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Celia Farber’s book Serious Adverse Events (Melville House, 2006) has been a serious adverse event for the multibillion dollar AIDS industry.

Some might have concluded that this journalist, who has written about the other side of HIV and AIDS since 1987, had given up. But with this compilation of her best articles plus new material, it is clear that she is still a strong independent voice.

Farber relates stories of censored scientists. These scientists do not fit the mould of heroic doctors struggling to get “life-saving” drugs into the mouths of those infected with HIV.

Readers encounter vignettes of shunned virologist Peter Duesberg as a charming, intelligent, and courageous man. The mainstream says he is discredited even though they have never answered his challenges. Readers also hear from prominent scientists on the other side, such as McGill University MD Mark Wainberg, who says that people who question the cause of AIDS should be jailed and has called Duesberg a “scientific psychopath.”

Farber describes visits with cowed scientists who can only be honest when anonymous. With this shield they say things such as, “I don’t think Peter [Duesberg] is necessarily wrong. But he had a fatal flaw. He went public... Political savvy is intrinsic to a scientific career. You don’t just stand up and say that everybody is wrong.”

Farber describes the broad sweep of the scientific dispute over the “HIV=AIDS=Death” theory, as well as the forces that drive the industry, the inner strength that drives the
scientists and doctors who have refused to stay in line and, more than anything, the personal stories of its victims.

Two of the last, most recent, and best chapters in the book concern such human tragedies. One describes how the Incarnation Children’s Center in New York City enrolled its charges in AIDS clinical trials. Gastrostomy tubes were surgically inserted into the stomachs of children who balked at taking the medications that made them miserable.

Farber closes with the death of a healthy woman who tested HIV-positive during pregnancy and died of AIDS drug-induced liver failure just after an emergency birth. This is only the tip of a huge US government-funded drug trial scandal that Farber exposes.

David Crowe is a Calgary-based environmentalist and medical science critic, currently writing a book called The Infectious Myth. Contact him through editorial@alive.com.

Source: alive #291, January 2007