All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 16, 2024 - Jim Fetzer
54:09
Fake Epidemics, Tests & Drugs with Rebecca Culshaw-Smith
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This is super important.
I am absolutely convinced that COVID could not have gone down the way that it did, had AIDS not gone down the way that it did.
The response to AIDS was basically the clinical trial for the response to COVID.
Rebecca Coleshaw-Smith is a medical researcher and author of the book, The Real AIDS Epidemic.
After starting her academic career with a mathematical focus, she became drawn into the area of HIV AIDS and quickly discovered that it was a world built upon deception and mistruths.
Rebecca is motivated to end the harm being done to vulnerable individuals who are being used to sustain sales of bogus antiviral pharmaceutical products.
Rebecca, thank you so much for agreeing to come on my channel and speak with me about your journey.
I'm really excited to hear about it.
Thank you so much for having me on.
I really appreciate it.
So firstly, I'd really like for the audience who don't know about you, if you could explain your background training and what led you to writing your book, The Real AIDS Epidemic.
I have a PhD in mathematical biology.
I was awarded my PhD in 2002 from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
The title of my PhD dissertation was called Immune Response Models of HIV Infection and Treatment.
And I had gotten into that field of study in the 1990s.
So I grew up in the age of AIDS.
I was, I believe, nine years old when the cause of AIDS was announced to the world by a press conference in 1984.
So I grew up Under the specter of AIDS, this, you know, really scary disease that kind of just came out of nowhere in the 1980s and you know, terrified people.
And I just always thought it was a really interesting disease.
And I was interested in medicine, but I, you know, because of just the way life went, I ended up falling in love with calculus in college.
And so I started to think, well, maybe I actually want to, you know, study mathematics instead.
And so I went to I don't know how it works in your part of the world.
I live in the United States right now, and typically the master's and PhD are done at the same time.
In Canada, and I think in the UK, they're typically awarded separately.
So I started a master's degree, and I knew that I wanted to study mathematical modeling.
I knew I wanted to study differential equations of some sort of biological process.
It came to my attention that there were actually people studying mathematical models of the interaction of HIV with the immune system, and I thought, wow, this is really fascinating.
I would love to get into this.
In the early 1980s, when people started showing up in emergency rooms with these strange opportunistic infections, pneumonias they couldn't get rid of, I'm sure you remember Kaposi's sarcoma, They had that movie called Philadelphia with Tom Hanks and he finds this lesion on his body and he's terrified because he's going to be fired from his job and he needs to, you know, cover it up and it was a very scary visual at the time.
So all of these people were showing up in emergency rooms all of a sudden apparently, you know, very sick with these opportunistic infections.
Researchers were supposedly confused as to what was causing them and coincidentally in the 1970s there had been a war on cancer that was going on and You know, they spent several years trying to find a retroviral cause for cancer.
Magically, as soon as the war on cancer failed, all of these researchers suddenly decided they were going to try to find a retroviral cause for AIDS.
Coincidentally, at the time, the technology for counting T-cells had just been developed.
So they started looking at the T-cells of these patients and they thought, wow, they're really, really low.
Let's go find ourselves some sort of an infectious agent that is trophic for these T-cells or likes to hang out in them and theoretically could destroy them.
And so they decided to look for a retrovirus and Robert Gallo who was the author of the original papers establishing that HIV was the cause of AIDS that were referred to at the press conference.
So the theory went like this is that you would contract this, you know, alleged virus either sexually or through Blood or blood products are for mother to child.
What would happen is they would infect your T-cells and over a period of time, and this period of time changed quite rapidly at the beginning of AIDS, over a period of time this virus would infect all of these CD4 T-cells in your body And then they would all be gone and you would be vulnerable to infection.
There are two things that led me to start questioning HIV.
When I was doing my PhD, I was still working on HIV models, and I was starting to think that there were some very strange things happening when I consulted with doctors, when I looked in the medical literature.
The two things that really stood out to me, the first one was there were an awful lot of people that were supposedly HIV positive, whatever that means, that simply were not getting sick.
And, you know, there were theories being thrown around, you know, maybe they're asymptomatic carriers, maybe they have some sort of genetic mutation that makes them resistant.
But over time, they just kept lengthening the latent period.
You know, first they said it was six months from infection to AIDS, then it was a year, then it was five years, and then it was 10 years or more.
And now, the official line is actually, untreated HIV infection may lead to AIDS.
And so I thought, okay, this is really weird.
You know, a lot of people are getting this virus and they're not getting sick, ever.
The other thing I thought was really strange was that there are literally millions of People with no trace of HIV genetic material who have full blown immune deficiency.
This came up really dramatically at the 1990 AIDS conference in Amsterdam where a bunch of people with literally HIV negative AIDS started showing up.
They had no T cells.
um people like Anthony Fauci had no idea what to do with it and then eventually they renamed it idiopathic cd4 lymphocytopenia which is a mouthful but it basically means hiv negative the absence of most of your t cells but no trace of hiv genetic material and so right off the bat i was starting to think this is really weird because in mathematics there are two things that are really important to prove something and one is that it must be necessary to cause this and the other is it must be sufficient well
Not necessary because there are people without HIV who have what looks just like AIDS, and then there are plenty of people with HIV who do not have AIDS, so it is also not necessary.
So neither necessary nor sufficient.
So I thought, okay, that's really strange.
Let me look into this more.
And then the other thing, and I think this was the thing that really, really rang my alarm bells like crazy, Not only, as Peter Duesberg pointed out many, many years ago, not only could they not find this genetic material related to this virus in hardly any T cells, but there was no explanation as to how.
HIV was actually killing these two cells.
It was not killing them directly, as we have been told happens when the infectious burden in a cell gets to be too much at first, like a shopping bag, and then that infection goes and it spreads and infects the other cells.
Well, that was not happening.
And so people came up with these weird You know, schemes whereby it could be causing this indirectally, or, you know, programming these cells to commit suicide at a later time.
Nobody, still, 40 years later, there is no consensus.
Long story short, I started to have some doubts.
And I actually did go to my advisor, and I was sort of halfway through doing the research for my PhD, and he was like, you know, this is not the time to switch lanes.
I think you need to finish this, get yourself a job, and then maybe you can diversify and work on something else.
And I had, to give him credit, He's never said anything about HIV, and I'm pretty sure he's quite mainstream, but he was very, very critical of a lot of the initial papers that had mathematical models of HIV in them.
There was one from 1996 that David Ho wrote that ended up getting him Times Person of the Year.
My advisor looked at an analysis that the Australian mathematician Mark Craddock, who is a contemporary of the Perth group, he had done this analysis of the model.
The model was terrible.
My advisor was like, do not cite this reference.
The math is so bad.
So, you know, he was at least sympathetic to the fact that I was having doubts, but he also, you know, I was his first PhD student and he really, you know, he was invested in getting me a job.
You know, getting me out into the world as a baby professor.
And, you know, that's the advice you would give anybody.
So I was like, you know, I'm going to finish this thesis.
I don't really know what I believe about this.
I'm suspicious.
But, you know, this is the opportunity to talk to more people and do a little bit more research.
So I did that.
I graduated in 2002 and I went to work at a small college in Iowa, which was primarily a teaching college.
So I was basically working on finishing up papers related to my dissertation.
And then in 2004, I moved to Texas to work at a branch of the UT System.
2006, this was when Celia Farber's Harper's article came out.
You might remember this.
And there was a lot of talk about South Africa and what was going on with Mbeke.
By this point, I was thoroughly disenchanted with the HIV theory of AIDS.
I thought it was completely corrupt.
I was embarrassed at having been involved in it for so long.
And I wrote this little screed late at night called, Why I Quit HIV.
And I didn't think anything was going to happen to it, but somehow I had become into contact with Harvey Bialy, the late Harvey Bialy microbiologist.
He wrote the scientific biography of Peter Duesberg and he was the former editor of Nature Biotechnology.
He insisted that I send this to Lou Rockwell, which is a popular libertarian website here in the States, and it basically went viral.
I got to work the next day and I opened up my laptop and there were Over 1000 messages in my inbox, some of them were supportive, some of them really unsupportive.
And so that led to a book deal with North Atlantic Publishing to publish what they were, they asked me to publish a polemic on The HIV Theory of AIDS.
And so that book was published in 2007.
It was called Science Sold Out.
In the wake of that article, why I quit HIV, and the book, some strange things started happening.
There was a concerted letter-writing campaign to my university.
Somewhere between one dozen and two dozen researchers, you know, HIV experts, they sent letters to the president of my university saying I was a dangerous crackpot and they should know who they're associated with.
And furthermore, They were told that I had been giving medical advice to AIDS patients online.
I never did that.
There were people who set up fake accounts pretending to be me, giving medical advice to AIDS patients and then somehow this was sent as an accusation.
These letters all got forwarded to the Dean and Several months later, I was brought in for my pre-tenure review and I was told that my research had dropped off and that my contract would not be renewed.
Now, I don't know.
I cannot say that I was fired for my unorthodox views on HIV.
It might have been something else entirely.
If you don't have tenure, the Handbook of Operating Procedures say that they can fire you at any time for any reason and that they do not need to give you the reason.
And So that's what happened.
At the time, my husband had custody of his two children from a previous marriage and we decided I wasn't, you know, he could not leave the county without giving up custody.
So we decided, you know, I would switch focus and, you know, look after a little family, maybe have a few more children.
And I thought I was done with HIV at that point.
I figured I said what I needed to say.
I, you know, I made a big sacrifice to do it and, you know, time for the next chapter of my life.
And then COVID happened.
I remember at the beginning of COVID, my initial thought was, oh yeah, you know, why are they paying attention to a respiratory virus in China?
My first thought was, oh, you know, this is just going to go away.
It's going to be like Zika or something.
But then it wasn't going away.
And I was like, There is something really, really suspicious happening.
We deal with respiratory infections constantly, you know, during flu season and even not.
You know, what makes this so special?
Like, they can't possibly have this, you know, high medical knowledge.
This is going to be so bad.
There is another reason they're doing this.
And I remember like nobody in my life, nobody in my life except for my sister agreed with me.
They're all like, no, no, no, they're just trying to protect us.
And I remember within months that fell apart and I started to see a lot of parallels to AIDS, especially the pandemic response.
And I want to circle back to this because this is super important.
I am absolutely convinced that COVID could not have gone down the way that it did had AIDS not gone down the way that it did.
The response to AIDS was basically the clinical trial for the response to COVID.
And so then I decided to start writing a substack.
And I didn't really do much on that.
I wanted to write about testing methodologies because there are certain subtleties about things like positive predictive value that a lot of people don't really understand.
They're kind of important to explain.
And so what happened was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
had written the book The Real Anthony Fauci, which sold over a million copies.
And he had cited my original book from 2007.
Science sold out in it several times.
His team reached out to me and said that Skyhorse Publication, who had published The Real Anthony Fauci, they wanted to republish my book and, you know, could I get a rights reversion from North Atlantic?
And I was like, You know, I might as well, right?
So they said, you know, we'd like you to republish this, add a meaty foreword and, you know, an afterword with, you know, whatever you want.
Initially, Kennedy himself was to write the foreword and that ended up not happening for whatever reason.
I decided to change the name to The real AIDS epidemic, which is also the name of my sub stack, kind of out of respect for the people who have immunodeficiency, non HIV AIDS, you know, people who are not under the HIV umbrella, they're sick, like people with chronic fatigue syndrome, you know, lupus, that's sort of a, you know, these kinds of immunodeficiencies that are not really paid attention to because, you know, no one can find a viral cause for them.
So that book was scheduled to be published in March of 2023.
And On January 13th, I got an email that had a link to an article called AIDS Denialism is Still Deadly in 2023.
And the person that had sent it to me thought this was just, you know, some hit piece on AIDS denialism.
But no, it was about my book.
He found out that my book was going to be published and he's like, this is an AIDS activist in New York City.
He's like, this is horrible.
We need to stop.
And so a petition was sent to Simon & Schuster, which was the distributor for Skyhorse Publishing, signed by I think it was 70 individuals and 30 public health organizations demanding that my book not be published, that it was a threat to public health.
They also had a list of crazy demands, like Simon & Schuster should create a public health working group to ensure the public that this will never happen again.
And then not only that, but the day before the book was published, they actually had a protest outside of Simon & Schuster in New York City with, you know, vans and signs.
But at that point, it was too late and, you know, the horse was already out of the gate and the book was actually published the day after the protest.
And since then, I've just been basically focusing on my subject, which has really grown a ton in the last year.
Holy moly!
That's a pretty amazing thing that's happened to you.
I mean, what's your reflection about this?
That I've noticed something interesting and that is that most of the major players are ignoring me this time around.
The first time, when I wrote my book, there were several, you know, AIDS activists who also happened to work in epidemiology or related fields that wrote these very careful debunking of some of my papers and Things that I'd written online in my book and I've had, if that's happened, I don't know about it and I have enough contacts that somebody would have seen it.
So I think this time around they're giving me the silent treatment and this really ties into something that has been bothering me a lot for the last few months and that is the fact that Kennedy's book on Fauci About half of it was about the AIDS scandal.
You know, he refers to the work of the journalist Celia Farber quite a lot, the newspaper from New York City, the New York native that went under, I think, in 1997.
They were the first gay newspaper, and I think the only gay newspaper, to cover AIDS from a critical perspective.
The media has completely ignored the AIDS section of the book.
And I think that they're doing that on purpose.
I just saw an interview from, I think it was last week, Tucker Carlson was interviewing Brett Weinstein of the Dark Horse Podcast.
And they talked a lot about, you know, the COVID sigh-off and everything.
AIDS was never mentioned.
It didn't even come up.
And the whole time I was watching the interview, all I could think was, AIDS set the precedent for COVID.
It is so obvious.
How come nobody's mentioning this?
And so the silent treatment, initially, when COVID started happening, and after about six months or so, when people were really starting to question the lockdowns, and this was before the vaccines had come out, I remember, you know, hearing some people talking about AIDS in a critical manner.
And I thought, okay, this is great.
Maybe this has really opened up people's minds to hear this story.
You know, now that we, See that, you know, yes, they can weaponize a disease to control people and to instill fear and to sell people drugs that they don't need and that are quite often harmful.
And that's something that we need to talk about because the whole history of AIDS is basically a history of trying to shove drugs down people's throats.
But that didn't happen.
What happened was like, no, Hardly anybody talks about AIDS anymore.
It's being completely ignored.
I don't know why that is, but I can't help but to think that there's some reason that this is happening.
And so one of my roles that I see now is to constantly remind people That look what happened over the last almost four years like there is a reason that that happened and there was a precedent that that was set with AIDS.
Most dramatically when it comes to the vaccines and the dramatically foreshortened clinical trials.
I mean that precedent goes back to AIDS back in the 80s there were no drugs for AIDS.
Activists were clamoring for drugs, and so they repurposed AZT.
A failed cancer chemotherapeutic was shelved for being too toxic, and they decided, well, okay, we're going to repackage it as a reverse transcriptase inhibitor.
There were AIDS activists, you know, they barricaded themselves to the New York Stock Exchange, they interrupted, you know, a church and threw condoms all around, you know, all sorts of, you know, these crazy publicity stunts because they wanted this to be fast-tracked.
Darn it, people are dying, do something.
The first clinical trials for AZT, I think they cut them off after 16 weeks because they had such wonderful results.
I think one person died from AZT, Ruben.
Between 10 and 20 in the control group.
I don't remember the exact numbers.
They're like, okay, it is unethical to continue this trial.
We have to get AZT to these people.
And we all know what happened.
They put a generation of gay men and hemophiliacs on high-dose AZT, and they all died really quickly.
And AZT is still actually prescribed, but at much, much lower doses.
You may have heard this brilliant line from the journalist Celia Farber, who had been talking to one of these You know, AIDS researchers at a conference or something like that, and she said, you had to know that it was toxic.
And the researcher said, of course, we knew it was toxic.
Why do you think we lowered the dose?
But the drug story with HIV just keeps getting crazier and crazier.
In the 1990s, they came out with these protease inhibitors.
They came with all sorts of, you know, crazy side effects like buffalo hunts, fat redistribution, which just led to a whole other industry of plastic surgery and drugs to combat the lipodystrophy.
And, you know, also, unsurprisingly, they also cause heart problems.
People still take these drugs, by the way.
So they moved on to that.
There's several generations of, you know, different kinds of drugs.
We have entry inhibitors, we have integrase inhibitors, we have nucleoside.
Analog reverse transcriptase inhibitors, which is what AZT is.
And basically, those are just DNA chain terminators.
They stop all cell division.
And the idea is very similar to that of cancer chemotherapy.
We'll kill enough of the cells that harbor HIV and hope that we don't kill the patient.
But what's interesting is that that is the oldest class of drugs that was prescribed for AIDS, arguably the most toxic.
The two of them, tenofovir and mketrichabine, both nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, they are what are included in what is called PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis.
And if you have a TV, you probably are because you've probably seen the ads that clearly target a very specific racial demographic.
It's time to step up, PrEP up.
Step up, PrEP up.
To help keep you free from the risk of HIV.
From the makers of Truvada, there's another PrEP option.
Dyscovi for PrEP.
A once-daily prescription medicine that helps lower the chances of getting HIV through sex.
It's not for everyone.
Dyscovi for PrEP has not been studied in people assigned female at birth.
Talk to your doctor to find out if it's right for you.
Step up for health and body.
Prep up for your one and only love, or many loves.
For kings, this queen, and you royals in between.
For my now.
Our now.
And my future.
Our future.
Step up, prep up.
Dyscovi is another way to prep.
Dyscovi does not prevent other sexually transmitted infections, so it's important to use safer sex practices and get tested regularly.
You must be HIV negative to take Dyscovi for prep, so you need to get tested for HIV immediately before and at least every three months while taking it.
If you think you were exposed to HIV or have flu-like symptoms, tell your doctor right away.
They may check to confirm you are still HIV negative.
Serious side effects can occur, including kidney problems and kidney failure.
Rare life-threatening side effects include a buildup of lactic acid and liver problems.
The most common side effect was diarrhea.
Tell your doctor about all the medicines and supplements you take or if you have kidney or liver problems, including hepatitis.
If you have hepatitis B, do not stop taking Dyscovu without talking to your doctor.
Ask your doctor about your risk of HIV and have Dyscovu for prep.
It's right for you.
Basically what the idea of pre-exposure prophylaxis is, is that if you are HIV negative and you are concerned about seroconverting, maybe you're in a discordant relationship or some other reason, you can take anti-HIV drugs as HIV preventatives.
Basically as a vaccine, because in 40 years of vaccine trials, every single one of them has failed.
And I think that now, for the first time, there is no HIV vaccine trial active right now.
I think there are some in the planning stages, but this big one, PrEPVAC, had failed in four African countries, abandoned for futility.
We were promised an HIV vaccine by 1986, and I think everybody knows that that's never going to happen, even with the mRNA technology.
And so basically what they're doing is they're offering people these horrible toxic drugs as prophylactics, which is just insane to me.
And it gets worse because the primary drug that is used for PrEP is Truvada.
It is manufactured by Gilead Pharmaceuticals and they are in extreme hot water right now.
There is a 26,000 person class action lawsuit on Truvada for Hiding and covering up the known toxicities of the older formulation.
Anyway, so Gilead is in hot water because they knew that this was toxic and they didn't tell anybody.
Now we've got, you know, all of these people.
There was just a lawsuit filed in California on December 20th.
19 people who are suing Gilead and they're suffering kidney failure, lactic acidosis, osteopenia, osteoporosis.
There's a lot of stories about teeth falling out because their bone density is so poor.
Yet, we are putting these to not only people who have been diagnosed with a condition that is highly suspicious, but we're giving it to people that don't even have a hint of that condition.
This is what really interests me about the PrEP, because one thing I've noticed is this shift away.
It used to be all about condoms, and you've got to use condoms, and now you can have these PrEP drugs as a heterosexual.
They're marketing them to children.
There was an article I read recently that I reported about there's this scheme to go into schools in Africa and give PrEP to African schoolgirls.
It's completely out of control and nobody seems to realize that it's happening.
What's been the shift from, you know, is it just because, like, what I don't understand is why are they doing this now?
Is it they've just realized that this is a huge marketing area that they can move into?
That is an interesting question and I have to tell you I don't have the greatest answer for it because I've wondered that myself because the first, I believe the first authorization for Truvada as PrEP was in 2011.
But we only really just started to hear about this in the last few years and there's probably many reasons behind it.
I think a large part of it is the fact that it's super obvious that there's never going to be an HIV vaccine and they need something that they can market as a preventative.
I suspect there are other nefarious reasons but I No, I'm hesitant to really discuss that at this point because I don't know.
Going back to the lawsuit on Truvada, I think the first lawsuit was filed in 2018 and immediately AIDS activist groups saw these advertisements on television.
You know those advertisements, have you been harmed by Tuvada?
You can be maybe entitled to compensation.
You know, contact our lawyers.
They were like, okay, these ads are a danger to public health.
So they petitioned Facebook and various other social media sites to have these ads taken down.
And they succeeded in 2019.
They got almost all of these ads removed.
But it gets even weirder.
There was basically nobody was reporting on the Trubado lawsuit, and it's a huge lawsuit.
Don't get me wrong, 26,000 people, that's more than 2% of the total HIV positive population in the United States, so that is not insignificant number of people.
When the first Trubado lawsuits were filed and there was a censorship campaign, There was a complete media blackout on the story.
I started reporting on them in February of last year, 2023.
And then in July, an article came out in the New York Times about them, and it was relegated to the business section.
But I thought, OK, this is weird.
Why are they suddenly talking about the Truvada lawsuits?
And since then, I think I have not actually heard anything in the mainstream media about the Truvada lawsuits.
What I love too, Rebecca, about your sub stack I was going to mention is that, which I thought was so good, is the way you frame what PrEP is, which is essentially a low dose, lifelong chemotherapy medication.
That's exactly what it is.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
And there's all these creepy articles about like PrEP discontinuation and how to keep people on PrEP and how, you know, There are people in certain communities that are not accessing PrEP the way that they should be.
I mean, the push to get all healthy African Americans in particular on this drug is super creepy.
I mean, I believe that the gay community and the African-American community have been really targeted and victimized by this whole paradigm.
And I think there's a reason for it.
You know, we go back to the idea of the response to AIDS kind of being like the clinical trial for the response to COVID.
I mean, it's actually kind of a brilliant strategy.
You find yourself a rather small, marginalized group of people who are often disenfranchised from their family.
And you tell them that, you know, this terrible thing is affecting them and only you can save them.
And so you've got these people, most of them anyway, in this kind of Stockholm syndrome with the medical community.
Because like I said, in the early 80s, there was not a lot of acceptance of gay people.
I mean, a lot of these people had been kicked out of their houses and disenfranchised from their families.
And so I think what they did was they took this group of people, they recruited, you know, I call them agents, as AIDS activists, so that it looks like the demands for the drugs is coming from them.
And when your strategy of scaring people, medicating people, over-medicalizing people, using these crazy tests that don't test for a virus, you test that on this small group, it works.
Wait a while until a lot of people that live through that are dead and can't contradict you.
Scale it up massively and try it on the whole population.
And there we go.
We have COVID.
And I think that's really a missing piece of the puzzle is that a lot of these, I mean, so many, even the technologies are similar.
The idea that other people are dangerous to you.
And that was so scary in AIDS, and in particular for my family.
My mother had a late miscarriage in the early 80s, like really late, and she ended up going to the hospital, and she was in shock, and they took her for blood transfusion.
And so there was always this sort of hovering fear in my family, like maybe my mother had contracted AIDS, and she was sort of...
I don't know why.
She didn't get tested for years and years.
She was like, I'm not worried about it.
Actually, she was one of the first people... I mentioned that when COVID first started happening, the only person I knew that was questioning it besides myself was my sister.
Within a few months, my mom came around as well.
I mean, we were terrified of each other.
People were scared of each other, people were scared of going to the restroom, all sorts of stuff.
And I remember Oprah coming on her show at one point and saying, this is really shocking, but by 1991 in five heterosexuals may be dead of AIDS.
Hello, everybody.
AIDS has both sexes running scared.
Research studies now project that one in five, listen to me, hard to believe, one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years.
That's by 1990.
One in five.
This was the sort of stuff that we were being told.
And then with COVID, it's like, oh, social distancing.
Don't go anywhere near anybody.
You're going to make them sick.
And if I recall correctly, that whole social distancing thing did come from that bad mathematical model from Neil Ferguson from the Imperial College of London.
Here's something that some of your viewers will be aware of, but some of them may not.
Mathematical models cannot prove anything.
The best that they can do is they can quantify something.
Like, for example, if you want to create an epidemic model that mimics the effect of vaccination, you are assuming that the vaccine works.
And the model just tells you how much of it you need to give, like what proportion of the population needs to actually take this to get rid of the disease.
You cannot use a mathematical model to prove social distancing works.
The only reason that they came up with those numbers was that they input that in as a variable and assumed that it worked.
I'm not trying to dismiss the utility of models.
I think that they are really important in quantification, but I think people have this sort of romantic, mysterious idea because it's mathematics that, you know, it can somehow do something that it actually can't.
And here, let me give you a perfect example.
This terrible virus that came along that caused massive immune destruction, but the AIDS activists and the researchers swooped in, they found these great drugs, and now it's been reduced to a chronic manageable condition.
How many times have we heard that term?
I think we can all agree That AIDS is not the big scary problem that it was in the 1980s.
If the drugs were the cause of that, you would have to assume that darn near everybody is on these drugs for AIDS to, you know, early 80s AIDS.
I like to call it proto-AIDS because I do think that there is still a version of, you know, non-HIV AIDS, which I call long haul AIDS, that's around, but it's not the same disease.
In the United States, There is approximately 1.2 million HIV positive individuals.
I believe something like 88% of them know their status.
Of those people, only 60% are on treatment.
And worldwide, it's not any better or, you know, any different.
Worldwide, I just covered a review article discussing this.
30% of people don't even know their status who are supposedly HIV positive, and the uptake of the drugs is around two-thirds.
So that leaves well over a third of allegedly HIV positive individuals not on these drugs, not showing up with AIDS.
What's happening?
We are led to believe that basically everybody in Africa is on those drugs.
And, you know, everybody except for us bad Americans who are, you know, non-compliant and individualistic and just won't listen to our doctors.
But, you know, the statistics are not dramatically different.
There are a few African countries that do have very high uptake because of certain, you know, Non-governmental agencies and governmental programs that are supplying them with these medications, but there's not that many of them.
And I mean, it defies belief that we should not be seeing a big AIDS crisis like we were seeing in the 1980s.
And HIV really is the cause of that manifestation of severe immune deficiency that we were seeing back then.
Etienne de Harbin, the late electron microscopist, he pointed out that no two identical HIV genomes have even been found in the same person.
I really also wanted to ask you, because you wrote a really good sub-stack, and it impressed me so much, about a person you interviewed, about the antenatal screening.
Your article was false positive Down syndrome screening, more common than you think.
I just wondered, could you explain about what led you to writing this article?
Well, actually what led me to writing this article is that Stephanie is actually a friend of mine, okay?
Full disclosure, this is somebody I know well.
But I did not know this story at all until a few months ago.
We were just sort of sitting around and she's like, Yeah, I had three false positive down syndrome tests and I was like, really?
Tell me more!
And I mean her story was just so insane because her first daughter and I don't know how to explain this because my understanding is that amniocentesis is basically perfect.
So her first daughter, she was 19 years old at the time and She's in her 30s now and she said, you know, the way that they treat you when you're pregnant at 19 is very different from the way they treat you when you're pregnant at 30.
You're very dismissive.
So they did an ultrasound, and they found a hole in her daughter's heart.
And these are actually quite common, and they almost always close up.
They said, okay, you need an amniocentesis, and she said that if she had known that it had the risk of causing a miscarriage, she would never have done it, but they didn't tell her about the risks, and so they gave her an amniocentesis, and it came back positive for Down syndrome.
And so, for some reason, she ended up getting a blood test, and I don't know why.
This might just be, you know, 19, and you're pregnant, and you, you know, You don't know what to do other than trust your doctors.
So, she took the blood test and it came back positive for Down syndrome.
And I said, you know, how did you feel about that?
And she said that she and her husband, they would be fine with it.
They had no problem having a Down syndrome child.
She just, you know, was...
going to go into the childbirth with the recognition that this was going to happen.
She ended up having an ultrasound later in the pregnancy to check on the heart hole, which had closed up, and there were also no markers for Down syndrome.
Babies born, no hint of Down syndrome, none whatsoever.
She's almost 13 years old now, totally developmentally normal, very healthy, nothing at all.
Oh, I should mention that before this pregnancy, she had had a miscarriage.
This may be relevant later on.
So she When she was pregnant with her second child, she also elected to undergo the blood screening, but not the not the amniocentesis.
And the blood test came back positive for Down syndrome again.
And at this point, she just thought there's something weird about my body that is tripping the tests to produce this result.
You know, maybe the baby has Downs, maybe not.
We're just going to go through the pregnancy.
Totally normal.
Second daughter, fine.
Third pregnancy, again, positive blood tests reading for Down syndrome.
Baby's perfectly healthy.
She's since had three more children that she declined the testing for and who are all perfectly normal.
One thing I think that might be relevant to the miscarriage that she had had was that, you know, a lot of the time these early miscarriages are directly as a result of something chromosomally wrong with the fetus.
And there is this phenomenon of inherited chimeric DNA from previous pregnancies that can stay in people's bodies.
I heard stories about, you know, male DNA being in a mother's body for, you know, 30 years or something like that.
And so what I wonder is, had that first um pregnancy had down syndrome and somehow there was some sort of genetic and I'm out of my field speculating about this so this is pure speculation but I do I do wonder if there was something um of that nature going on but these prenatal tests are kind of um they're a little bit alarming because
They threw a lot of false positive results and the more rare that your condition gets the more likely you are to have a false positive result because of you know the positive predictive value and a lot of these things are testing for things that are Super, super rare, like trisomy 13, you know, we're talking 1 in 100,000 sort of thing.
So people are getting a massive number of false positives.
The implications of that on a mother, you know, on a family that is expecting a child, like, are you going to keep the pregnancy?
Or, you know, what do you need to do to change?
You want to, you know, prepare to have a child with special needs?
You might get an amniocentesis, which is also not without its risks.
There was a New York Times article and they were saying that I think for every 15 times they diagnose somebody correctly, it's like 87 times that they're wrong for some of these rare conditions.
And I have three children myself and I I mean, I declined all of those screenings and my doctor was really cool about it.
She was, you know, totally fine with me doing that.
But I think a lot of these young women are just being told, okay, this is part of the standard of care.
It's not mandated.
And I mean, I think it's fine.
People should be able to choose what medical tests that they want to take, but they should also be informed about the risks of these tests and the chances that they're going to be wrong.
And I think part of the issue is that a lot of, you know, a lot of these physicians, they don't have time to look into the medical literature.
You know, you have a busy practice, you're not going to, you know, and you have a family, you're not going to, you know, spend half your night sitting up, you know, reading all the medical literature.
It'd be nice if you could do that.
But, you know, we're living in reality here.
You know, false positives going up in when something is low prevalence.
I don't know if you want me to give, you know, a quick synopsis of how that works for your viewers, or if you think that that's cool and they've got it, then we can just move on.
Yeah, no, I think I was just, yeah, I've got like a really diverse group of people that they understand about HIV and AIDS really well and the no virus position, I guess.
But yeah, I just, I'm really interested in the testing side because I think particularly with antenatal tests, people often write to me and ask me about them and what they should be doing.
And I just, it was the first time I'd really seen someone write about it.
And what I also like is how you highlighted, you know, these tests, the rarity of it, but how the false positive levels could be up to sort of around 46 or 47 percent.
And people don't realize when they're going into these tests, there's the triple therapy, sorry, the triple test for, you know, Down syndrome and trisomy.
It's such a high false positive because of, like you say, these are rare conditions.
To touch on positive predictive value just really briefly because I think a lot of people are not aware that when you're told that a test is 99% accurate, that means that 1 in 100 test results is false positive.
That's not 1 out of 100 positive results.
That's 1 out of 100 results of any of any sort of Positive, negative, indeterminate, whatever.
And so let me just keep the math super, super simple.
Say you have 100 people and you have a prevalence of 1%, which is actually quite a bit higher than it's alleged to be for HIV.
That's 0.3% of the US population.
But let's just say it's 1%.
So one in 100 people is going to truly have this disease.
You test 100 people, there's going to be one false positive.
Since it's low prevalence, let's just say two people tested positive.
One of those is going to be false.
Which means that the test only has a 50% accuracy rate.
Say you go up to 10% prevalence, so 10 out of 100 of those people actually have the condition, and all 10 test positive, well, we still expect one false positive, so that's nine out of 10, and so now it's 90% accurate.
So as the prevalence increases, the accuracy allegedly increases, and that's one of the problems with these.
Conditions that are being tested for in these prenatal tests is that they are rare.
I mean until unless you're talking about and even down syndrome for you know women over 40 it's still I think the worst chance you get is like 1 in 35 or something like that so it's still not a super high prevalence condition.
These other trisomies and various abnormalities are even rarer and so I mean a lot of this testing Not sure what the point is.
It's bogus.
I think we know what the point is.
No, it really is, and I think people get sucked into it because it's another marketing.
It's a huge industry, the testing.
The other thing I wanted to ask you, I'm not sure if you know, but in New Zealand, if this is the same in the States or Canada, is we have this thing called the heel prick test, which is when babies are born.
They have a drop of blood is taken, it's like a wee prick that goes into the heel, and they test for all these very rare conditions that basically you never see, like even as a doctor I never saw them.
Oh yeah, phenylketonuria, and then they get you to come back in to get another test, yeah.
Exactly, and when I researched this for my own, when I had my child two and a half years ago, I didn't realise that they collect this data, that the police have access, this is in New Zealand, to the genetic data so that, say there was some crime that happened in the future, they can go and they get a sample from the crime scene
They can go back and look.
And I don't know if that happens at all, but that's legal in New Zealand.
I don't want the screening tests.
That is crazy.
You know that a lot of the initial statistics for HIV in Africa all came from prenatal clinics where they were testing these women for HIV when they came in.
To have their babies, but the problem is that pregnancy itself is a known cause, even acknowledged by the mainstream of false positive HIV results.
So it's being skewed already.
I mean, I think that they're purposely taking, you know, they're taking groups.
where they suspect that they're going to find it the most and testing them.
You take a woman and, you know, when you're pregnant, your emotions are not the way that they normally are, at least mine were not.
You know, I felt much more vulnerable, much more sensitive than I normally did.
And, you know, your whole brain and body is just, you know, trying to protect this You know, of course, it's really easy to convince people to take these tests for the sake of their child.
And, you know, again, you're scaring people.
It's the old fear tactic again.
It's like, oh, something really bad could be wrong with your kid.
We need to test you.
But, you know, a lot of this is just propped up by making people terrified.
What I was wondering was, with your family, how have things been since so people have woken up and are supportive of you now with your position, your stance that you've taken?
You know, a lot of people in my life are.
Some people just don't talk about it at all.
It's like this big thing that just won't be mentioned.
You know, I have some family members that we just don't talk about it.
Um, but my mom, my mom's super supportive.
My two younger sisters are super supportive, so is my husband.
So I'm, you know, I'm really lucky because I am, I am working on something that is, you know, it's not really out there.
It actually makes a lot of sense, but it seems really out there to, you know, the vast majority of people.
And, you know, I'm fortunate and, you know, I'm surrounded by mathematicians as well.
And I think that's an advantage because we tend to be very, very rigorously logical.
And there's a lot of, like, very basic, you know, arguments about the demographics of HIV that are pretty clear.
A pretty clear indication that it can't possibly be infectious.
For example, when they started testing military recruits and the blood supply in 1985, There are already a million people in the United States with antibody to HIV, so-called antibody to HIV.
That number has not budged in 40 years.
That's not how an infectious disease behaves.
And furthermore, it was everywhere in the country.
And Henry Bauer, a former professor emeritus of chemistry at Virginia Tech, which is my husband's alma mater, He wrote a great book in 2007 called The Origin, Persistence, and Failings of HIV-AIDS Theory, and he basically looked at all of the CDC's own data on HIV testing and found that since the beginning of the epidemic, not only have the numbers not increased nor decreased, but they have stayed exactly the same.
It's in every risk group, including repeat blood donors who you would think would be at no risk, and the racial The racial demographic is always the same.
African-Americans and people from Africa presumably test positive at a rate higher than do whites, who test positive at a rate higher than do Asians.
And that is reflected worldwide.
And that sounds an awful lot more like something that is related to your genetics and not to any sort of infection that you have acquired, because it should not be so consistent.
And epidemics don't stay flat for 40 years.
And there had been some Possibilities theorized, like, okay, well, maybe it was here a lot longer.
Well, then where was AIDS?
Why didn't AIDS show up until 1980?
It might have been, I think it was 1979, actually, when the first case of AIDS was found in San Francisco.
There's an absolutely wonderful book, but unfortunately, it's out of print.
It's called When AIDS Began by Michelle Cochran, and it basically studies the case studies of the first I think a hundred men with AIDS in San Francisco and it completely you know decimated the idea that these were young previously healthy men because they were some of them were young but none of them were previously healthy they you know there was a lot of problems.
That might have contributed to the immune destruction.
And something that I often think about is that, and it's sort of politically incorrect to talk about it, but I'm going to go there anyways.
And that is the fact that, you know, back in the 70s, during the gay liberation movement, and, you know, this bathhouse culture, a lot of these men were popping antibiotics really, really regularly.
We know what antibiotics do to your immune system and to your microbiome and to your gut, and then there's the gut-brain connection and all of this stuff.
And so I think it's so tragic that to treat this, we're just giving people a ton of drugs when that may have been part of the problem in the first place.
What's been your focus, Rebecca?
Like, what's your kind of goals with your work?
So back, you know, back in the early days when I was working on this, you know, the first go round, I was primarily interested in falsifying the HIV AIDS theory, which, you know, I don't really need to do.
It's been done by lots of people, you know, the Perth group, Peter Joosberg, lots of other people in there as well.
And so I was focused on that and just, you know, explaining to people why this couldn't be true for whatever reasons.
And I think right now, You know, I have a lot of long-term goals.
My main focus right now has been trying to get the information out about the dangers of PrEP and how crazy it is.
Right now, I am the only writer that I know of that's covering PrEP from a critical perspective.
And also, I really want to break this Truvada story.
Much bigger, because I think once people see what is happening with Truvada and how it's basically the new ACT, that this might actually wake some people up to, you know, the harms that are being done to people in the name of protecting them.
So, you know, those are my short-term goals is to, you know, I'd like, I would like to eventually, you know, Don't waste your time with that Rebecca, you're way too good for them.
Or even to get the attention of some of these scientists that have been critical of COVID but won't touch HIV.
That's kind of something I would really, really like to do.
I'd like to, you know, or a journalist or somebody like Alex Berenson, who, you know, he's been really good on the COVID vaccines, you know, great writer, but he is absolutely dogged when it comes to HIV.
And he is like the perfect example to me of somebody who's skeptical of everything, but somehow HIV AIDS was the one time that they got it right.
And, you know, if I could, If I could just get on a call with somebody like that and get some publicity to this and start talking about what the media is ignoring about Kennedy's book, I think that that would be really great.
Another thing that I have changed a little bit about my substack is that I am now writing it as a joint publication with Nina Ostrom.
She wrote the foreword to my book and she's written several books.
She worked at the New York Native, which is the gay newspaper in the In New York City that covered AIDS from a critical perspective and she's been in this literally since the beginning, you know, she's been covering this from the beginning.
She writes primarily about chronic fatigue syndrome.
So she's going to writing on my sub stack as well as me.
And I think it'll be.
A really interesting juxtaposition.
We have different areas of expertise.
I kind of come from the mainstream and I'm a mathematician, she's a journalist, she's been in this game, you know, looking at AIDS from a critical perspective literally since the beginning.
So I think that'll be interesting to see where we go with that.
Yeah, I think that's really interesting and I'd like, yeah, so for my viewers to follow you, tell me what is the name of your subject?
Okay, so my Substack is called The Real AIDS Epidemic, which is the same as the name of my book, and my full name is Rebecca Colshaw-Smith, okay?
And Colshaw is the name under which my book was published and which my dissertation was awarded.
So the actual URL is rebeccacolshawsmith.substack.com.
And I would love to have some of your viewers come over and check out my work and Jania's work.
I publish pretty frequently, like at least twice a week and often quite a bit more, so.
Pretty active there on Substack.
Yeah, no, I really encourage people to come over and have a look at your substat, because I also, I love your articles, how they're written, because I think they're long enough.
I find some substats are just not yours, others are just so long, I'm just like scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and it's too much for me, but I found yours really punchy for the point, and you know, academic, but also just really interesting topics, and especially what you're doing, exposing the Truvada prep Thank you for saying that.
I aim for that, so I'm glad that it's landing.
Yeah, it really is.
I think it would be great.
Your publication is something I definitely recommend people to follow.
Is there anywhere else that people can find your work?
Just my book!
It's available on Amazon.
It's cool.
I love the journey that we're all on because there are certain focuses that you have at different times in your life, but you can see where someone's come from, like where, why you are, why your focus has been.
It makes a lot more sense now.
Yeah, thank you so much.
Well, thank you for having me on.
Yeah, thank you.
It's been great.
Good night.
▲
Export Selection