by Neville Hodgkinson

As a veteran medical and science correspondent, I have a special reason for tearing my hair out (what is left of it) at the damage being done to democracy, social cohesion and above all our health by the global hysteria surrounding COVID-19.

Similar mistakes were made when hysteria over the immune system failure that came to be called AIDS swept the world during the late 1980s – and 35 years on, the mistakes remain largely unacknowledged and uncorrected, with some of the perpetrators now driving the new panic.

I feel especially frustrated because as medical correspondent at The Sunday Times from 1985-89, I helped to spread alarm over AIDS in the first place. Later I spent several years as science correspondent at the same paper, trying to draw attention to efforts by a small group of experts, including top-ranking Nobel prize-winning scientists at the heart of the fight against AIDS, to let us know that the so-called Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was never scientifically established as the cause of the syndrome. These efforts were shouted down almost universally.

The HIV theory caused a generation of young people to falsely equate sex with death. Yet no apology, no inquiry by the scientific community, no mass media analysis of how we could have got it so wrong, has ever been forthcoming.

What’s more, in deciding how to handle the current COVID-19 epidemic, governments are relying heavily on advice from scientists who also played a central part in misleading the country on AIDS.

These include Anthony Fauci, the “AIDS Czar”, who as head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has presided over an era in which several hundred billion dollars have been spent on AIDS research and treatment, including a completely futile but continuing search for a vaccine.

Another is Sir Roy Anderson, the current Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College, London. He co-authored an influential, 150-page Royal Society study, published in September 1989, analysing the AIDS epidemic and making predictions about future spread. The other main author was Sir David Cox, professor of statistics at Imperial for more than 20 years, now long since retired.

The predictions were wrong, as demonstrated by an 8,000-word analysis first submitted to the society in September 1990 by the late Professor Gordon Stewart, one of its most distinguished members, with a lifetime’s work in public health.

The error, he said, came about because the statistical model used rested on two false assumptions. The first of these was that the essential cause of AIDS was HIV; and the second was that the virus was already spreading heterosexually, beyond the original susceptible groups of homosexual men with multiple sexual partners, and drug addicts, and would cause a global pandemic.

Stewart, an early adviser on AIDS to the World Health Organisation (WHO), had made predictions of his own that were almost identical with what was actually being seen. Despite an apparent spread of HIV, he wrote at the time, AIDS was occurring

foreseeably as it began, i.e. in subsets of the population whose behaviour or misfortune places them at high risk of exposure to the various infections, drugs, trauma and depletion of immunity which contribute to the variable symptomatology in the complex of diseases registrable as AIDS.

The Royal Society, the national academy of science for the UK, gave Stewart the run-around for four years before his report was finally rejected. It was a betrayal both of the people and of science. “Coming from the top scientific body in the country, this is a pretty disgraceful state of affairs,” Stewart told me before his death in 2016. “It was the Royal Society that convened the meeting that made the wrong predictions. They are honour bound to put it right.” A demonstrable error had been made that in other walks of life “would have been washed out years ago”.

Click on the link for the rest.