On the Brink of Denialism: Why Peter Duesberg is Wrong and David Crowe is a Liar

Here is a real gem.

Onnie Mary Phuthe, an HIV+ woman from Botswana, wrote to South African AIDS Denialist Anthony Brink to ask about the organization Rethinking AIDS. The exchange is posted at AIDS Myth Exposed.

Brink’s response reminds me of a conversation I had with him while he was in Berlin attending an AIDS Dissident's Conference. I asked Brink about Peter Duesberg and he replied that Duesberg was washed up – old hat. The new ideas in AIDS dissidence were coming from contemporary scientists like Etienne de Harven. That seemed remarkable seeing as Peter Duesberg is 73 years old and de Harven is even older at age 81! Ah, the new ideas of AIDS Denialism.

Yet, I often wondered what Anthony Brink felt deep down about Rethinking AIDS and the people I had come to know as North America’s leading AIDS Deniers. Brink after all is responsible for feeding AIDS Denialism to the suspicious intellectual and former South African President Thabo Mbeki – ultimately bringing 300,000 of his fellow countrymen and 30,000 babies to their unnecessary deaths. Now Anthony Brink gives us some insight through his reply to Onnie. It
humoursly shows the infighting among AIDS Deniers, especially the Perth People and Duesbergians. This is worth a read. But be ready, Anthony Brink is not thrifty with words.



UPDATE: AIDS Myth Exposed has a thread to Defend David Crowe from Anthony The Brink of Disaster. Too funny. "If nothing else, it just makes it plain that Brink, and now Knoll are pushing to create a situation no matter what anyone thinks.I will say this though, I have corresponded with Dr. Bauer and he mentioned that Brink has no support from the Board to become RA President. I assume that goes no matter what happens to David. Brink will not ever be President of RA. Why on earth would he go out of his way to harm a terrific and effective dissident? Why would he brush aside the reasoned and caring pleas of a friend like Michael Geiger?

UPDATE: Is David Crowe a liar? Is he a fraud? Anthony Brink is not alone in making these claims against our favorite wannabe scientist AIDS Denialist. As posted at AIDS Myth Exposed...

"I am curious. Is this the same David Crowe who has been a long time executive in the Green Party of Alberta? If you go to the Facebook Group called Greens in Alberta you will find a great deal of information in some of the discussion groups that show how Crowe has operated in the past, and that Crowe and his friends fled the Green Party AGM and tried to hold a secret meeting in the parking lot (unbeknownst to hundreds inside the hall),. Now it is my understanding that he may be under investigation for extortion, fraud, forgery and submitting false documents."

UPDATE: David Crowe will not take Brink's abuse. What kind of denialist would not deny what an AIDS denier alleges! Not David Crowe. Read how David Crowe claims that it is Anthony Brink that is lying. The Snakes are getting rather vicious.

UPDATE: Anthony Brink (Junior Member at AIDS Myth Exposed) shares a string of emails that offer a glimpse into the snake pit. Thank Snout for this one.

From: Onnie Mary Phuthe
Sent: 22 July 2009 10:13 PM
To: arbrink@iafrica.com
Subject: Rethinking Aids

I came across the Rethinking Aids web.

I contacted Mr. David Crowe [David.Crowe@aras.ab.ca] since I wanted to attend he conference for 2009 Nov 4 but have no money.

I have huge interest in HIV and Aids; I have lived with HIV since 1994. I have seen for myself many things that truly support rethinking aids.

I really wish to be in contact with people who think in line with the rethink aids group since I am already living rethink aids. I really feel deceived by all the info being pushed by big pharma and crooked scientists, most of all I really feel pity for all the people who have believed what they heard with no question.

I am the kind of person who does not believe anything until I can also prove it myself. I don’t have a college education only form 4 but learn more at ke fodile, wena? (still under construction). The end of it will make me more enemies than friends about myself. Nevertheless, one thing I have personally witnessed is that most of the lies have come with 99% of the drug pushing diagnoses that are made on humans. It seems very important to treat people at the expense of their lives, health, and financial stability, and worst of all, a devastated mental state in the name of profit.

I truly thought I was in denial or crazy since I questioned everything and I did not believe all I heard. One thing I believe is that food, herbs, water, sunlight, unrefined sea salt, and others are the missing link between the human being of today and the past generations.

All disease that are identified come with a huge profit margin, and second they also comes with a huge cost for the humans involved. The question is animals are in the wild but manage well without vets. Whereas humans because they know and can buy are never fully treated, but rather are always lead to believe what is not true about their bodies.

Disappointing enough, but how can we trust scientists and their discoveries? I know what genuine research looks like.

It looks like this: all the board members, scientists, founders, directors and all others of Rethinking AIDS > Home ( DNN 4.3.5 ) and all their associates. I wish to learn with more clarity the puzzle that I am also putting together; I am missing some pieces here.

I really need to talk to other people who might think similar thoughts. When I talk to others in my country, I already see a threat of people fearing to tell the truth in favour of the funding they get from the spear-headers of the lies of the century.

I have made an ad at the link below. I do not want funding from the same people who got us in the mess, except those who want to deal with me will pay for themselves for the herbs I personally use. I get them fresh and prepare them raw. I am afraid to verbalize all that I know, because maybe I will be caught, I don’t know, but the thing is, does anyone else know what the truth is? If they know, why are we still being told the same lie over and over again, that is why I am afraid. There is something in it for those who choose to conceal the facts.

The challenge is that when it’s been almost thirty years of lies then it’s a challenge to make a statement to a brainwashed society (the world), plus the businesses would collapse if people knew and accepted the truth as it is.

Onnie Mary Phuthe
Botswana

Anthony Brink's reply

From: Anthony Brink [mailto:arbrink@iafrica.com]
Sent: 23 July 2009 03:33 PM
To: (Onnie)
Subject: RE: Rethinking Aids
Importance: High

Dear Onnie

Thanks for your email.

Very nice hearing from you.

We see things in much the same way.

As a fellow African, a pale African in my case, you need to know a few things about 'Rethinking AIDS', and you might want to share this information with your friends and family in Botswana so that they are not also misled about what this organization is.

'Rethinking AIDS' is basically a support group for Professor Peter Duesberg at the University of California, Berkeley, California in America, to promote and defend his scientific views on AIDS.

To see this you only have to go to 'About RA': About RA

Apart from reading about him there, and even finding a link to his website, you'll also read there an account of how and why 'The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis' was originally formed and its past activities.

Nowhere in the 'About RA' page is there any mention of the generally recognized scientific leaders of the AIDS dissident movement: the Australian physicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her colleagues (the Perth Group), who even before the publication of Duesberg's critique of the HIV theory of AIDS in 1987, on the basis that 'retroviruses' are always harmless, were already onto the real, more basic reason why the theory is wrong: 'HIV' has never been proven to exist.

You ask in your email, 'how can we trust scientists and their discoveries? I know what genuine research looks like.'

What you need to do is satisfy yourself about this by reading into the matter yourself.

You mustn't take things on authority. Like one of the Rethinking AIDS board members, a very senior member of the board, who says more or less: 'Duesberg's clever and experienced so I just go with what he says.'

It may interest you to know that to the best of my knowledge nobody who has read Duesberg's and the Perth Group's respective papers, and particularly their debate on whether 'HIV' exists, has come away with the conclusion that Duesberg is right that 'HIV' has been proved to exist, and that the Perth Group is wrong to claim that in truth and in fact 'HIV' has never been proved to exist.

Everyone who has studied the scientific disagreement between them has concluded that Duesberg is wrong.

This includes former South African Presidents Mbeki and Motlanthe (the latter currently Deputy President under President Zuma).

All of us feel rather embarrassed about this.

But it's awkward to say something like: 'My father, you need to take a bath, you really do. Everyone around you is noticing and saying so.'

It's so much easier just to pinch our noses and say nothing.

By the early years of our new century, 'The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis' had disintegrated.

It was dead.

In 2006 a Canadian businessman called David Crowe decided to form a new organization under his control.

He collected around him a handful of AIDS dissidents that he knew wouldn't give him any problems, and he formed a 'board of directors', most of whom are either active Duesberg partisans or 'sleepers' in the sense that they don't actively conduct themselves as directors should and do not express any disagreement with Mr Crowe (when one tries, we'll read below, Mr Crowe fixes him.)

This makes it easy for Mr Crowe to run things pretty much on his own along American lines.

It's a bit like the Treatment Action Campaign here in South Africa, which although it has many formal office bearers, is completely dominated and controlled by Zackie Achmat. Everyone knows this.

Now Mr Crowe needs to keep things running on American lines, because as usual that's where the money is.

Isn't it always so, Onnie? Don't we feel it over here in Africa all the time?!

Rethinking AIDS is funded by the same rich person who funds Duesberg, and do you know this same person even sits on the board of Rethinking AIDS, meaning he has the clout to govern its scientific policy? Can you believe such a thing, Onnie?

When one of the Rethinking AIDS board members tries breaking ranks and privately challenges Mr Crowe recently in a small closed internet forum about the things he says and does, whether in his opinion they're right or wrong, true or false, do you know that Mr Crowe sends him a demand by email that he should shut his mouth and in future submit any communications to that forum for him for prior censorship, just to make sure that the disobedient board member doesn't challenge Mr Crowe ever again? Can you believe your ears, Onnie?!

All of this makes it possible for Mr Crowe to run his show the way he wants it unaccountably to the international AIDS dissident community, and to pretend to the outside world that the little organization he formed in 2006 speaks for us all.

Obviously Mr Crowe made his move to form Rethinking AIDS in 2006 behind the scenes without telling the rest of us.

He did not contact every dissident on the list of those who'd signed their support for our basic cause that the HIV-AIDS hypothesis should be re-examined (see About RA page) and announce, 'I reckon it's a good idea to form a new AIDS dissident organization, what do you think? Please nominate yourself if you like and/or some other dissidents for election to a provisional representative body to discuss purpose and direction, scientific policy and operating strategy.'

That's not the way Mr Crowe works!

Behind the scenes is the way he works!

He wanted to make sure that Rethinking AIDS doesn't do any rethinking about anything important, anything really important such as whether 'HIV', which is at the core of the 'HIV-AIDS' construct, even exists.

No, we can't have that, Onnie!

We must stay off that matter!

This is why Mr Crowe made a point of snubbing the Perth Group and rejecting their request for representation on the board when they got to hear what he was up to behind the scenes.

Appropriating the name of the Group's former bulletin, Mr Crowe called his new organization Rethinking AIDS.

From this name and to read 'About RA' on his website, you get the impression that Rethinking AIDS is much the same scientific initiative as the Group.

People who don't know the real history will be deceived by this, but that's the whole idea!

In fact Rethinking AIDS is in no sense a representative organization, and it doesn't speak for the vast majority of AIDS dissidents who reject Duesberg's claim it promotes that 'HIV' has been shown to exist as childish scientific nonsense.

These structural, organizational and legitimacy issues aside, the main problem with Mr Crowe's Rethinking AIDS organization is that it promotes the lie that 'HIV' exists, just as the drug-pushing AIDS doctors, activists, journalists and academics say, only Rethinking AIDS says it's harmless.

This is like telling a child terrified by a noise outside his or her bedroom at night:

'Don't worry, my child, it's only a tokoloshe, it's definitely a tokoloshe. Never mind what everyone believes and tells you, the tokoloshe lurking outside your window won't come in and harm you. Just go back to sleep.'

You say this to the child knowing it's a lie, but you tell the lie to the child anyway because you think it's best to tell lies, maybe because telling lies comes naturally to you in your daily life and in your business dealings and you have a habit of telling lies and responding to what people say with emotive and disingenuous half-truths, and so you're comfortable with lies and half-truths, and/or because you think the child can't cope with the simple truth that tokoloshes exist only in the human imagination.

So it's better to tell the child a lie. The lie that tokoloshes really do exist. Even though it's quite easy to show they haven’t ever been proven to exist by the generally accepted procedure for proving things like this. And if anyone else comes into the room who has heard the child's cries, and says, 'There's no need to worry, my child, there's no tokoloshe outside, there are no tokoloshes', you say: 'Get out! Be quiet! You mustn't say this. It's too complicated for children to be told things like this. It will only confuse them.'

That's the approach to the problem of 'HIV-AIDS' taken by Mr Crowe's Rethinking AIDS organization.

This is how Mr Crowe thinks the myth of HIV-AIDS will be resolved.

He thinks the myth of HIV-AIDS will be resolved with lies.

But when you raise this matter with him, he says, 'But I have been questioning the existence of tokoloshes for many years.'

He doesn't say, 'I agree there are no tokoloshes in the real world.'

He says, 'I have been questioning the existence of tokoloshes for many years.'

Of course this is the kind of thing successful scheming politicians say, because it's evasive, self-serving, convenient and basically dishonest.

I mean successful in getting to be where they want to be for themselves.

I don't mean successful in serving the constituency they claim to represent.

Mr Crowe never says anything as directly truthful as 'There are no tokoloshes in the real world', because that would make it difficult for him as the self-appointed king of the tiny little country he's formed that's cut off from the rest of the world, which no one in the rest of the world recognizes, like Transkei and Bophuthatswana in apartheid South Africa, advised by a witchdoctor who says tokoloshes are very, very real, but are harmless.

What he worries about most is being king of his little country.

Like Ian Smith and his Rhodesian Front, claiming in 1965 to be the Prime Minister of all of Zimbabwe (then named Rhodesia after the businessman who stole the country). When actually he was representing only the tiniest minority of very foolish people.

We know all about people like this over here in Africa, don't we Onnie?

But Mr Crowe likes the feeling of being the king; it's almost as nice as the feeling one gets from being the president of a Rotary Club in a little town in the middle of nowhere that no one wants to go to.

Sorry, I should have said President, President with a capital P, because Mr Crowe always announces himself with a capital P.

He realizes that to deal with the underlying problems caused by his witchdoctor whose views about tokoloshes he promotes, even though deep inside he knows that they're lies, and the problems he causes us by the way he runs things in doing everything possible to prevent a proper ventilation of these lies, would mean the end of his reign as king with the crown he put on his own head, or asked a couple of his friends to put on his head. And he'd have to give up being the king, the king he likes being so much, either by abdicating in disgrace or being kicked out in disgrace with a hard boot up his arse for the tremendous harm he's caused our AIDS dissident movement, and remembered forever for the tremendous harm he's caused our AIDS dissident movement.

Particularly in the big case held by the elders in the shade of the big tree in the centre of the village concerning whether a certain man was causing the tokoloshe to come riding in on a hyena in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep to visit his neighbour and cause his cow to die and his mother to hurt her leg in a fall and his cousin to fail his exams.

In that case, the man accused had expert witnesses to explain to the court that he couldn't have done what he was being accused of having done because tokoloshes have never been proved to exist. And right in the middle of the case when it was going very well for the accused man and his expert witnesses, and everyone was noticing and commenting on how impressed the court was by the scientific evidence and arguments being presented, the President comes along, and behind the scenes he furtively tells the lawyer 'You're going to lose the case doing it this way, it's much better to tell the court that tokoloshes do exist, only they're harmless.' And not being a very bright lawyer, who also hasn't really had enough time to appreciate what's wrong with this kind of defence, and why the first and second defences are not complementary or alternative but must necessarily be mutually destructive, the lawyer thinks the President is right, why, he's the President of all the AIDS dissidents in the world, and he changes the defence strategy right in the middle of the case, when it was going very well as I said, and with that the case is on its way to hell, so that the unfortunate accused man ends up severely punished for calling out tokoloshes to visit and cause his neighbour's cow to die and his mother to hurt her leg in a fall and his cousin to fail his exams, and the historical opportunity is lost, the historical opportunity to show in court that despite what nearly everyone thinks and all the witchdoctors claim, actually tokoloshes have never been shown to exist.

And when it's all over the President doesn't even say I'm very sorry about the calamity I caused, I'm terribly sorry, I was only trying to help. I realize now that it's been pointed out to me that I made the most horrendous mistake. I feel sick to my stomach over what I have done.

No, he says, What are you complaining about? I did exactly the right thing going behind your backs and telling the lawyer to change his fundamental defence strategy right in the middle of the case and introduce a new defence that contradicts the original one.

He says, Go and jump in the lake, you and your complaints against me and what I did. You were going to lose the case anyway. I'd do it again!

So you see, Onnie, it would be better to avoid Rethinking AIDS for information about so-called HIV-AIDS.

It's always best to avoid taking advice from people who tell lies and behave in the way I've told you about.

You can get honest, reliable information about the basic trouble with the HIV theory of AIDS from the The Perth Group HIV-AIDS Debate Website.

My TIG Position Statement on 'HIV' will put you fully in the picture.

All the best

Anthony
Cape Town

"The Doctor will Sue You Now": Ben Goldacre's Missing Chapter on the Rath of AIDS Denialism

I have been reading Ben Goldacre’s great book Bad Science and I knew something was missing. Goldacre covers all of the wacky snake oil scams and schemes that plague health care today. From antitoxins to homeopathy, Bad Science seems has it covered. What’s missing is none other than the Rath of AIDS Denialism himself, German vitamin salesman Matthias Rath. You know, as in Rath and Rasnick, the guys who embarked on illegal ‘clinical trials’ to build a pseudoscience to boost vitamin sales in South Africa. Now, Goldacre explains why he omitted the Rath chapter and gives us all the essential missing material as a gift!! Enjoy!

From Ben Goldacre: This is the “missing chapter” about vitamin pill salesman Matthias Rath. Sadly I was unable to write about him at the time that book was initially published, as he was suing my ass in the High Court. The chapter is now available in the new paperback edition, and I’ve posted it here for free so that nobody loses out.

Although the publishers make a slightly melodramatic fuss about this in the promo material, it is a very serious story about the dangers of pseudoscience, as I hope you’ll see, and it was also a pretty unpleasant episode, not just for me, but also for the many other people he’s tried to sue, including Medecins Sans Frontieres and more. If you’re ever looking for a warning sign that you’re on the wrong side of an argument, suing Medecins Sans Frontieres is probably a pretty good clue.
This is an extract from BAD SCIENCE by Ben Goldacre Published by Harper Perennial 2009.
You are free to copy it, paste it, bake it, reprint it, read it aloud, as long as you don’t change it – including this bit – so that people know that they can find more ideas for free at http://www.badscience.net/

***Note that Seth Kalichman added images and did not alter the text.

The Doctor Will Sue You Now
This chapter did not appear in the original edition of this book, because for fifteen months leading up to September 2008 the vitamin-pill entrepreneur Matthias Rath was suing me personally, and the Guardian, for libel. This strategy brought only mixed success. For all that nutritionists may fantasise in public that any critic is somehow a pawn of big pharma, in private they would do well to remember that, like many my age who work in the public sector, I don’t own a flat. The Guardian generously paid for the lawyers, and in September 2008 Rath dropped his case, which had cost in excess of £500,000 to defend. Rath has paid £220,000 already, and the rest will hopefully follow. Nobody will ever repay me for the endless meetings, the time off work, or the days spent poring over tables filled with endlessly cross-referenced court documents.

On this last point there is, however, one small consolation, and I will spell it out as a cautionary tale: I now know more about Matthias Rath than almost any other person alive. My notes, references and witness statements, boxed up in the room where I am sitting right now, make a pile as tall as the man himself, and what I will write here is only a tiny fraction of the fuller story that is waiting to be told about him. This chapter, I should also mention, is available free online for anyone who wishes to see it.

Matthias Rath takes us rudely outside the contained, almost academic distance of this book. For the most part we’ve been interested in the intellectual and cultural consequences of bad science, the made-up facts in national newspapers, dubious academic practices in universities, some foolish pill-peddling, and so on. But what happens if we take these sleights of hand, these pill-marketing techniques, and transplant them out of our decadent Western context into a situation where things really matter?


In an ideal world this would be only a thought experiment.

AIDS is the opposite of anecdote. Twenty-five million people have died from it already, three million in the last year alone, and 500,000 of those deaths were children. In South Africa it kills 300,000 people every year: that’s eight hundred people every day, or one every two minutes. This one country has 6.3 million people who are HIV positive, including 30 per cent of all pregnant women. There are 1.2 million AIDS orphans under the age of seventeen. Most chillingly of all, this disaster has appeared suddenly, and while we were watching: in 1990, just 1
per cent of adults in South Africa were HIV positive. Ten years later, the figure had risen to 25 per cent.


It’s hard to mount an emotional response to raw numbers, but on one thing I think we would agree. If you were to walk into a situation with that much death, misery and disease, you would be very careful to make sure that you knew what you were talking about. For the reasons you are about to read, I suspect that Matthias Rath missed the mark.


This man, we should be clear, is our responsibility. Born and raised in Germany, Rath was the head of Cardiovascular Research at the Linus Pauling Institute in Palo Alto in California, and even then he had a tendency towards grand gestures, publishing a paper in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine in 1992 titled ‘A Unified Theory of Human Cardiovascular


Disease Leading the Way to the Abolition of this Disease as a Cause for Human Mortality’. The unified theory was high-dose vitamins.


He first developed a power base from sales in Europe, selling his pills with tactics that will be very familiar to you from the rest of this book, albeit slightly more aggressive. In the UK, his adverts claimed that ‘90 per cent of patients receiving chemotherapy for cancer die within months of starting treatment’, and suggested that three million lives could be saved if cancer patients stopped being treated by conventional medicine. The pharmaceutical industry was deliberately letting people die for financial gain, he explained. Cancer treatments were ‘poisonous compounds’ with ‘not even one effective treatment’.


The decision to embark on treatment for cancer can be the most difficult that an individual or a family will ever take, representing a close balance between well-documented benefits and equally well-documented side-effects. Adverts like these might play especially strongly on your conscience if your mother has just lost all her hair to chemotherapy, for example, in the hope of staying alive just long enough to see your son speak. There was some limited regulatory response in Europe, but it was generally as weak as that faced by the other characters in this book. The Advertising Standards Authority criticised one of his adverts in the UK, but that is essentially all they are able to do. Rath was ordered by a Berlin court to stop claiming that his vitamins could cure cancer, or face a €250,000 fine.


But sales were strong, and Matthias Rath still has many supporters in Europe, as you will shortly see. He walked into South Africa with all the acclaim, self-confidence and wealth he had amassed as a successful vitamin-pill entrepreneur in Europe and America, and began to take out full-page adverts in newspapers. ‘The answer to the AIDS epidemic is here,’ he proclaimed. Anti-retroviral drugs were poisonous, and a conspiracy to kill patients and make money. ‘Stop AIDS Genocide by the Drugs Cartel’ said one headline. ‘Why should South Africans continue to be poisoned with AZT? There is a natural answer to AIDS.’

The answer came in the form of vitamin pills. ‘Multivitamin treatment is more effective than any toxic AIDS drug.’‘Multivitamins cut the risk of developing AIDS in half.’ Rath’s company ran clinics reflecting these ideas, and in 2005 he decided to run a trial of his vitamins in a township near Cape Town called Khayelitsha, giving his own formulation, VitaCell, to people with advanced AIDS. In 2008 this trial was declared illegal by the Cape High Court of South Africa. Although Rath says that none of his participants had been on anti-retroviral drugs, some relatives have given statements saying that they were, and were actively told to stop using them.

Tragically,Matthias Rath had taken these ideas to exactly the right place. Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa at the time, was well known as an ‘AIDS dissident’, and to international horror, while people died at the rate of one every two minutes in his country, he gave credence and support to the claims of a small band of campaigners who variously claim that AIDS does not exist, that it is not caused by HIV, that anti-retroviral medication does more harm than good, and so on. At various times during the peak of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa their government argued that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, and that anti-retroviral drugs are not useful for patients. They refused to roll out proper treatment programmes, they refused to accept free donations of drugs, and they refused to accept grant money from the Global Fund to buy drugs.

One study estimates that if the South African national government had used anti-retroviral drugs for prevention and treatment at the same rate as the Western Cape province (which defied national policy on the issue), around 171,000 new HIV infections and 343,000 deaths could have been prevented between 1999 and 2007. Another study estimates that between 2000 and 2005 there were 330,000 unnecessary deaths, 2.2 million person years lost, and 35,000 babies unnecessarily born with HIV because of the failure to implement a cheap and simple mother-to-child-transmission prevention program.

Between one and three doses of an ARV drug can reduce transmission dramatically. The cost is negligible. It was not available. Interestingly, Matthias Rath’s colleague and employee, a South African barrister named Anthony Brink, takes the credit for introducing Thabo Mbeki to many of these ideas. Brink stumbled on the ‘AIDS dissident’ material in the mid-1990s, and after much surfing and reading, became convinced that it must be right. In 1999 he wrote an article about AZT in a Johannesburg newspaper titled ‘a medicine from hell’. This led to a public exchange with a leading virologist. Brink contacted Mbeki, sending him copies of the debate, and was welcomed as an expert. This is a chilling testament to the danger of elevating cranks by engaging with them.

In his initial letter of motivation for employment to Matthias Rath, Brink described himself as ‘South Africa’s leading AIDS dissident, best known for my whistle-blowing exposé of the toxicity and inefficacy of AIDS drugs, and for my political activism in this regard, which caused President Mbeki and Health Minister Dr Tshabalala-Msimang to repudiate the drugs in 1999’.

In 2000, the now infamous International AIDS Conference took place in Durban. Mbeki’s presidential advisory panel beforehand was packed with ‘AIDS dissidents’, including Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick. On the first day, Rasnick suggested that all HIV testing should be banned on principle, and that South Africa should stop screening supplies of blood for HIV. ‘If I had the power to outlaw the HIV antibody test,’ he said, ‘I would do it across the board.’When African physicians gave testimony about the drastic change AIDS had caused in their clinics and hospitals, Rasnick said he had not seen ‘any evidence’ of an AIDS catastrophe. The media were not allowed in, but one reporter from the Village Voice was present. Peter Duesberg, he said, ‘gave a presentation so removed from African medical reality that it left several local doctors shaking their heads’. It wasn’t AIDS that was killing babies and children, said the dissidents: it was the anti-retroviral medication. President Mbeki sent a letter to world leaders comparing the struggle of the ‘AIDS dissidents’ to the struggle against apartheid.

The Washington Post described the reaction at the White House: ‘So stunned were some officials by the letter’s tone and timing – during final preparations for July’s conference in Durban – that at least two of them, according to diplomatic sources, felt obliged to check whether it was genuine.’Hundreds of delegates walked out of Mbeki’s address to the conference in disgust, but many more described themselves as dazed and confused. Over 5,000 researchers and activists around the world signed up to the Durban Declaration, a document that specifically addressed and repudiated the claims and concerns – at least the more moderate ones – of the ‘AIDS dissidents’. Specifically, it addressed the charge that people were simply dying of poverty: The evidence that AIDS is caused by HIV-1 or HIV-2 is clearcut, exhaustive and unambiguous … As with any other chronic infection, various co-factors play a role in determining the risk of disease. Persons who are malnourished, who already suffer other infections or who are older, tend to be more susceptible to the rapid development of AIDS following HIV infection. However, none of these factors weaken the scientific evidence that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS … Mother-to-child transmission can be reduced by half or more by short courses of antiviral drugs … What works best in one country may not be appropriate in another. But to tackle the disease, everyone must first understand that HIV is the enemy. Research, not myths, will lead to the development of more effective and cheaper treatments.

It did them no good. Until 2003 the South African government refused, as a matter of principle, to roll out proper antiretroviral medication programmes, and even then the process was half-hearted. This madness was only overturned after a massive campaign by grassroots rganisations such as the Treatment Action Campaign, but even after the ANC cabinet voted to allow medication to be given, there was still resistance. In mid-2005, at least 85 per cent of HIV-positive people who needed anti-retroviral drugs were still refused them. That’s around a million people.

This resistance, of course, went deeper than just one man; much of it came from Mbeki’s Health Minister,Manto Tshabalala- Msimang. An ardent critic of medical drugs for HIV, she would cheerfully go on television to talk up their dangers, talk down their benefits, and became irritable and evasive when asked how many patients were receiving effective treatment. She declared in 2005 that she would not be ‘pressured’ into meeting the target of three million patients on anti-retroviral medication, that people had ignored the importance of nutrition, and that she would continue to warn patients of the sideeffects of anti-retrovirals, saying: ‘We have been vindicated in this regard.We are what we eat.’

It’s an eerily familiar catchphrase. Tshabalala-Msimang has also gone on record to praise the work of Matthias Rath, and refused to investigate his activities. Most joyfully of all, she is a staunch advocate of the kind of weekend glossy-magazine-style nutritionism that will by now be very familiar to you. The remedies she advocates for AIDS are beetroot, garlic, lemons and African potatoes. A fairly typical quote, from the Health Minister in a country where eight hundred people die every day from AIDS, is this: ‘Raw garlic and a skin of the lemon – not only do they give you a beautiful face and skin but they also protect you from disease.’ South Africa’s stand at the 2006 World AIDS Conference in Toronto was described by delegates as the ‘salad stall’. It consisted of some garlic, some beetroot, the African potato, and assorted other vegetables.

Some boxes of anti-retroviral drugs were added later, but they were reportedly borrowed at the last minute from other conference delegates. Alternative therapists like to suggest that their treatments and ideas have not been sufficiently researched. As you now know, this is often untrue, and in the case of the Health Minister’s favoured vegetables, research had indeed been done, with results that were far from promising. Interviewed on SABC about this, Tshabalala-Msimang gave the kind of responses you’d expect to hear at any North London dinner-party discussion of alternative therapies.

First she was asked about work from the University of Stellenbosch which suggested that her chosen plant, the African potato, might be actively dangerous for people on AIDS drugs. One study on African potato in HIV had to be terminated prematurely, because the patients who received the plant extract developed severe bone-marrow suppression and a drop in their CD4 cell count – which is a bad thing – after eight weeks. On top of this, when extract from the same vegetable was given to cats with Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, they succumbed to full-blown Feline AIDS faster than their non-treated controls.

African potato does not look like a good bet. Tshabalala-Msimang disagreed: the researchers should go back to the drawing board, and ‘investigate properly’. Why? Because HIV-positive people who used African potato had shown improvement, and they had said so themselves. If a person says he or she is feeling better, should this be disputed, she demanded to know, merely because it had not been proved scientifically? ‘When a person says she or he is feeling better, I must say “No, I don’t think you are feeling better”? “I must rather go and do science on you”?’ Asked whether there should be a scientific basis to her views, she replied: ‘Whose science?’ And there, perhaps, is a clue, if not exoneration. This is a continent that has been brutally exploited by the developed world, first by empire, and then by globalised capital. Conspiracy theories about AIDS and Western medicine are not entirely absurd in this context. The pharmaceutical industry has indeed been caught performing drug trials in Africa which would be impossible anywhere in the developed world. Many find it suspicious that black Africans seem to be the biggest victims of AIDS, and point to the biological warfare programmes set up by the apartheid governments; there have also been suspicions that the scientific discourse of HIV/AIDS might be a device, a Trojan horse for spreading even more exploitative Western political and economic agendas around a problem that is simply one of poverty.

And these are new countries, for which independence and self-rule are recent developments, which are struggling to find their commercial feet and true cultural identity after centuries of colonisation. Traditional medicine represents an important link with an autonomous past; besides which, anti-retroviral medications have been unnecessarily – offensively, absurdly – expensive, and until moves to challenge this became partially successful, many Africans were effectively denied access to medical treatment as a result. it’s very easy for us to feel smug, and to forget that we all have our own strange cultural idiosyncrasies which prevent us from taking up sensible public-health programmes. For examples,we don’t even have to look as far as MMR. There is a good evidence base, for example, to show that needle-exchange programmes reduce the spread of HIV, but this strategy has been rejected time and again in favour of ‘Just say no.’ Development charities funded by US Christian groups refuse to engage with birth control, and any suggestion of abortion, even in countries where being in control of your own fertility could mean the difference between success and failure in life, is met with a cold, pious stare. These impractical moral principles are so deeply entrenched that Pepfar, the US Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, has insisted that every recipient of international aid money must sign a declaration expressly promising not to have any involvement with sex workers.

We mustn’t appear insensitive to the Christian value system, but it seems to me that engaging sex workers is almost the cornerstone of any effective AIDS policy: commercial sex is frequently the ‘vector of transmission’, and sex workers a very high-risk population; but there are also more subtle issues at stake. If you secure the legal rights of prostitutes to be free from violence and discrimination, you empower them to demand universal condom use, and that way you can prevent HIV from being spread into the whole community. This is where science meets culture. But perhaps even to your own friends and neighbours, in whatever suburban idyll has become your home, the moral principle of abstinence from sex and drugs is more important than people dying of AIDS; and perhaps, then, they are no less irrational than Thabo Mbeki.

So this was the situation into which the vitamin-pill entrepreneur Matthias Rath inserted himself, prominently and expensively, with the wealth he had amassed from Europe and America, exploiting anti-colonial anxieties with no sense of irony, although he was a white man offering pills made in a factory abroad. His adverts and clinics were a tremendous success. He began to tout individual patients as evidence of the benefits that could come from vitamin pills – although in reality some of his most famous success stories have died of AIDS. When asked about the deaths of Rath’s star patients, Health Minister Tshabalala-Msimang replied: ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean that if I am taking antibiotics and I die, that I died of antibiotics.’ She is not alone: South Africa’s politicians have consistently refused to step in, Rath claims the support of the government, and its most senior figures have refused to distance themselves from his operations or to criticise his activities. Tshabalala- Msimang has gone on the record to state that the Rath Foundation ‘are not undermining the government’s position. If anything, they are supporting it.’

In 2005, exasperated by government inaction, a group of 199 leading medical practitioners in South Africa signed an open letter to the health authorities of the Western Cape, pleading for
action on the Rath Foundation. ‘Our patients are being inundated with propaganda encouraging them to stop life-saving medicine,’ it said. ‘Many of us have had experiences with HIVinfected patients who have had their health compromised by stopping their anti-retrovirals due to the activities of this Foundation.’ Rath’s adverts continue unabated. He even claimed that his activities were endorsed by huge lists of sponsors and affiliates including the World Health Organization, UNICEF and UNAIDS. All have issued statements flatly denouncing his claims and activities. The man certainly has chutzpah. His adverts are also rich with detailed scientific claims. It would be wrong of us to neglect the science in this story, so we should follow some through, specifically those which focused on a Harvard study in Tanzania. He described this research in full-page advertisements, some of which have appeared in the New York Times and the Herald Tribune. He refers to these paid adverts, I should mention, as if he had received flattering news coverage in the same papers. Anyway, this research showed that multivitamin supplements can be beneficial in a developing world population with AIDS: there’s no problem with that result, and there are plenty of reasons to think that vitamins might have some benefit for a sick and frequently malnourished population.

The researchers enrolled 1,078 HIV-positive pregnant women and randomly assigned them to have either a vitamin supplement or placebo. Notice once again, if you will, that this is another large, well-conducted, publicly funded trial of vitamins, conducted by mainstream scientists, contrary to the claims of nutritionists that such studies do not exist. The women were followed up for several years, and at the end of the study, 25 per cent of those on vitamins were severely ill or dead, compared with 31 per cent of those on placebo. There was also a statistically significant benefit in CD4 cell count (a measure of HIV activity) and viral loads. These results were in no sense dramatic – and they cannot be compared to the demonstrable life-saving benefits of anti-retrovirals – but they did show that improved diet, or cheap generic vitamin pills, could represent a simple and relatively inexpensive way to marginally delay the need to start HIV medication in some patients. In the hands of Rath, this study became evidence that vitamin pills are superior to medication in the treatment of HIV/AIDS, that anti-retroviral therapies ‘severely damage all cells in the body – including white blood cells’, and worse, that they were ‘thereby not improving but rather worsening immune deficiencies and expanding the AIDS epidemic’. The researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health were so horrified that they put together a press release setting out their support for medication, and stating starkly, with unambiguous clarity, that Matthias Rath had misrepresented their findings.

Media regulators failed to act.

To outsiders the story is baffling and terrifying. The United Nations has condemned Rath’s adverts as ‘wrong and misleading’. ‘This guy is killing people by luring them with unrecognised treatment without any scientific evidence,’ said Eric Goemaere, head of Médecins sans Frontières SA, a man who pioneered anti-retroviral therapy in South Africa. Rath sued him. It’s not just MSF who Rath has gone after. He has also brought time-consuming, expensive, stalled or failed cases against a professor of AIDS research, critics in the media and others.

His most heinous campaign has been against the Treatment Action Campaign. For many years this has been the key organisation campaigning for access to anti-retroviral medication in South Africa, and it has been fighting a war on four fronts. Firstly, it campaigns against its own government, trying to compel it to roll out treatment programmes for the population. Secondly, it fights against the pharmaceutical industry, which claims that it needs to charge full price for its products in developing countries in order to pay for research and development of new drugs – although, as we shall see, out of its $550 billion global annual revenue, the pharmaceutical industry spends twice as much on promotion and admin as it does on research and development. Thirdly, it is a grassroots organisation, made up largely of black women from townships who do important prevention and treatment-literacy work on the ground, ensuring that people know what is available, and how to protect themselves. Lastly, it fights against people who promote the type of information peddled by Matthias Rath and his like.

Rath has taken it upon himself to launch a massive campaign against this group. He distributes advertising material against them, saying ‘Treatment Action Campaign medicines are killing you’ and ‘Stop AIDS genocide by the drug cartel’, claiming – as you will guess by now – that there is an international conspiracy by pharmaceutical companies intent on prolonging the AIDS crisis in the interests of their own profits by giving medication that makes people worse. TAC must be a part of this, goes the reasoning, because it criticises Matthias Rath. Just like me writing on Patrick Holford or Gillian McKeith, TAC is perfectly in favour of good diet and nutrition. But in Rath’s promotional literature it is a front for the pharmaceutical industry, a ‘Trojan horse’ and a ‘running dog’. TAC has made a full disclosure of its funding and activities, showing no such connection: Rath presented no evidence to the contrary, and has even lost a court case over the issue, but will not let it lie. In fact he presents the loss of this court case as if it was a victory.

The founder of TAC is a man called Zackie Achmat, and he is the closest thing I have to a hero. He is South African, and coloured, by the nomenclature of the apartheid system in which he grew up.At the age of fourteen he tried to burn down his school, and you might have done the same in similar circumstances. He has been arrested and imprisoned under South Africa’s violent, brutal white regime, with all that entailed. He is also gay, and HIV-positive, and he refused to take anti-retroviral medication until it was widely available to all on the public health system, even when he was dying of AIDS, even when he was personally implored to save himself by Nelson Mandela, a public supporter of anti-retroviral medication and Achmat’s work.

And now, at last, we come to the lowest point of this whole story, not merely for Matthias Rath’s movement, but for the alternative therapy movement around the world as a whole. In 2007, with a huge public flourish, to great media coverage, Rath’s former employee Anthony Brink filed a formal complaint against Zackie Achmat, the head of the TAC. Bizarrely, he filed this complaint with the International Criminal Court at The Hague, accusing Achmat of genocide for successfully campaigning to get access to HIV drugs for the people of South Africa.

It’s hard to explain just how influential the ‘AIDS dissidents’ are in South Africa. Brink is a barrister, a man with important friends, and his accusations were reported in the national news media – and in some corners of the Western gay press – as a serious news story. I do not believe that any one of those journalists who reported on it can possibly have read Brink’s indictment to the end.

I have.

The first fifty-seven pages present familiar anti-medication and ‘AIDS-dissident’ material. But then, on page fifty-eight, this ‘indictment’ document suddenly deteriorates into something altogether more vicious and unhinged, as Brink sets out what he believes would be an appropriate punishment for Zackie. Because I do not wish to be accused of selective editing, I will now reproduce for you that entire section, unedited, so you can see and feel it for yourself.

The document was described by the Rath Foundation as ‘entirely valid and long overdue’. This story isn’t about Matthias Rath, or Anthony Brink, or Zackie Achmat, or even South Africa. It is about the culture of how ideas work, and how that can break down.Doctors criticise other doctors, academics criticise academics, politicians criticise politicians: that’s normal and healthy, it’s how ideas improve. Matthias Rath is an alternative therapist, made in Europe.He is every bit the same as the British operators that we have seen in this book. He is from their world. Despite the extremes of this case, not one single alternative therapist or nutritionist, anywhere in the world, has stood up to criticise any single aspect of the activities of Matthias Rath and his colleagues. In fact, far from it: he continues to be fêted to this day. I have sat in true astonishment and watched leading figures of the UK’s alternative therapy movement applaud Matthias Rath at a public lecture (I have it on video, just in case there’s any doubt). Natural health organisations continue to defend Rath. Homeopaths’ mailouts continue to promote his work. The British Association of Nutritional Therapists has been invited to comment by bloggers, but declined. Most, when challenged, will dissemble. ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘I don’t really know much about it.’ Not one person will step forward and dissent.

The alternative therapy movement as a whole has demonstrated itself to be so dangerously, systemically incapable of critical self-appraisal that it cannot step up even in a case like that of Rath: in that count I include tens of thousands of practitioners, writers, administrators and more. This is how ideas go badly wrong. In the conclusion to this book, written before I was able to include this chapter, I will argue that the biggest dangers posed by the material we have covered are cultural and intellectual.

I may be mistaken.

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For Moron Rath click his lovely mug and watch this video.