HIV/AIDS

Between the bands is a film that explores contentious issues surrounding HIV and Aids, particularly in regard to the epidemiological representation in South Africa, which include:

  • Has the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) been proven to be sexually transmitted and to be the cause of Aids?
  • Does the South African statistical picture confirm that the country has been in the grip of a viral-induced epidemic, which was slowed due to the uptake of antiretrovirals in the public health system?
  • Has the virus been isolated according to scientifically agreed upon principles, which forms the gold standard for all tests?
  • Do the antibody and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests detect the alleged virus?
  • Have antiretroviral (ARV) drugs been proven to be effective?
  • Does an HIV diagnosis and a low CD4 count predict that one will progress to death without the use of toxic ARVs to drugs to slow down the progression of this alleged deadly virus?

Similar issues are being explored in the current debates on SARS-CoV-2.

(Below you can find more detailed information about the film, and the HIV/Aids blog posts extend some of the discussions and provide further citations.)

You can view Between the bands with Russian subtitles. My deep gratitude to Dr Irina Sazonova, who translated the subtitles into Russian. Перевод на русский язык сделан доктором Ириной Сазоновой.

You can also view Between the bands with German subtitles. Much appreciation to Anne Sono who translated the subtitles into German.

In this supplementary video to Between the bands, attorney and former magistrate, Anthony Brink, provides a broad history of the rollout of antiretrovirals in South Africa, highlighting some of the safety issues. To access his extensive work on the subject, visit the Treatment Information Group website.

Historical context

At the 13th International Aids Conference, held in Durban in 2000, while former South African President Thabo Mbeki was making the opening address, many people walked out, “both because of what the President said and what he did not say.”

What Mbeki said:

“Let me tell you a story that the World Health Organisation told the world in 1995. […] The world’s biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill-health and suffering across the globe is listed almost at the end of the International Classification of Diseases. It is given the code Z59.5 – extreme poverty.All the scientific texts we have cited assert that there are many conditions that cause changes to the immune system, including malnutrition and various tropical diseases, themselves a manifestation and consequence of poverty and underdevelopment. To our knowledge, no serious scientist has or would question these known and provable scientific truths.Unfortunately for us, and the scientists, the omnipotent apparatus denounces these views as being non-conformist and therefore totally unacceptable. It condemns them as belonging to a school of thought categorised as “dissident” and genocidal. They must therefore be suppressed.This must be done, so they say, to save us, the Africans, from the HIV/AIDS pandemic and, according to them, the sole cause of immune deficiency, HIV.”

Mbeki, T et al.  Castro Hlongwane, Caravans, Cats, Geese, Foot & Mouth and Statistics: HIV/AIDS and the Struggle for the Humanisation of the African. March 2002

What Mbeki did not say:

A single causative agent was causing the syndrome Aids.

Through Anthony Brink, a South African lawyer and magistrate, Mbeki became aware of the work of the Perth Group (more on them later), and other dissident scientists, doctors and researchers (often referred to by the pejorative term “denialists”) and the contestations regarding:

  • the science underpinning the theory that causes HIV and Aids, and more specifically,
  • isolation of the alleged virus and the (un)reliability of the HIV tests,
  • the safety and efficacy of antiretrovirals, as well as
  • the epidemiological representation.

The year 2000 was climatic, when Mbeki convened a Presidential Aids Advisory Panel (PAAP), comprised of invited doctors and scientists from around world, who held opposing views regarding HIV/Aids. This panel met twice in the months leading up to the first international Aids conference to be held in South Africa in July.

These events happened against a backdrop of shocking news reports, of the staggering increase in the mortality rate from the mid-1990s, notably among the sexually active, and particularly in woman – an increase attributed to the impact of HIV. The modelled projections fuelled fear of a decimated population within a decade, if swift action wasn’t taken, and coupled with photographic and video reportage of dying people, helped to entrench the consensus view that HIV was a deadly virus that was causing Aids, which was invariably fatal unless treated with very toxic antiretrovirals.

Yet behind the scenes there was disagreement among the statistical experts regarding whether the mortality rate increase reflected a real rise in deaths or reflected improvements in death registration, which is measured as an estimate of what percentage of actual deaths have been registered, known as completion of death registration (CDR). A confounding contingent factor is that testing for HIV in South Africa, which started taking off in the mid-1990s, coincided with the implementation of a range of successful initiatives by the government (from around 1997) to increase the CDR from a relatively low completion rate. The “homelands”, which were designated under Apartheid, were integrated back into South Africa and a more decentralised registration system was introduced, especially in rural areas, to make registering deaths much easier. The Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Actuarial Society of South Africa (ASSA) asserted the increase was largely due to HIV and AIDS but Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) calculated that improvements in CDR could account for most of the increase in death.

While some aspects of these debates were ventilated in the public arena, particularly around the turn of the millennium, in the years that followed, a consensus view that the debates were settled quickly developed, which increasingly limited any scientific dissent or debate.

The Aids epidemic was a key post-apartheid crisis that needed to be addressed and, arguably, anti-Apartheid activism was transposed onto the war against Aids, which largely manifested as a struggle for equitable access to treatment, particularly for those who could least afford it. Mbeki, and other “denialists” were perceived as obstructing the process of providing “life-saving” drugs to those who tested positive and for mothers so they wouldn’t pass on the virus to their children.

Thus, against the backdrop of projections of a devastated population, Mbeki’s government was forced, by a court order, to abandon the proposed 18-month UN-sanctioned pilot programme, and to expedite the availability of antiretrovirals AZT and Nevirapine for prevention of mother to child transmission. Some years later, in 2004, the government was also pushed, on threat of legal action, to fast track making antiretrovirals available in the public health system. By 2006, the overall mortality rate had stopped its upward trajectory and this was attributed to the antiretroviral treatment programme, further cementing the consensus view.

Yet critical analysis of the issues relating to the alleged isolation of the virus and the problems with testing, as well as the statistical picture, have continued, with negligible engagement from the orthodox scientific establishment.

Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and Valendar Turner of the Perth Group have been critically analysing the scientific basis of whether HIV has been proven to exist and whether HIV causes Aids, since the first papers that claimed to show proof of isolation of a new virus were published in the early 1980s. Papadopulos-Eleopulos and Turner, as well as Brink, who became a member of the Perth Group. attended Mbeki’s PAAP, where Papadopulos-Eleopulos presented on the issues regarding isolation. And although it was agreed upon at PAAP to redo the steps of isolation – the cornerstone of the theory that HIV exists and causes Aids – to date this has not been done.

The Perth Group’s papers and monographs can be found on their website and Brent Leung’s excellent film, The Emperor’s New Virus (ENV) features Papadopulos-Eleopulos and Turner systematically explaining all the issues with the alleged isolation of the virus, with further details in the linked commentary. In House of Numbers, a companion film to ENV, Leung interviews many doctors and scientists, including Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the co-Nobel prize winners for the discovery of HIV, which reveals many inconsistencies regarding testing regimens.

For a concise summary of the key issues, it is worth reading the late Christine Johnson’s interview with Papadopulos-Eleopulos, who passed away in the first half of 2022, titled “There Is No HIV Virus”, from an 1997 edition of Continuum (a journal that became defunct a few years later), which is archived here.

Anthony Brink has written books, letters and pamphlets that: exhaustively document the toxicity of the preliminary antiretroviral regimens, and issues related to their efficacy; recount the opposition the South Africa government faced to their cautionary approach of rolling out these drugs, and detail his public challenges to scientists and scientific bodies, such as the former Medicines Control Council, since replaced by the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA). He has also presented the Perth Group’s analysis on the issue of isolation at conferences and heads the Treatment Information Group (TIG). All his work can be accessed on the TIG website.

TIG General Secretary Chris Rawlins, who has a background in statistical analysis, and Rodney Richards, who was formerly  involved in developing HIV tests, have written critical papers on the epidemiological representation, and in BtB, Rawlins is extensively interviewed and Richards’ work is explored. Rawlins’ papers are all available on the TIG website and a November 2005 paper of Richards, Increases in reported death in South Africa from 1997 to 2002: evidence for increasing mortality or improving death registration? papers can be found here.

The film also tells the story of Onnie Phuthe, a woman from Botswana who tested positive for HIV and was put onto antiretrovirals. After suffering severe ill effects she began to do some independent research, which made her realise that many of her symptoms were directly caused by the antiretrovirals (ARVs). Eventually she reached a point where she decided to go off the treatment and over several years she slowly regained her health. Several other vocal Aids dissidents also started questioning the consensus model after having conflicting results on HIV tests or after experiencing severe side effects on ARVs.

About the making of this film

I made this film as a deliverable for a degree at a South African university, where I was accepted as a Master’s student on the basis of a preliminary proposal: to trace whether the experiments agreed upon at the PAAP sessions had been carried out or not. While registered as a student, I went through around eight processes of reworking proposals, which were all ultimately rejected, over several years, during which time I made this film and wrote a dissertation, with minimal and episodic supervision. When time allows I intend to adapt some of this work into blog posts.