The Strange Debate on the Science of AIDS
Laurice Taitz
March 19, 2000
Earlier this month South Africa's health ministry announced a government plan to convene an international panel of experts to investigate "the science of AIDS". This would not have been so contentious a statement had it not followed the October pronouncement by President Thabo Mbeki that the drug AZT is toxic, and that it would be irresponsible of the government to use it for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of the virus.
In light of the government's dismal track record in dealing with AIDS, it seems ironic that the decision not to provide AZT because of its presumed toxicity is considered a responsible move. The two announcements have sparked panic and incredulity among researchers and activists, because they give credence to the views of AIDS dissidents - an international group of "fringe" scientists who argue that HIV does not cause AIDS.
According to a report published in New York's Village Voice newspaper this week, this is a view that finds favour with Mbeki - or at least one he is looking at seriously. The price to be paid for what at first glance may appear to be Mbeki's delight in combative debate, rather than his faith in the facts, may be inestimable. Already South Africa has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world. If that is not enough, the growing number of children being orphaned by AIDS should be.
While government spokesmen dispute the fact that the President favours the dissident view, Mbeki has not officially refuted it. And beyond our borders his mercurial approach to the AIDS question is drawing its fair share of attention. The Voice article, for instance, remarks that "South Africa's President may become the first world leader to believe that HIV is not the cause of AIDS". The AIDS dissidents have so little credibility in the established science community that they are forced to use the Internet as their primary vehicle of expression. Their flagbearer is a man called Peter Duesberg, a molecular biologist at the University of Berkeley, California. Since the viral cause of AIDS was first proposed in 1983, he has disputed it. One of his more memorable statements is: "They have hyped up HIV into this super-rapist, but in reality the damn thing can hardly get an erection."
Though Duesberg's supporters do not seem to share a uniform view, other counterviews to the prevailing scientific wisdom on HIV and AIDS have generally been harnessed to the dissident cause. There are those who say the HIV theory is the greatest scientific fraud in history and that those who perpetuate it are guilty of "psychological murder". Yet credible scientists and doctors worldwide dismiss such claims as "voodoo science", in the words of Dr Mamphela Ramphele, University of Cape Town vice-chancellor.
Lynn Morris, a vaccine researcher at South Africa's National Institute of Virology, is unequivocal: "There is no debate among scientists. HIV causes AIDS. The evidence is overwhelming and conclusive." Yet the dissident view persists - at least in Mbeki's administration. Which is why it cannot be so easily dismissed by South Africans. There are those dissidents, like molecular biologist Dr Charles Thomas, who claim: "If we said that AIDS didn't exist . . . it would disappear in the background of normal mortality."
Thomas and co also say the Food and Drug Administration - the US medicines regulatory body - has conspired with pharmaceutical companies, motivated by profit, to allow toxic drugs like AZT on to the market because of pressure on them to find a treatment. The view that pharmaceutical companies are evil empires bent on ruling the world would sound almost kooky if it had not been so often repeated by a succession of South African health ministers - and Mbeki himself.
The dissidents, it seems, have all the questions but none of the answers, as the bodies piling up in Africa's mortuaries attest. At the extreme end of the dissident scale there is Dr Kary Mullis, a Nobel prize-winning biochemist whose book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field documents his scepticism about the HIV theory, his passion for hallucinogenic drugs and his belief in flying saucers.
So far there has been no indication that Mbeki shares all of their views. In response to a column that appeared in the Sunday Times in November, Thabo Masebe - spokesman to Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa - wrote that poverty, malaria and TB have broken down people's immune systems. He concluded that the fight against AIDS should therefore focus on "radically raising the standards of living of our people, rather than distributing drugs and concentrating too exclusively on the social behaviour of the individual African".
So far, the government seems to have managed neither. This week, presidential spokesman Parks Mankahlana said: "Let's not obsess with this petty foolishness. AZT is not a cure for AIDS, and besides, it's unaffordable." The government's arguments against AZT's "toxicity" and its "affordability" appear to be interchangeable. Mankahlana also said that the country's only hope is the AIDS vaccine which South African researchers - along with the rest of the world's scientists - are racing to find.
"What is important is that here we have a disease that there is no cure for. The President is saying let us all work together on this. And yes, there is going to continue to be confusion, but the person who's going to shut us up is the person who finds a cure." He added: "The President doesn't belong to any faction." But it would be an act of supreme hubris for the government to put all its resources into the quest for a vaccine that cannot cure AIDS but may, at best, prevent future generations from getting it.
In Grips of AIDS Epidemic, South Africa Lashes out at Drug Companies
By Andrew Selsky
March 20, 2000
Johannesburg, South Africa - President Thabo Mbeki's office on Monday bitterly accused Western drug companies of enriching themselves from the AIDS epidemic. In a newspaper column, Mbeki's administration compared them to warmongers "who propagate fear to increase their profits." The blistering comments come as Mbeki's administration finds itself on the defensive for its controversial policies - including the withholding of anti-AIDS drugs to infected pregnant women, which could help save thousands of newborns' lives. Mbeki also recently declared that the drug AZT, a mainstay in the battle against AIDS, was dangerous - remarks that baffled and shocked AIDS experts.
Monday's broadside made some experts wonder about the Mbeki administration's ability to deal with the worst calamity to hit sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 2 million people died from the virus in 1998 and 1.7 million more became infected in 1999. In South Africa alone, 4 million people - 10 percent of the population - are believed to have HIV or AIDS. There is no known cure. "It's unfortunate that we are going backward instead of dealing with the serious issues," said Ashraf Grimwood, who chairs the National AIDS Convention of South Africa.
The column in the influential Johannesburg newspaper Business Day also defended the government's decision to convene a panel to investigate whether HIV leads to AIDS and whether the virus is sexually transmitted - matters the world medical community has long taken for granted. In the column, Mbeki's spokesman Parks Mankahlana wrote that the panel should try to unearth information about the virus - information he hinted was being kept secret.
"This international panel must ... attempt to unravel the 'mysteries' of the HIV/AIDS virus, including, and more especially, what the profit-takers cannot tell us," Mankahlana wrote. The panel is separate from the World AIDS Conference, a biannual event which brings together the world's most respected AIDS experts. South Africa will play host to that conference in July in the port city of Durban. South Africa has previously complained that pharmaceutical companies charge more for anti-AIDS drugs than the vast majority of Africans can afford. But Monday's column was the most vociferous attack.
"Like the marauders of the military industrial complex who propagate fear to increase profits, the profit-takers who are benefiting from the scourge of HIV/AIDS will disappear to the affluent beaches of the world to enjoy wealth accumulated from a humankind ravaged by a dreaded disease," Mankahlana wrote. The piece singled out the shareholders of Glaxo Wellcome, which manufactures AZT, and said they are concerned about the values of stocks but not people's lives.
Glaxo Wellcome said it would respond in its own column to Business Day this week. And James Cochran, the British-based company's executive director for Africa, said recently that "blaming the pharmaceutical industry for failure to arrest the current AIDS epidemic in Africa is convenient but simplistic." "The real barriers to access to treatment are lack of education, medical infrastructure and political will," Cochran said. He pointed out that Glaxo Wellcome supplied anti-AIDS drugs at reduced prices to Uganda and Ivory Coast and offered anti-AIDS drugs at a 75 percent price reduction to South Africa for HIV-positive pregnant women - an offer that he said South Africa spurned.
Last Thursday, South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang ruled out giving anti-retroviral drugs to infected pregnant women, saying the government could not afford them and that the safety of the drugs was not proven.
Buying Anti-AIDS Drugs Benefit the Rich
By Parks Mankahlana
March 20, 2000
Human beings live in the realm of what they know. Through the ages, humanity's relationship with our environment has been one of discovery, research, investigation and invention. Knowledge and information as well as their management and dissemination are therefore important ingredients in the definition of human existence. From time immemorial, humans have struggled to grasp phenomena which, for want of scientific progress at the time, were either incomprehensible or confusing to them. English words like "magic", "mystery" and many others that seek to define phenomena and things that human beings did not understand, epitomise the struggle to grasp our surroundings.
Out of anxiety - or should we say desperation - to understand and grapple with the unknown, humans have invented beliefs such as witchcraft, sorcery, and superstition to explain what was alien to them. All this is due to the failure or inhibitions of science and philosophical thought at the various stages of human development. Invariably, the powerful and the rich expropriate knowledge, issue patents to themselves, and make laws and regulations to protect and defend their interests. With the advent of capitalism, knowledge and information have become the main commodities in the process of wealth accumulation.
Since his address to the National Council of Provinces in August last year, President Thabo Mbeki has taken the debate on HIV/AIDS to the level it deserves. He is the only head of state that has put the HIV/AIDS issue on the national agenda on a daily basis, not only in SA, but the world over. Following what most HIV/AIDS activists have argued, he has broken the approach which seeks to make the disease just a health problem.
HIV/AIDS is a socioeconomic problem. It is a political problem that has reached the proportion of an international crisis. It threatens to destroy nations and continents. There has hardly been a negative response to Mbeki's comments within the debate about AZT, from any personality of note from the third world or any of the countries most affected by HIV/AIDS. We have not seen the kind of reaction we would have encountered had any other drug prescribed for TB, cholera or other diseases been at issue. AZT means little or nothing to most of the citizens of the world where HIV/AIDS is prevalent, because they cannot afford it anyway.
But why has Mbeki generated such a violent reaction from the same people who should cherish a head of government championing the cause of HIV/AIDS awareness? Why is it that the only president in the world whose official portrait has the HIV awareness ribbon emblazoned on his breast, has become the subject of scorn and ridicule? Why is it that a president who authorised an additional R73m from a limited budget for AIDS research is accused of embracing "voodoo science"? And why is he accused of saying things he has not said?
Commerce and industry unfortunately define human relations. In the modern world, what we say or do not say, may be the ultimate determinant in share price performance or nonperformance. The response to Mbeki's address last year was not motivated by the desire to see an end to the scourge of AIDS/HIV. It was driven by the fear of the effect the remarks might have on the profitability of the product.
The tragedy is that HIV/AIDS is not going to succumb to the machinations of the profiteering pharmaceutical companies and their propagandists. Like the marauders of the military industrial complex who propagated fear to increase their profits, the profit-takers who are benefiting from the scourge of HIV/AIDS will disappear to the affluent beaches of the world to enjoy wealth accumulated from a humankind ravaged by a dreaded disease. And we shall continue to die from AIDS. Why is it that no one has asked the medical aids?
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