AZT, Nevirapine: Do Anti-Retroviral Drugs Cause AIDS?

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Epidemics

Pharma

Nevirapine has been in the news recently over a study in Africa, where researchers apparently "forgot" to report numerous serious side effects and even several deaths. The study was to prove efficacy in reducing HIV transmission from pregnant mothers to their newborns, but researchers also "forgot" to include a control group of mothers that did not receive the drug. Grave oversights? Apparently the US health authorities thought so, because the application by Boeringer Ingelheim to use their drug on pregnant mothers in the US was never approved. Toxicity seems to be severe, but it was not properly reported, and could not be compared to non-toxic alternatives.

Studies for the approval of AZT were similarly defective. Indeed, AZT had been developed in the 60's as a chemotherapy drug and shelved because of ... toxicity problems. It was taken out of mothballs, so to speak, when an extraordinary media frenzy and predictions of doom for mankind at the hands of the pandemic demanded an immediate "cure for AIDS". For more data on AZT, see here and here.

Now why would we "treat" an immune weakness with highly toxic drugs? HIV, a new type of "retrovirus" was announced by Robert Gallo at a press conference, and we needed an immediate killer drug. In a pattern similar to the Nevirapine story, the virus itself was postulated as the culprit, but the virus isolation is highly contested. Gallo "forgot" to let the scientific community in on his secret. Anyway, the "virus" was painted as the culprit by a press campaign and the heavy toxic drugs were brought in, without toxicity testing, because "people were dying" and "the pandemic" was "going to wipe out mankind" if something was not done immediately.

But what about all the people that test HIV positive? Apparently, they test positive to something else than the virus. The HIV test was developed for blood screening and is, according to manufacturers, not a test to indicate the presence of a virus. No one has yet claimed a £ 1000 cash prize for proving HIV isolation in a scientific publication.

Some days ago, I was checking out Jon Rappoport's www.nomorefakenews.com and came across an interesting discussion - you can find a copy at the very end of this article. Rappoport was one of the first skeptical inquirers who came out with a book (AIDS INC) questioning the science behind the HIV/AIDS Gordic knot. Rappoport, upon investigation, concluded that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.

Neither are HIV tests specific to indicate the presence of a virus. They react positive to a host of non-HIV-related conditions. Neville Hodgkinson writes about Nevirapine - see his article, as published in The Business below. Hodgkinson says about the AIDS test:

Scores of conditions, including pregnancy itself, as well as infections such as TB that are especially prevalent in Africa, have been shown to affect the immune system in ways that cause positive reactions with test kits used to diagnose “HIV” infection, but have nothing to do with HIV.

On the other hand, Boyd Graves tells us that HIV is part of a US government plot to develop an ethnicity-specific bio-weapon. Graves has put together a lot of research on the existence and the activities of a classified "special virus program" and he contends that HIV is the upshot of that program and is used in a genocidal campaign to wipe out blacks.

Let's put two and two together: The balance of evidence tells us HIV is likely not the cause of AIDS. People are dying of AIDS, especially in Africa. Africans are not even tested for HIV before being treated, but large numbers are given the toxic antiretrovirals, because they have symptoms of disease. Africans are starving and living in dangerous sanitary conditions. Many don't have either clean water, sanitation or sufficient food. What is our response? We're sending more antiretroviral drugs to Africa. We are giving those same drugs to pregnant mothers in Africa to "prevent HIV transmission".

What if we were guilty of committing genocide with toxic anti-retrovirals?

If you're interested in more, here is Neville Hodgkinson's article on Nevirapine and Jon Rappoport's excellent "THE LOGIC OF AGENDA".

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The Business, 30/31 January 2005

Fresh cause for concern over the side-effects of nevirapine

Doubts emerge over clinical studies of crucial HIV drug

By Neville Hodgkinson

A tragedy of global proportions is unfolding over a toxic anti-HIV drug given to hundreds of thousands of women and babies in the developing world in the belief that it can help prevent the spread of Aids. 

The drug, nevirapine, has become so central to Aids agencies’ efforts to support African and other developing nations that they are defending its use in dozens of poor countries, despite evidence that flaws in claims for its safety and effectiveness were covered up at the highest level by government scientists in the United States.

Nevirapine is acknowledged by Boeringer Ingelheim, its German manufacturer, to be capable of causing severe liver damage and life-threatening skin reactions soon after patients start taking regular doses. This month a new warning about its dangers was issued by US health officials. Deaths have been reported from several countries. 

But a study published by The Lancet in 1999 purported to show that when given as a single dose to HIV-positive mothers at delivery, and to the babies within three days of birth, the drug safely reduces transmission of HIV from mother to child. 

The study was initiated and funded by the powerful Division of Aids of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), part of the American Government’s massive National Institutes of Health (NIH) complex at Bethesda, Maryland.  The research, conducted on maternity wards in Kampala, Uganda, was led by investigators from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.  The findings were hailed by Dr Anthony Fauci, NIAID’s director, as opening up “an entire new avenue” towards prevention of transmission of HIV in countries that could not afford more expensive drugs. 

To help get nevirapine established for this purpose, Boehringer Ingelheim offered to provide it free for five years to government hospitals in developing countries.  Along with the drug’s endorsement by the World Health Organisation and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), this gave Aids organisations a powerful tool for pressing for its rapid introduction and there are now 122 programmes administering the drug in 57 developing countries.  The product, which is also used as part of some anti-viral “cocktail” treatments for Aids patients, has today become the company’s sixth best-selling drug with sales totalling E310m ($412m, ₤217m) in 2003.

On 19 January, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned that cases of liver damage were more common with nevirapine, especially in women, than with other anti-HIV drugs. Some instances have been fatal, including in pregnant women. The FDA said doctors should weigh benefits and risks before prescribing the drug, adding that no serious toxicity or deaths have been reported with the single-dose treatment. The drug is not licensed for this use in the US or Europe.

In July 1999, even before the Uganda study results had been published, Boehringer Ingelheim asked South Africa’s Medicines Control Council (MCC) to fast-track approval of the single-dose regime in mothers and babies.  When South African authorities insisted it was not proven safe and that caution was needed, massive criticism followed from within and outside the country. 

Worldwide media derision was directed particularly against South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, who had questioned the relevance of Western approaches to Aids, particularly in the African setting, arguing that poverty and malnutrition were the real causes of immune deficiency there.
 
The push behind nevirapine was one of the most extensive promotional drives by the world’s media for a pharmaceutical product, perhaps surpassed only by the way NIAID catapulted AZT, the first purported anti-Aids drug, onto world markets through studies that were also shown subsequently to be deeply flawed.  Manufactured by Burroughs Wellcome (a company now subsumed in GlaxoSmithKline), AZT was said to be the “gold standard” of Aids treatment until the biggest and longest trial, conducted jointly by French and UK government researchers, showed more deaths in patients given the drug early than in “controls” who received it later.  

That finding was also downplayed and AZT survived, becoming used in much smaller doses as part of the “cocktail” treatments.  AZT is also given to pregnant mothers and their babies for the same purpose as nevirapine; it was in comparison with AZT that nevirapine was declared to halve the risk of transmission of HIV in the Uganda study, from 25% to 13%. 

Yet some scientists argue that AZT is useless and dangerous.  They say that although nevirapine and AZT can reduce the proportion of babies who test HIV-positive, this may simply be a result of general suppression of the immune system by the drugs.  Scores of conditions, including pregnancy itself, as well as infections such as TB that are especially prevalent in Africa, have been shown to affect the immune system in ways that cause positive reactions with test kits