Specimen Magazine Interview with Peter Duesberg

“Here you try your best, at least you

think, to say what’s really going on. And

AIDS would be...not like cancer, where I

say maybe we have the truth but it’s not

going to be a picnic either. But with

AIDS, it could be a stroke of a pen and 

                      AIDS would be gone.”

Specimen Interview: Duesberg_for_Specimen_Issue_1
22. DUESBERG. SPECIMEN MAGAZINE. ISSUE 1.
DUESBERG. SPECIMEN MAGAZINE. ISSUE 1. 23.

*Interview conducted on August 3rd, 2011 in Peter’s Berkeley office and local coffee shop

PETER: The funding of the lab has been, to say the least, rather lean, ever since I questioned the virus

AIDS hypothesis. And that’s a long time ago by now. That was in ’87. I’m surprised that I’m still alive anyway.

And my critique of viral AIDS was in good faith. It was not because I hated somebody or I’m a mass

murderer and all this kind of thing. It was just basic science. There are some very profound problems with

this idea that AIDS is a viral epidemic, sexually transmitted epidemic. Where is it? 28 years later.

This virus can not be found in people with AIDS, even when they’re dying from AIDS. Only the antibody

against it. For all other viruses - no exceptions, none – if the antibody is there, the virus is not doing anything.

That’s why vaccines work so well. They prevent the virus from getting into another cell. When the antibody

is there, you cannot die from the virus, because the virus cannot be found. They can’t find it. They

need the polymerase chain reaction to detect traces of viral nucleic acid,

because this is a method that finds a needle in a haystack. 

But you

are not dying from a needle in a haystack. 

There are

lots of holes in this virus-AIDS hypothesis. There are too many. Well, there are only holes in it. Often I

don’t see anything else.

All new pathogenic microbes cause exponential epidemics. The population gets sick exponentially, within

weeks lots of people die. Then, the remainder of the population either becomes immune, through their own

immunity or a vaccine if you have one, and then the epidemic disappears. So the history of microbial epidemics,

viral, bacterial, or others has always been more or less the same over time. It goes up exponentially and

comes down exponentially. And the classical example is the flu epidemic of 1918 in which more people died

than in WWI. That’s 20 million people within a couple of months. Up and down and gone it was.

But typically, the microbes claim only a couple of million of your cells to replicate without causing a disease.

In some cases you get sick and in very rare cases you die. So AIDS was said to be an exception. We’re all going

to die from this new virus; the population is going to be decimated. We have a new sexually transmitted

virus coming from Africa.

But now, 27 years later, there is no general, heterosexual AIDS epidemic anywhere on this planet. Not in the

great USA, not in Europe, not in Africa, not in India, not in Asia, nowhere. And sex has not changed a lot in

the past 20 years. It’s been the same since God invented it millions of years ago. As a result of unprotected

sex, 4 and a half million babies are born in the U.S. every year, and have been born before AIDS and continue

to be born, and there is no devastating AIDS epidemic among heterosexuals and babies.

24. DUESBERG. SPECIMEN MAGAZINE. ISSUE 1.

Abby: So the numbers are just not adding up.

PETER: They are not adding up at all. The germ theory says the numbers go up exponentially and soon

after come down exponentially. That’s how it should go. The numbers don’t add. The AIDS establishment is

more and more silent about it. They don’t say much about this anymore. They keep assuring you, you must

take your drugs or else you die, but they don’t discuss anymore that it’s supposed to kill everybody and spread

exponentially. They are more and more quiet about this now.

Anyway, so I think that there are big open questions. Nevertheless, I became the

official villain responsible for everything that didn’t work out in AIDS, because I

advised people to ignore the virus and not to take anti-viral drugs, and now I don’t

get grants and students as a result of that.

No more research funds. So, I focused again on cancer which was my expertise and my interest anyway.

When I first came to this country, in the sixties, the virus-cancer theory was the prevailing cancer theory. I

worked than with Wendell Stanley who got the first Nobel Prize in viruses, tobacco mosaic virus. That new

building next door was named after him. He was the first Nobel-virologist, and he said you can come to work

with me on cancer viruses as a post-doc. The whole institute was essentially working with him, and he said the

hottest thing nowadays is tumor viruses. If we can nail that down, we will make a vaccine and cancer is conquered.

And that would be a big goal. A lot of people were pushing this goal at that time. So I was working

on so-called retroviruses, viruses that might cause cancer because they don’t kill cells.

When the virus-cancer theory didn’t work out two decades later – some

cancer virologists said, well, a retrovirus could at least cause AIDS. That’s

still important. It’s not as good as cancer, but it’s better than nothing. So

they pushed that one. I said, well, there are problems with that too. And

then I became a persona non grata for pointing out the many problems with the virus-AIDS hypothesis. No

more grants, no more students, no more invited lectures – those were the immediate consequences. Ok. I

said, if it’s not a virus, then other things must explain AIDS and cancer. So I set out to find those other

things.

Abby: Well then, how harmless is HIV, do you think?

PETER: I think it does nothing. That’s how harmless it is.

Abby: Because a lot of people have it but they are not having symptoms?

PETER: Indeed, the fact that over 30 million have HIV but no symptoms of AIDS is a strong argument

that HIV is not pathogenic. At least if you can trust those estimates that the Center for Disease Control and

U.N. AIDS keeps publishing. Like 30-40% of the population in South Africa, or in Africa altogether are HIV

positive. And that population has doubled in last 25 years. That’s not so bad, huh? You could say HIV has

doubled the African population. If you can replicate and procreate – despite HIV, that’s not a bad sign. At

the same time, they say this virus is deadly, the worst we’ve ever seen or we ever had.

Even in the U.S. we have 1 million HIV positives at any given time since we can test for it in ’85. Now 26

years later, it’s still a million. That looks like a stable population to me. We have 30,000 AIDS patients, but

30,000 out of a million is only 3%, is it? Yeah. It’s not a whole lot. The normal mortality is 1.5% - 2%. And

those 30,000 include all these so-called “AIDS risk groups,” when you look up who is dying among those millions.

It’s not some anti-body positive who didn’t know before. It’s typically one from these risk groups,

which are intravenous drug users, or male homosexuals who advertise thousands of dates and use tons of

chemicals to make this possible. These chemicals include cocaine, the amphetamines, the nitrite inhalants, and

then come the anti-viral drugs, which are chemotherapies to get over the so-called HIV risk.

You are much better off on illicit amphetamines, and cocaine, and heroin

then you are on anti-viral drugs. The primary anti-viral drugs are DNA

chain terminators, which were originally designed to kill human cells for

cancer therapy – not to treat harmless viruses like HIV.

See, most viruses, the majority of the viruses we know in humans and in animals are cytotoxic, meaning they

the kill cells in which they replicate. They kill typically a few 1,000 cells, enough for them to survive, when the

immune system stops them.

But the retrovirus are so harmless, literally harmless because they do not kill cells for their survival. Moreover,

they are typically latent or inert in contrast to all pathogenic viruses. They become genetic residents of the cell,

if you want to call them a name. They are in there like your in-laws moving into your house. They are a nuisance,

but they are not killing you. And this is how the retroviruses are, and that is why they are, in theory at

least, potential cancer viruses.

It is for this reason that we studied them very carefully as so-called possible cancer viruses - because they don’t

kill cells like lytic viruses, such as measles, or mumps, or polio. So if a virus kills a cell, it can’t

become a cancer cell, but a retrovirus is one that never kills the cell. We

retrovirologists kept saying that to each other. We were the leading virologists

in the 70s and the 80s for that implied reason. I was one of

them. I was the blue-eyed boy in the field. I had every grant I wanted.

We studied these special viruses that don’t kill the cell and therefore could be the cause of cancer, and in this

work I found that one of them contained a gene that caused a tumor, the so-called oncogene. This gene actually

makes the cells grow faster, or hyperplastic— but these hyperplastic cells are not really cancer cells yet, and

such a virus was never found in humans. That is consistent with the fact that human and even animal cancers

are not contagious. The “tumor viruses” nevertheless helped us to later find that chromsomal rearrangements

are the immediate precursors of cancer.

Abby: So why did everyone get so alarmed about the HIV virus? What happened to create this?

PETER: Well, because they were desperate to find a cause and a corresponding treatment for AIDS.

There was pressure to find something. Again, the CDC was always hyping up a new scare, a new panic. The

CDC was built up as a military unit initially in WWII and they didn’t want to shrink down after WWII. In fact,

they wanted to expand, so they had to invent one problem after another. And I think their last semi-hit was

the polio epidemic of the 50s. Since then, there is nothing really, nothing that they can claim. Nevertheless,

they come up with one scare story after another. All these flu epidemics are not happening, AIDS isn’t a true

viral epidemic either.

The writer John Rappaport, from Los Angeles,

used to call it “science by press release.” Margaret Heckler,

the Secretary of Health and cancer researcher Robert Gallo from the National Institiues of Health announced

by press release in Washington in April 1984 that the cause of AIDS had been found. But at that

time there was no publication yet, no paper, nothing, except a speculative paper from 1983 by the French virologist

Luc Montagnier. Montagnier’s paper was not considered, taken serious at the time. That was before

that press conference in ’84.

Why? In 1984 Reagan needed badly something to build up his reelection campaign. He hadn’t talked about

AIDS and he was probably too “homophobe” at the time. Maybe he talked to John Wayne about it but not to

the public. I am paraphrasing now freely, but they probably told him that he needs to say something about

AIDS because it looks bad with the votes. He needed the New York Times, needed Liz Taylor, and Rock

Hudson, and the Left votes. So he apparently tried, they tried to find something for him. So he picked up

Gallo. I mean, that’s at least what I heard related. He asked, is there any hope? They said, yes, Gallo is the

DUESBERG. SPECIMEN MAGAZINE. ISSUE 1. 27.

man that found the virus, and once we have a virus, we’ll have a vaccine. Don’t worry. In two years, it’s all

over. The New York Times jumped at it. And Liz Taylor loved it. And Mathilda Krim loved it. And they

founded AMFAR [The American Foundation for AIDS Research], and then Ronald Reagan was reelected.

Bob Gallo from the National Institutes of Health found the virus, and Margaret Heckler, Secretary of Health,

promised a vaccine, so now the machine was running and the millions were

flowing. That was a pivotal time, in that respect.

And the machine was rolling, ever since. At least in medical history, it was a unique public relations job getting

everyone engaged. ‘We are all in this together’ from Liz Taylor to even Ronald Reagan, reluctantly I think

though. ‘Pro gay jogging, gay marching, gay advertising’, anything. Patients never had a voice before. All

these actors wore the purple ribbon. Even at the Oscars, they were wearing them, most of them. That started

with AIDS, purple. It’s not so in anymore, but it was like the American flag on the president now. Even

some of the politically correct professors, heterosexuals were joining in. ‘We’re all in this together,’

that was the slogan. There’s lots of propaganda.

But, how could HIV cause a fatal disease? They never answered that question. They left it always open.

Yeah, they said, we don’t know yet, we’ll find the mechanism. But the reality is that no global sexually transmitted

epidemic ever materialized. It stayed in these very few rare risk groups.

Yet there was a very strong alternative explanation, which they don’t want to hear about, namely recreational

drugs. In the 70s and 80s, everybody was on drugs. It’s a lifestyle, but they don’t want to say it. A

drug lifestyle is politically incorrect.

Nobody should be blamed. Viruses you can’t blame, that’s like blaming

God, you know, but lifestyle or sexual persuasions is another matter - you’re homophobe, or you’re against

a minority, against blacks, Africans, God knows what. Viruses are politically correct, so we can deal with

them.

It is the biggest windfall for pharma-companies ever. It was chemotherapy for the rest of your life! And chemotherapy

is very expensive. I think, it’s now a 5 billion or 8 billion dollar market for AIDS drugs, so they

don’t want to hear that HIV doesn’t need to be treated. See what I mean? It’s a horrible market.

Abby: So it’s a phenomenon where the treatment may be more harmful than the symptoms?

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PETER: Yeah, for sure. The treatment for AIDS is essentially a lifetime prescription

of chemotherapy. It’s truly horrible. The only thing they have done - if you want

to call it an improvement - is making it less toxic. They lowered doses over time

because people were dying pretty fast on the original doses. And what do they give? They

give you drugs, like AZT, that were developed for cancer chemotherapy, developed to kill your own cells.

AZT, is a DNA chain terminator, a drug designed to stop DNA synthesis in the cell. When that happens, the

cell goes. And that was developed to, quote, cure cancer. That is cancer chemotherapy. As I said, even that is

not exactly God’s invention.

Abby: Can you describe, what happened when you came out with this book, Inventing the AIDS Virus?

PETER: Oh, Inventing the AIDS Virus. Yeah. It was mentioned in the New York Times once, but always

negative and always hesitant.

Abby: So, it’s been kind of pushed aside and not taken seriously?

PETER: Yeah. “A lone dissenter” (New York Times, 1996).

I was described as a lone dissenter, always the only one.

They want to isolate you to zero. But there are literally hundreds

or thousands of them who question it. You know the control is

so tight. We had a paper on this African issue, two years ago now. It was a response to a challenge from a

colleague from Harvard, Max Essex is his name. They were charging us, and me personally, as “mass murders.”

The word is printed in Discover Magazine, because I and the president Mbeki from South Africa questioned

the merits of these anti-viral drugs for the same reason we talked about now.

The virus is very unlikely causing it, and if so, these drugs are not even depressing the virus anyway. Essex

estimated 1.8 million South Africans, of South Africa, the state South Africa died from 2000 – 2005 and that

was my doing and Mbeki’s doing, and I would be a mass murderer. So I responded with the argument that the

reality is that the population during that same time increased by 3 million. And then they responded sort of

indirectly: well, there would have 4.8 million if you hadn’t knocked out the 1.8.

When the population explodes, hardly anybody would say, well, couldn’t it explode

even more if it weren’t for some microbe that I’m going to discover? No. It’s kind

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of an odd situation. Since the population gained 3, but they have never been able to show that HIV

does something. In tissue culture, you put the virus into human cells, they do not die, just like all other retroviruses

in infected cells.

But there came anonymous letters to the university last year, that in the interests

of public health, I should be investigated for some misconduct, meaning up to and possibly losing the job or

some censure like being degraded or limiting teaching. But half a year later, they couldn’t find any evidence,

and I was exonerated. They didn’t like that either. But the paper we published against Essex is gone. The paper

was withdrawn by Elsevier, the publisher, at the request of anonymous “HIV researchers.” It’s a big big

publisher, and they don’t want to be criticized by mainstream scientists because they need the publications. If

they had taken a stand, essentially for me, that this should stay if it’s not refuted, they would have been under

lots of pressure from the AIDS researchers who might say, we don’t want to publish with you, you’re supporting

a mass murderer. So, Elsevier followed suit and took the paper. I’m exonerated, but

the paper is not back. The rumors still continue. I

cannot show up and say here is my paper.

Abby: When would it have been published?

PETER: In 2009. It was already there. I have it on my desktop…Quite a few people have it. And they

can’t stop it. It’s still in the so-called DOI file or somewhere. It’s semi-extinguishable. They do it subtly now.

Typically, they send it to a so-called peer reviewer, meaning somebody who is in the establishment already and

knows what to do with it. It’s sort of essentially abortion. Reviewers typically kill

it before publication. This can be done secretly. It’s anonymous. Typically,

with peer review, you don’t have to put your name. They say, well,

this is risky, and can dump on it without having to sign and give enough

reasons. Typically, the editor and the editorial board know this is not

good for them, so they say, too bad, we cannot publish your paper. But this

time it slipped through, and it was already in their journal. Now they couldn’t do this anymore.

Abby: What was it called?

PETER: Medical Hypotheses, the journal.

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Abby: What was your essay called?

PETER: Well, I have published along these lines before, but this one was called HIV-AIDS hypothesis out

of touch with South African AIDS—A new perspective. I focused it on Africa a long time ago, but the whole continent

is covered in it, A new perspective. It was relatively clear, what I was saying. I think it was the emperor’s

new clothes that killed it. The major charge was that I had killed 1.8 million when there were 3 million more.

I think they even didn’t know. They didn’t check. They may have checked, but nobody ever mentioned these

numbers. So we checked. It’s not a secret. Really. You can go to the website of the U.S. Census Bureau and

they say exactly what the populations are. They have national and international tables. They keep tabs. I

think it’s part of national security because they want to know how many people there are per country to know

what would happen in a war: how much food they need, how much ammunition they need, and what the national

social product is going to be, for that purpose. The U.S. keeps very good numbers on that.

Abby: That was one of my questions. Are you debating the interpretation of the facts or are the facts

themselves in question? It sounds like it is a little bit of both.

PETER: In this case, I would definitely first take the quoted fact that people were lost in this country.

That’s just a matter of looking at facts, not interpretation. Sure, the interpretation comes next. They interpreted

an assumed loss of 1.8 million, without mentioning the gain of 3 million.

See Medical Hypothesis was founded by Horrobin. He’s a British biochemist. He said exactly what

I’m saying. This whole thing with reviewing papers before they get published

by the peers is a completely incestuous process, because those who

are getting to review grant applications and papers usually are the current

establishment, the mainstream establishment. I was part of it myself before

I questioned HIV hypothesis. We were reviewing grant applications

and papers. It’s easy enough to filter out someone who is totally nuts, and

says it’s Chinese tea or something like that, but if there is someone who is

threatening your own investment, someone who says, for instance, that cancer is caused by

chromosomes, or carcinogens, or lifestyle, that it has nothing to do with viruses, we would have done away

with it, because it would have been threatening our own investments, our awards and chances to get grants

and stay in business. It’s a biological thing. It’s self-interest, I think. You tend to take care of yourself first. It

doesn’t mean that you are a bad guy, but you may not see other points so easily. You have to work on it, to be

tolerant enough.

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So, this is why this journal Medical Hypotheses came

up. [Horrobin] said the bias is so obvious in this

peer review system. You send in an AIDS paper

anywhere in America, I would say anywhere in the

Western world by now, that questions HIV, and it

will not be accepted. This was essentially the only chance left, this Medical Hypotheses

journal, that I know. And that’s a well established journal, but it’s clearly a minority journal. It’s like an outsider’s

journal. But they stated, we don’t give it to peers who have an inherent conflict of interest, who want

to defend their field. And beyond just criticizing their competition, they would not want to have something

published that gives a new perspective on AIDS when they all have worked on AIDS and want to work on

HIV and make a career on HIV.

Abby: Sounds like the way microbes operate.

PETER: So that’s exactly right. They said we have this journal without the conventional peer review, oh,

that’s the problem. They not only took out our paper, they fired the editor in chief. He’s gone. He’s a professor

from Newcastle University, and he was the successor of the editor in chief who died a few years earlier.

He is British professor of science and history, perfectly suited for the job, but they fired him because he

would not agree to install conventional peer review, where the guys in the field are judging. It’s

like having General Motors or Volkswagen review all of the new cars...

Abby: There’s not really a better option, is there?

PETER: He said, we’ll publish it if it’s consistent—we have our own reviewers. If it’s logical, there it is.

Everybody can attack it or reject it once it’s published. We are not protecting

this paper against reasonable attacks. So they certainly knew

that they could answer the charge, but they chose to go to Elsevier, the publisher, a huge publishing house,

and said, close down the journal, it’s a world public health risk, what our critics are doing now. Most of them

were anonymous but one of them was Barré-Sinoussi, who shared the Nobel Prize on HIV with Montagnier,

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according to an editorial in Science. A Nobelist defending her prize by censoring dissent.

Abby: I see. That sounds like quite an investment to me.

PETER: Oh, it’s a big one. So, essentially, they threw out the editor in chief. They took out an Italian

AIDS paper which was published at the same time, also questioning AIDS to some degree, which I didn’t

know about at the same time, and the editorial board was fired too. In other words, they’d have experts reviewing

who have their own career made in, let’s say, in cancer, it would be in mutations, or in AIDS it would

be HIV. And that’s a terrible, unfortunately, a terrible situation. I

think it’s bad for American science and science in general. Putting so

much money on so many hopes and then…

Abby: People, of course, say that it’s the drugs that are keeping it stable.

PETER: No, they couldn’t make that argument in Africa because I had prevented them from getting

drugs with Mbeki! Without the drugs these guys are exploding! But that they didn’t want to hear. See? That

was bad for their case…

Abby, is your paper school-linked or is it just...?

Abby: No, it’s totally independent.

PETER: Do you have an issue yet or not yet?

Abby: This is the first.

PETER: And there are some more mass murderers in it? Saddam Hussein or Bin Laden?

Abby: Yes, it’s the mass murderer issue…It must be difficult to receive that…Is it difficult?

PETER: Sometimes I laugh about it, most of the time. It sometimes gets you down in the foggy morning.

Here you try your best, at least you think, to say what’s really going on. And AIDS would be preventable,

by banning or not taking drugs—not like cancer, where I say maybe we have the truth but it’s not going to be

a picnic. With AIDS, it could be a stroke of a pen and AIDS would be gone.

You could stop the anti-viral treatments, which are AIDS by prescription.

They are toxic. They are designed that way. It’s not a side effect. That’s

what they were designed to do, kill cells. And that’s what they do. And that’s going to kill people. It’s just a

matter of time, how much you take.

Also, you could make a lot of progress if you told the kids, maybe now they don’t even know much about

AIDS anymore, but 10 years ago, if you take all these drugs, amphetamines, cocaine or heroine that’s going to

give you AIDS, not some date or some mate. That would probably be one of the more effective weapons in

the war on drugs. I think if they had a choice, many of them would probably stop using these things. I think

they need to impress each other with big numbers, but I think if they knew that these poppers were toxic, they

would think it over. Most of them I know actually suspect it anyway. That it’s not the virus or certainly not

only the virus. If we tell them clearly, it’s not your sex. Sex is not new like AIDS.

But what’s new in our society, our population, our time, is the availability of all

these psychoactive drugs, the horrible anti-viral drugs and the combination of

them. That’s inevitably what’s associated with AIDS patients in Europe and the

U.S. or the so-called Western world. In Africa, it’s poverty and not much is happening

anyway. It’s [the population] exploding, not disappearing. So to make that

clear and ban the use, the sale even of anti-viral drugs, would essentially eliminate

AIDS. But not with cancer. That would be more difficult. Even there, for anything

to happen scientifically, you need a theory. You need a rational theory that is

testable to find out what cancer is really all about, rather than guessing around.

But we cure, cure, cure. Cure what? People always like

to talk cures. They jog for an AIDS cure and a cancer cure and pay tons of money. And those who promise

the easiest and the fastest cure are now the leading scientists. And if you say you don’t even have a good theory

or the theory is wrong, they get mad at you.

Abby: So, you plan to focus on cancer research?

PETER: That was in fact my initial focus, and since viruses were said to be the cause, particularly the

retroviruses…I was an expert. I was worth 25 years on retroviruses. I determined the

genetic map of them, I mean, the so-called genetic structure, how they replicate,

and even identified the so-called oncogene. So that was my claim to fame. So I

had big investments in it.

34. DUESBERG. SPECIMEN MAGAZINE. ISSUE 1.

Abby: But at the same time, nobody is listening to you about these matters.

PETER: By criticizing the virus theory, I am working against my

own interest, I mean career-wise interest, that there’s something

wrong with this virus theory. The genetic map of HIV is the same as we worked out in this

lab here 20 years ago for mouse and chicken retroviruses, and even some mouse, rat viruses. They all have the

same basic genetic makeup and they do nothing, or hardly anything.

Abby: You mean, they are not fatal unless other factors are involved?

PETER: Not even unless. They are not fatal period. Other factors could be involved. But I mean, you

could have that virus and be shot by a gun. And you’d be done. But they don’t have anything causally to do with

each other. They are by themselves, harmless. If you have a car accident, too bad, but the virus is not the cause

of that. It could happen with or without the virus. It would be the same.

Abby: Or with or without tuberculosis.

PETER: That’s right. They try to make it co-factors. If they are in a corner with the

virus not doing much, well it’s a co-factor for something. They say,

this plus something else. But then we have to know exactly what

plus something else is. And I tell you what the plus something else

is. I know they don’t need the virus. You can give them an antiviral

drug, which is a chain terminator of DNA synthesis. It doesn’t

need HIV to terminate DNA. And the same thing with the so-called i.v. drug users.

What about the long latent period? Well the long latent period, ten years or five years—that’s the time it takes

from starting to inject drugs to ending up in People’s Park or going in the hospital with pneumonia. Yes, that’s

what it is. You’re not getting AIDS from injecting drugs even for 10 or 20 parties, but then it gets a bit worse

over time. If you have no time to do anything else, and if you run out of money to pay for it, can’t pay the rent,

can’t take a shower, can’t get new underwear, and start smelling and rotting in the park, then you end up in the

hospital. They say, poor guy, you have HIV. Take a shower, we’ll give you anti-viral drugs. That’s even worse.

So the HIV is not doing anything by itself as far as I can tell.

Abby: And that point seems to be very controversial, just in the general public.

DUESBERG. SPECIMEN MAGAZINE. ISSUE 1. 35.

PETER: It shouldn’t be but they are always told it’s so bad. But if they looked at the numbers, they

would see very fast that it doesn’t fit. We have a million HIV positives since 1985. And where are they?

There’s still a million HIV positives now. Why didn’t they die out from HIV? They say, oh, this has a long

latent period. What does that mean? The virus replicates in 24 hours. There is no long latent period for any

virus whatsoever. The latent period is the time it needs to get into the cell, replicate, and get out. And that’s

totally timed by the cell. It doesn’t have its own machine. It works exactly with the cell. So, there is no explanation

for these long latent time periods. The latent periods are…that’s how long it takes

when you have a certain lifestyle to wear yourself down. Even if it was the best

lifestyle, you were out at the end of 80 years or 90 years, but with these drugs, you

burn up your credits faster. Your God given time credits.

Since we all have our focus thanks to the CDC and the constant propaganda on this one latent virus...There

are dozens of latent viruses and bacteria in us, dozens and dozens. But because they are known longer, and

nobody has claimed we discovered it only in ’84, it’s not so easy to sell. With a new one, you can say quickly,

oh, this is my terrible new virus. That will cause all the problems we have now. There is no old textbook or

doctor or somebody saying that we had this 50 years ago and nothing happened.

Abby: And that’s what we saw with the swine flu and SARS and all that?

PETER: Nothing, nothing happened.

Abby: I’m a person who went through a university education, and this is really the first that I’ve ever heard

of this view.

PETER: You must have read something. That’s why you came.

Abby: I heard about you only this year, and your work. What I mean to say is that the mainstream view is

so completely accepted.

PETER: There will be a conference in December, I think, in Washington by this Rethinking AIDS

group. You could look it up on the website. R.A. Rethinking AIDS. I used to be part of it or still am part of

it. There are almost two thousand names, science writers or scientists, who have signed on that they have

doubts about HIV-AIDS. One big name is Kary Mullis. He is here in California. He wrote the introduction

to this book Inventing the AIDS Virus. It’s a funny story in a way. Here is a Nobel prize winner,

looking for a paper that proves HIV is causing AIDS and has

36. DUESBERG. SPECIMEN MAGAZINE. ISSUE 1.

not been able to find it. Great scientist. Good enough to invent

polymerase chain reaction. And he describes the HIV problem in just a few words. Did

you read that foreword in the book? In the end he meets Montagnier at a meeting. And he talked to him, and

immediately Montagnier looked how to escape. So where is the paper?, he said. The CDC. What? The CDC?

You got the Nobel Prize for it. Don’t you have a paper that proves it? Well, uh, then he’s running away. He

says, he was running away faster than he could follow him for his Nobel Prize winning discovery. That’s the

first time he’s seen a scientist doing this. Typically, they can’t get enough of saying what they have done and

how they can prove it, and he was running away all the time. So, from then on, he joined me and invited me

for a meeting down there, and he wrote the introduction to the book, the foreword.

Abby: What year was that published?

PETER: In 1996. I know. It seems kind of old, but the irony is, when I read it recently.

Exactly the same problems are still around, and all of the predictions, everyone of them in

there I think proved to be right: that the drugs wouldn’t cure, a vaccine would not be found.

You know Edward Jenner was the country doctor who invented vaccination. It’s called vaccination because

he found that pox occur in cows also. The Latin word for cow is vacca. So he took an extract from the cow

that had recovered from the pox and thought maybe that protects other people too. And apparently, they say,

he tried it on his kid. Inoculated some extract in the kid and several others too, and they didn’t get pox virus.

And he deduced this must work on other people and succeeded in inoculating other people with it. So he discovered

the principle of vaccination, that an infection induces something that protects against a new infection,

that’s the antibody, and he essentially designed the first vaccine

against pox virus which is still used today.

That was 200 years ago. He got 30

pounds from the English government and

developed it with his son in his practice in 6

months. And here is the most sophisticated,

advanced, affluent, everything America, we

DUESBERG. SPECIMEN MAGAZINE. ISSUE 1. 37.

are working now since 1984 on a vaccine

against HIV. I think they have spent, I don’t

know how many billions so far. And we have

nothing.

Abby: And we won’t ever have it?

PETER: That’s what I and Inventing the AIDS Virus kept saying for decades now. Because you can’t have

a vaccine against a disease that isn’t caused by a virus. You can have a vaccine, but it won’t protect you against

the disease that’s not caused by the virus.

All viruses strike before immunity strikes back. They are essentially doing a blitzkrieg. They attack fast, before

you can defend yourself. That’s their only chance. For flu, for measles, for mumps. They cause lesions

or fever or sometimes even death, but rarely that. In the meantime, your immune system catches up. And

that’s a matter of days. It’s very fast, the immune system. It’s not waiting. It better not. Otherwise, you

would be gone. And the virus grows exponentially and the immune system, at the same rate, sometime even

faster, makes B Cells and T Cells. And within 3 or 4 days typically, the immune system catches up and the

virus is blocked. The antibodies block it. And then the disease ends.

There is not one example, not one that I know of from studying

viruses for over 20 years, that a virus causes a disease years after it

is neutralized. That’s completely absurd. I mean, not only paradox,

I think it’s truly absurd. There’s no logic behind it. It’s only trying to connect something

that one likes to be the cause, like HIV, with something that happens 5 or 10 years later. There is absolutely

nothing there to link the two events, except a hypothesis. And they have tried very hard. They still do

when you put them on the spot. If you push them hard enough, they come out with co-factors. Then the

next round would be name me a co-factor. Then you’d say, why does the co-factor heroin or

AZT need HIV? It can do it just as well without it. Then the one co-factor is

gone. You stay with the drugs. There’s nothing else there.

CROSSING THE STREET,

PETER WAVED GOODBYE

AND HOLLERED,

“KEEP

YOUR T

CELLS UP!”

P E T E R

D U E S B E R G

B I O L O G Y

VIROLOGY AND CANCER RESEARCH

~

P L A C E O F O R I G I N: 

Munster, Germany

D E G R E E S F R O M :

B.S. Chemistry, University of Munich, 1961

Ph.D Chemistry, University of Frankfurt, 1963

A T U C B E R K E L E Y S I N C E : 1964

H I S T O R Y:

First to isolate a cancer gene in 1970, subsequently awarded an Outstanding

Investigator Grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health

Member of the U.S. National Academy of Science since 1986

Author of the books Inventing the AIDS Virus

and The AIDS Dilemma

F O R M O R E I N F O R M A T I O N :

www.duesberg.com

www.rethinkingaids.com