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(SCIENCEGUARDIAN BLOG) House of Numbers is quietly explosive

House of Numbers is quietly explosive
September 5th, 2009

Remarkable movie shows how AIDS story falls apart under questioning
Leading luminaries confess flaws, confirming critics’ concerns
Clarity and entertainment value may gain wide audience for documentary
But John Moore and his goons are on the job to sink it if possible

House of Numbers premiered last night at the Quad in New York City, and contrary to the uninformed review by Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times (see previous post), the documentary is a winner on every level – clarity of exposition, entertainment value, and unexpected revelation. Small wonder it has started garnering prizes at festivals (six so far).

Brent Leung adopts the Boy Scout approach of innocent inquiry, and travels the world in search of answers to the huge questions that HIV/AIDS ideology raises in every inquiring mind. He ends up gaining remarkable admissions from some leading lights in the field.

Web of inconsistency

The impression left as the credits roll is that every time he pokes at the supposedly solid science of HIV/AIDS he finds he meets no resistance, and his finger tears another hole is what seems like a cobweb of false claims, one that needs sweeping away before it catches another million hapless “HIV positives” to feed killer drugs to and, the film implies, shorten their lives for no good purpose except to preserve the careers and salaries of all in the vast economy of this statistically exaggerated and medically misread disease.

The film makes all the major points that the much vilified (by HIV defenders) “denialists” have made over the years, starting with Peter Duesberg’s brilliant and unrefuted reviews of the late 1980s, which have been censored from public attention ever since by Anthony Fauci of NIAID and the editors of the New York Times. But none of these McCarthy-ite internal politics are touched on in the film, which keeps it all very simple.

Conjuring the statistics

Can electron microscope images of the AIDS virus be produced? A leading expert in the technique shows Leung all the pictures produced by Gallo and by others since, but confirms they are only “probably” HIV. Do any tests provably confirm the presence of HIV or even HIV antibodies in the blood of “HIV positives”? No they don’t, other experts admit.

As the scientists quarrel on camera about which combination of tests might be definitive, it emerges that all tests, even PCR tests, have package disclaimers saying that in themselves they confirm nothing about the HIV status of the individual. Meanwhile, test interpretation varies by country, and by the information you have given the tester (are you gay? are you poor?). Rapid tests, used widely now in South Africa, are unreliable and prove nothing, it turns out, though Brent takes one on camera. Many Africans are still judged to be AIDS victims without any testing at all (the Bangui definition is still widely used, he discovers, for symptoms as simple as diarrhea and fever, no testing required).

James Chin, who was chief epidemiologist for WHO for five years, says he warned headquarters how flimsy the statistics were but no one paid any attention. Now he predicts that their “house of numbers” will collapse as the true situation emerges, and indeed huge downward adjustments have been made by the UN for the total of HIV “positives” in the world. (Kevin De Cock, the WHO official who stated a couple of years ago, that heterosexuals have never in reality been threatened by AIDS is not mentioned.)

With Brent and his audience thus instructed how a positive status doesn’t necessarily mean they are infected or have ever been infected by HIV, he is then shown how damaging and even lethal the drugs administered are. Reducing the dosage of the dreaded AZT in the nineties by substituting David Ho’s cocktail of protease inhibitors slowed patients’ decline, reprieving them from the early death guaranteed by full dose AZT before the mid nineties. Everyone lasted longer, so the triumph of protease inhibitors was applauded and the cause of AIDS spuriously confirmed. But deaths have continued at the same rate in the US since (about 17,000 a year). Meanwhile the definition of AIDS was expanded so that a decline was turned into a doubling of cases.

Applause during the film

By the time the film contemplates the experience of Steve and Sherrill Nagel the audience is ready to be horrified. The Nagels adopted a baby from Romania who tested positive in the US, and dutifully fed her AZT while doctors predicted she would barely last till age two. Her leg pains, loss of coordination, and mental disruption are disturbing to watch, and the parents finally decide that even by the measure of standard AIDS ideology it is not worth harming the child any further with AZT. There was a burst of applause at the premiere when it is announced that the child is now 19 and perfectly healthy.

The film doesn’t leave room for any official rebuttal of this or other anecdotes, but on the core points of the science and its politics well known figures such as Anthony Fauci of NIAID are given time to rebut the cynics. When they contradict themselves this is shown clearly. But what is most surprising is that Martin Delaney, who turned from being a skeptic to a staunch advocate of AIDS drugs when his San Francisco group Project Inform gained drug company funding, expresses a lot of world weary doubts about their usefulness and even notes that the companies have no financial motivation to think up a better way to go.

Montagnier’s stunning statement

In its final phase Brent Leung maps AIDS worldwide and shows how it matches poverty and how lack of good food and hygiene gives rise to exactly the same symptoms that are laid at the door of HIV. Is it possible, he asks, that much of global AIDS is sickness from poverty, and would be cured by pouring money into clean water and decent food rather than damaging drugs? That the drugs are damaging is earlier highlighted by photos of buffalo humps and by the death of Joyce Hafford after only 39 days in a test of nevirapine, with grotesque skin symptoms.

The establishment in HIV/AIDS has practiced answers to all this, to be sure, though none of them bear examination, as we have found in writing this blog. So perhaps Brent Leung can be forgiven for not including them, although they are undoubtedly among the 300 hours of film he has recorded. What he has produced is a vivid documentation of unanswered – in fact, confirmed – doubts about the scientific rationale peddled in HIV/AIDS, conflicting claims by experts, and real people examples of ignorance and suffering. He has shown how AIDS drugs could equally be causing the same and worse symptoms and deaths as HIV is supposedly causing.

The climax of the film comes with Luc Montagnier assuring him that “a good immune system” can rid the body of HIV in a few weeks. Leung gets him to repeat this unexpected statement and then asks if it applies to poor Africans. If their immune systems are restored with adequate nutrition, would their bodies conquer HIV too? The soon to be Nobelist Montagnier says “I would think so.”

Montagnier also emphasizes as he has done over the years (he was barred from the San Francisco AIDS Conference for it) that a co-factor is always necessary for HIV to do its deadly work, which opens the possibility that HIV itself is not actually involved. Presumably now that he alone won the Nobel last year for discovering HIV “the cause of AIDS” he will now be less frank in public. But here he is on film. The cat is out of the bag.

Will the doc be stopped?

This is the kind of paradigm threatening conclusion that a huge array of vested interests cannot abide, ranging from the emotions of patients who have committed themselves to taking the drugs to the vast array of career and financial interests that need to keep the 25 year old HIV/AIDS ideology in play, including now George Bush and Bill Clinton, who have both sought redemption through AIDS.

John Moore of Cornell, the HIV scientist most hostile in public and behind the scenes to outside review, has vowed in email to them that the filmmakers will, as the Hollywood phrase has it, ‘never eat lunch in this town again.’ Yet his efforts haven’t been able to stop their momentum so far, despite his supporters at the Times, which itself now has a huge, 25 year investment in the status quo.

With the politics so intense the censors of AIDS review may still succeed, but on behalf of the public Leung has fired the loudest shot yet across the bows of the great ship of fools, SS HIV Science. It is hard to imagine that, as has already happened, thoughtful people completely unaware of the real situation before they take their seats won’t leave the cinema skeptical of and even hostile to those that want to shut off public debate.

And the irony is that Leung has done nothing but document the tale that HIV scientists tell against themselves. The confusion he records looks amusingly like the Mad Hatters tea party from Alice in Wonderland. Could it be that they have led the world through a looking glass for 25 years?

Entertainment plus important revelation. All in all, a stunning achievement.

Posted by Truthseeker | Categories: Africa, Anthony Fauci, Best, Brent Leung, Clinton, House of Numbers, John P. Moore, Joyce Ann Hafford, Luc Montagnier, Movie Review, Peter Duesberg, Robert Gallo, Science Guardian | 14 Comments »

House of Numbers savaged by Times on cue
September 3rd, 2009
Jeannette Catsoulis, resident pit bull, unleashed on Leung

Naive review compares HIV skepticism with questioning gravity

But can Times afford to open this can of worms?

The New York Times, reliably irresponsible shill for the HIV/AIDS establishment for the last quarter century, has wasted no time in unleashing its house attack dog on House of Numbers, the revealing documentary on scientific confusion in HIV/AIDS which will open at the Quad tomorrow night.

Second tier critic Jeannette Catsoulis achieves a career peak in AIDS Seen From a Different Angle, her brief dismissal of the film in tomorrow’s paper, combining a vindictive level of nastiness about the unfortunate director Brent Leung’s work with zero evidence that she has actually viewed with any real attention more than the film’s trailer:

AIDS Seen From a Different Angle
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Published: September 4, 2009

Couched as a “personal journey” through the history of H.I.V. and AIDS, “House of Numbers” is actually a weaselly support pamphlet for AIDS denialists. Trafficking in irresponsible inferences and unsupported conclusions, the filmmaker Brent Leung offers himself as suave docent through a globe-trotting pseudo-investigation that should raise the hackles of anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the basic rules of reasoning.

Assembled from interview fragments with doctors, scientists, journalists and others, the film cobbles together an insinuating argument against the existence of H.I.V. as a virus and AIDS as the resulting disease. Among the many inflammatory claims is that diagnosis is a pharmaceutical-industry ruse to sell complex drug therapies (which the film then presents as the real cause of the syndrome we identify as AIDS). Evidence to support this and other highly dangerous contentions is found not in verifiable statistics (house of numbers, my foot) but in the impassioned anecdotes of individuals who have outlived the expectations of an H.I.V.-positive diagnosis.

Rife with fuzzy logic (most people with AIDS live in poverty, therefore poverty causes AIDS) and a relentless fudging of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions, this willfully ignorant film portrays minor areas of scientific disagreement as “a research community in disarray” and diagnostic testing as a waste of time. A few months ago 18 angry doctors and scientists interviewed in the film issued a statement claiming that Mr. Leung “acted deceitfully and unethically” when recruiting them and that his film “perpetuates pseudoscience and myths.”

Mr. Leung said in a recent interview, “All we do is raise questions.” Perhaps his next film will question the existence of gravity.

HOUSE OF NUMBERS
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Produced, directed and edited by Brent Leung; written by Llewellyn Chapman. At the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. This film is not rated.

Luckily a more sober and responsible description of House of Numbers is carried in the Movie section on line (House of Numbers (2009), otherwise this childish diatribe would discourage too many people from seeing what is surely one of the most important documentaries this year, given the light it throws on evidence that billions of dollars have been misspent and and countless lives needlessly destroyed by the HIV/AIDS juggernaut:

Review Summary

What is HIV? What is AIDS? What is being done to cure it? These questions sent Canadian filmmaker Brent Leung on a worldwide journey, from the highest echelons of the medical research establishment to the slums of South Africa, where death and disease are the order of the day. In this up-to-the-minute documentary, he observes that although AIDS has been front-page news for over 28 years, it is barely understood. Despite the great effort, time, and money spent, no cure is in sight. ~ Baseline StudioSystems

We are familiar with Catsoulis’s unjustly scathing style, for example, in attacking America the Beautiful last year, as if she would like to have hung, drawn and quartered the director, Darryl Roberts, of that interesting and personal essay on the ways in which the obsession with good looks is distorting American lives, apparently because the film was not sophisticated enough in content and style to suit her.

America the Beautiful
August 1, 2008
What You See
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Published: August 1, 2008

Clueless, directionless and altogether pointless, “America the Beautiful” will outrage only those who have spent the last 50 years in suspended animation. Paddling in the shallow end of a very deep pool, the writer and director Darryl Roberts bumbles his way through a hodgepodge of impressions about our national quest for physical perfection before suggesting — wait for it — that real beauty is on the inside. I feel enlightened already.

Stuffed with empty sound bites from the likes of Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton, this fabulously inept documentary aims much of its ire at the beauty industry’s purported tyranny of impressionable young women. Ignoring writers who have spent their careers studying this issue (including Jean Kilbourne and her pioneering video series, “Killing Us Softly”), Mr. Roberts conducts embarrassingly naïve and occasionally creepy interviews with young girls concerned about their body image. Though what we can learn from a close-up of a 12-year-old model’s naked thigh is not precisely clear.

Displaying an astonishing degree of ignorance about his chosen subject (“What’s a six-pack?”), Mr. Roberts zigzags from eating disorders to music videos to Eve Ensler chatting about — what else? — designer vaginas, without drawing breath or conclusions. If he had, he might have noticed that the tragic story of that 12-year-old model offered all the material his movie needed.

“America the Beautiful” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Flesh, fantasy and four-letter words.

Minor critics have always found it easiest to make a name for themselves by showing they are cleverer and more literate than their hapless victims, but we always thought that one of the virtues of the Times was that, like the New Yorker, it employs people who are both skillful and mature enough to please without showing off at their subject’s expense.

You can judge for yourself whether to take Catsoulis’s reviews at face value at Metacritic’s listing of her reviews, which suggest that the Times editors have not, after 247 of them, yet seen fit to send her to major releases, and we can imagine why.

The shame of the Times

In this case, however, one imagines that the politics of the Times in this arena dictated that the editors unleash their pet movie pit bull for a guaranteed throat ripping lest the film gain any traction in New York.

For God forbid that this documentary should be in contention for an Oscar, let alone win one, when it threatens to expose the foolishly one sided Times coverage of HIV/AIDS and its supposed science since 1984.

Even their science reporters, in particular medical reporter Lawrence Altman, write about HIV/AIDS as if they were suddenly unaware that paradigms shift in science all the time as they are reviewed and displaced by better notions, and that the process is made doubly difficult when vast amounts of money and careers are invested in the standard wisdom.

That the Times should have taken sides against Peter Duesberg, the leading light of the field of retrovirus research, ever since he rejected the notion that HIV accounted for AIDS, is unforgivable. And it creates an almost insurmountable barrier to reversing course now that Duesberg’s view is more and more confirmed with every passing year of non-achievement in the field.

If House of Numbers and its message were to gain the audience and respect it deserves (see the LA Times in our previous post for an example of a rational reaction to the film) where would that leave the Times, now struggling financially while trying to leave behind the very serious embarrassments of fiction on the front page and other errors of the last few years?

The irony is that the great newspaper is turning its reporters attention more and more to investigative exposes of waste and venality. Could its tattered reputation survive the revelation that for 25 years its science reporters and editors have been hoodwinked by Anthony Fauci, Bob Gallo, David Baltimore, Max Essex and John Moore into writing pr for the WorldCom of science?

Posted by Truthseeker | Categories: Science Guardian | No Comments »

Brent Leung, Duesberg provoke censorship moves
August 31st, 2009
House of Numbers wins respect in LA, arrives NYC

John Moore leads HIV guard dogs in barking fest on HuffPost without seeing film

HIV/AIDS defenders erase Duesberg’s fine science at Medical Hypotheses


Brent W. Leung’s House of Numbers, the documentary expose of the confused, conflicting and frequently nonsensical claims of HIV/AIDS scientists in the face of reasonable inquiry, which includes the reasoned evisceration of those claims by critics led by the distinguished Peter Duesberg of Berkeley, arrives in New York this Friday at the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13 St.

The film won a respectful review in the Los Angeles Times, a tribute to the documentary’s objectivity in investigating the tortured topic of conflicting official claims in HIV/AIDS medicine, and possibly also to the fact that John Moore of Cornell and other rabid enemies of free inquiry in this scientific arena failed to get to the editors of the LA Times’ entertainment section in time to block a favorable response.

Moore did manage, however, to get a Huffington Post blogger and gay AIDS patient, Thomas Lorenzo, to post a condemnation of the movie’s content, Since When Is the Expression of Fear and Ignorance a Basic American Right?: AIDS Denialists’ Movie Does a Better Job in Spreading Fear than an Insurance Company Lobbyist., without first seeing it. This provoked a very long 92 comment thread in which HIV critics, skeptics and cynics battled Moore, the blogger and the usual HIV defense suspects to a standstill.

Director and producer Brent Leung, 29, (who is neither gay nor HIV positive) then replied himself to the charges of Moore and other HIV scientists in the film (none of whom had seen it at the time, see earlier post, or apparently even now) that their words have been “taken out of context” and that he is a “denialist” instead of a filmmaker documenting replies he received to reasonable questions trying to clarify the issue of what exactly HIV/AIDS science claims. The comment thread blossomed again, by 171 so far, and now both serve as a very useful reference for all who wish to compare current sense and nonsense on this issue and decide which is which.

Unfortunately, Moore’s disgraceful and revealing efforts to censor any review of HIV/AIDS science have scored a great and shameful success elsewhere recently. The publishers of Medical Hypotheses have been persuaded to take down a fine piece by Peter Duesberg, one contradicting the grotesque claim of Harvard researchers that he and colleagues who led Thabo Mbeki to suspect HIV/AIDS ideology was corrupt at its scientific core are responsible for the premature deaths of 330,000 South Africans.

Apparently this was achieved with Moore’s standard claim that free speech in science endangers HIV/AIDS patients, who might, if led astray from the official view, give up their dangerous drugs for healthy nutritional support for their immune systems such as organic fruit and vegetables. That responsible publishers of a publication devoted to novel inquiry should accept this anti-scientific claptrap is a sad commentary on their lack of sophistication in the very science politics that Medical Hypotheses exists to counter.

Duesberg has complained to the publishers and attached letters of support which we reproduce below, and he will be presenting the paper at the upcoming Rethinking AIDS conference 2009 on November 6-8 in Oakland, California, just across the bay from San Francisco.

All in all, the irony is that Moore has stirred up exactly the kind of attention and documentation he seems most afraid of. Once again, we are led to the conclusion that Moore is in fact a secret supporter of review in HIV/AIDS (see earlier post).

The LA Times reviews House of Numbers favorably

Leung’s film has been getting enthusiastic reviews from bloggers and comment posters on the Web, for example, Documentary Blog:House of Numbers.

Labels: HIV/AIDS

posted by MrK @ 8:33 PM