decision in boxing, the U.S. and French governments decided in 1987 to share the disputed discovery between Gallo and Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Institut Pasteur -and more importantly, to divide the lucrative profits from the widely used blood test.

That 1984 media event came in a presidential election year, when Reagan was accused of insensitivity to gay men, refusing to utter the newly minted acronym AIDS. Gays embraced the "discovery" offered by the science bureaucrat Gallo, who had been trying with virtually no success for a dozen years to relate his retroviruses to cancer.

A 19th-century germ theory answer to what first was called Gay Related Immune Deficiency was welcomed by the gay community. It made AIDS "everybody's disease," trumping growing evidence it was actually of multifactorial causation, that immune systems were collapsing from: (1) frequent, multi-partner exchange of old pathogens in incestuous urban gay enclaves, causing diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis, heavily treated with antibiotics, which destroy immune-healthful gut bacteria; (2) ubiquitous use of immune suppressive toxins, including alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines and nitrites ( "poppers"), which fuelled partying in a small but significant subset of urban gay culture; and (3) the suppressive psychogenic effects of anxiety and stress on naive, youthful gay male immune systems, from blowback by newly politicized religious fundamentalists, pillorying "unclean gay lifestyles."

I write this with first-hand knowledge. I am a 63-year-old gay man, who participated in that "lifestyle" and who witnessed politicizing of medical science while serving as press secretary in the mid-1980s at the Democratic National Committee, the party opposing Ronald Reagan and supportive of gay rights.

With that brief history, I return to Tommy Morrison and the blood-test-about-nothing Quebec regulators are asking him to take. In fact, the test is nothing more than an assay for some blood proteins that can result from 70 different conditions, including pregnancy and flu vaccinations. Morrison tested reactive -the correct term for the meaningless result -- when he had blood drawn by the Nevada boxing commission before a 1996 fight. He later took "the test" several times and was "negative" -but after being placed on highly toxic, "antiretroviral" chemotherapy, drugs still administered to millions of humans, mostly gay men and black Africans, convinced they carry a lethal bug, not just proteins declared by Gallo to be markers for HIV.

Morrison eventually learned the truth about the test and the chemotherapy, which he stopped taking after it almost destroyed his health.

Thousands of us in the worldwide community of dissenters from the single pathogen theory of AIDS understand Tommy Morrison is really looking for more than a fight in Montreal. He is offering an important teaching moment to Quebecers, Canadians, and millions worldwide who are victims of the multi-billion dollar HIV-AIDS Industry.

The HIV-AIDS story is complex. Many of us have devoted years of study to it, and have concluded there is not now and there never was a human immunodeficiency virus. We ask the world to reassess 27-year-old politicized junk science. Canadians can contribute to that fight for truth by opposing injustice being visited on an American athlete who should be allowed to enter a ring Feb. 25 without taking a test about nothing.