Questioning AIDS

Michelangelo Signorile:
Whether dissident AIDS activists Dave Pasquarelli and Michael Petrelis committed the crimes of harassment that the San Francisco DA's office alleges they did remains to be proven in court ("The Gist," 12/12). Meanwhile, defenders of official AIDS policy - including Gabriel Rotello in his recent L.A.Times editorial - are trying to blacken all disagreement on AIDS science by equating it with Pasquarelli's and Petrelis' alleged crimes against city health officials and others.

Their effort belies the facts. If Pasquarelli and Petrelis were to disappear off the planet tomorrow, the AIDS establishment would still have a growing problem with an international group of dissenting scientists, journalists, activists and patients. These people don't fit any criminal profile, and they don't use what Rotello calls "harassment and obscene threats" to get their points across. They're asking questions about nagging issues that haven't gone away. The issues include debate about San Francisco AIDS statistics that Pasquarelli and Petrelis were questioning when they were arrested in December.

AIDS dissent goes back to the early 1990s, when the international Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis first united over some common concerns. In a letter published by Science in 1995, these scientists and other experts called for - among other things - an independent audit of CDC AIDS statistics. At that early date, there was already controversy about the methodology for creating AIDS statistics, which doesn't operate off head counts. Instead, estimates are projected more or less freely. To this day, a number of scientists, investigative journalists and activists note that some so-called "AIDS statistical studies" are more like polls than peer-reviewed studies; they express the view that some statistics are hugely inflated.

The AIDS-statistics controversy is not a local San Francisco squabble. In India, at this moment, debate rages over whether HIV cases are at four million or 10 million - a big discrepancy. In a recent Rolling Stone, investigative reporter Rian Malan, originally a believer in AIDS policy, tells how he recently visited his home country, South Africa, and found himself unable to match the public-health scene he found there with WHO's "alarming" AIDS statistics on South Africa.

Why are AIDS statistics a key issue? Because "alarming" figures are used to leverage public opinion and pump ever-growing AIDS funding - including in San Francisco, where public-health officials insist that there are new "sub-Saharan" statistics for HIV infection among gay men. In other words, the folks who defend the statistics are also defending their programs, jobs, political power, etc.

But the statistics issue is only one among many, and they shouldn't be settled by political demagoguery, but by impartial examination. Congress, alarmed over growing reports that federal AIDS funds are being widely misspent, is already doing a bipartisan investigation. Democrat Max Baucus of Montana, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is one of those on point. I'd also like to see Congress scrutinize AIDS statistics. The government has regulations about how scientific research should and shouldn't be conducted. Federal money pays for many of these widely questioned statistical studies. So Congress should want to know if the feds are getting their money's worth.

Meanwhile, more and more defenders of AIDS policy are saying that AIDS dissent should be considered a crime, and prosecuted as such. I find it alarming that these people are demanding police-state solutions to scientific issues that really deserve to be handled on a less bloodthirsty level. Are the figures accurate or not?

Patricia Nell Warren, Beverly Hills, CA