An important factor with respect to the current situation in South Africa is the polarizing effect of the open skepticism of former president Thabo Mbeki. A well-educated man, he developed doubts about HIV/AIDS more than a dozen years ago. Upon finding out, attorney Anthony Brink and journalist Anita Allen supplied Mbeki not only with Duesberg's challenge to that hypothesis, but also the "Perth Group's" [E. Papadopoulos-Eleopoulos et al] exposes of the flaws in the HIV tests, biochemist David Rasnick's description of the toxicity of antiretroviral medication and historian Charles Geshekter's account of the pattern of African epidemics and the masking by AIDS of their continuity and causation.
As a result, Mbeki became the first head of state to publicly question the HIV orthodoxy, and that produced a worldwide uproar, with all the namecalling you see now. With Durban hosting the 2000 international AIDS conference, Mbeki invited both sides to attend and thrash out the issues in public debates. As to be expected, the proponents would have nothing to do with the questioners and instead put forth the Durban Declaration raising their hypothesis to religious dogma.
I followed the conference in my local paper Newsday, which sent an editor to cover the event. I don't have any links and even forgot who the editor was, but the articles should be found in Newsday's archives. Throughout the conference, the editor was a true believer, breathlessly hailing the Durban Declaration as a triumphal advance in the fight against AIDS. But all good things must come to an end, and in filing his final dispatches, the editor, I suppose out of professional ethics, produced a shocker. He reported the observations of the proprietors of Durban's escort agencies and massage parlors that the volume of their businesses had doubled during the conference. Who'da thunk it that pharmaceutical salesmen, morality missionaries and public health bureaucrats were such party animals? And right there in the very bowels of the dreaded pandemic, no less. This confirmed my own skepticism, as it sure looked like the revelers knew something they were hiding from the public.
The keepers of the faith have never forgiven President Mbeki, even as he occasionally backtracked and sidestepped. Meanwhile, there have been subsequent AIDS conferences, some of them held in some notorious fleshpots, but I know of no reporters who ever asked the purveyors of adult entertainment at the conference sites, "How's business?"
Have you found any evidence of TAC funding by the mining companies themselves? And, as I mentioned before, pharma company Boehringer-Ingelheim in particular?
I wonder how this is cheaper than providing clean clothing, dust-free living conditions and safe working environments for the workers. But then I didn't take into account how just throwing workers away, tossing them on the garbage pile, eliminates the cost of slower, older workers and any kind of retirement benefits.
Brilliant. No silicosis deaths, because they all die of something else first.
Ironic that nobody cares about the exploited workers of big corporations, but hsi is the type of upside-down world the fraud and complicity of HIV/AIDS has created...
Good job following the money to get at the reality. Keep up the good work !
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