On 28 October 1999, after reading an early draft of
High Court advocate Anthony Brink’s book
Debating AZT: Mbeki and the AIDS drug controversy
(PDF, 1.2 MB),
then subtitled ‘Questions of safety and utility’,
South African President Thabo Mbeki
ordered an enquiry
into the safety of the AIDS drug AZT
(PDF, 188 KB). ‘“That,” Mbeki
told me, “is what sparked it off.”’ – Mark Gevisser,
Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred
(Jonathan Ball, 2007).
Rasperries and plaudits.
Introducing AZT: ‘A
world of antiretroviral experience’
cites research findings published after Debating AZT went to print in November 2000, and liberally quotes
South Africa’s leading AIDS experts, AIDS activists
and AIDS journalists on AZT to enable you to form
your own opinion after hearing both sides
(PDF, 1 MB).
For an overview, see
Why do President Mbeki
and Dr Tshabalala-Msimang warn against the use of
ARV drugs like AZT?
(PDF, 98 KB).
(Hi res version for printing in ‘Quick links’)
Sure, AZT is extraordinarily toxic, but does it have
any countervailing value as a medicine? In other
words, do its benefits outweigh its risks? Or to put
it more directly: is AZT really antiretroviral? An
Open Letter to
GlaxoSmithKline SA CEO John Kearney
on 26 April 2001 addresses this question
(PDF, 51 KB),
conveying the gist of
A Critical Analysis of
the Pharmacology of AZT and its Use in AIDS
(PDF, 425 KB)
by Australian physicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos
and her medical colleagues, published in June 1999
as a special supplement to Current Medical Research
and Opinion. It’s summed up in an unpublished
letter
(PDF, 96 KB).
The AZT triphosphorylation problem examined in this
paper has been discussed by other scientists, such
as
Lavie
and colleagues of the Max Plank Institute
(PDF, 451 KB)
and by
Dr Dennis Blakeslee,
a medical correspondent for the Journal of the
American Medical Association
(PDF, 783 KB).
Is AZT a DNA chain
terminator
as GlaxoSmithKline and even the drug’s critics
Professor Peter Duesberg and Dr David Rasnick claim
it is? Or is it extremely toxic for entirely
different reasons?
GlaxoSmithKline hired its fantastically
richly paid
consultant and grant recipient
(PDF, 114 KB)
Professor David Back at the University of Liverpool
to claim in an
expert report
filed in the High Court in South Africa that AZT is
triphosphorylated just like the company says
(PDF, 1 MB).
Papadopulos-Eleopulos and colleagues examined and
rebutted
his false claims
(PDF, 42 KB).
In April 2001 the Medicines Control Council (MCC)
conditionally approved nevirapine, another
exceptionally toxic drug,
for experimental use to prevent mother to child
transmission of HIV. The Treatment Action Campaign
successfully applied to court to force the
government to abandon its UN-AIDS-sanctioned pilot
study and to provide the drug in the maternity wards
of all government hospitals across the country
without more ado.
The trouble with
nevirapine
is a comprehensive exposé of the whole shambles
(PDF, 1 MB).
Between June 2004 and January 2005 we addressed ten
letters to the MCC, commencing with an enquiry about
the status of its review of its special registration
of nevirapine for administration to HIV-positive
women in labour and their newborn babies, which it
had announced in May 2002 after a licensing
application for similar special registration had
been thrown out two months earlier by the American
Food and Drug Administration .
We also provided the MCC with
Papadopulos-Eleopulos’s et al. seminal critiques of
AZT as an AIDS drug
(PDF, 416 KB),
and
AZT and nevirapine as
perinatal anti-HIV prophylactics
(PDF, 2.03 MB),
along with an easy-to-understand
slideshow
critically examining the notion that nevirapine
prevents mother to child transmission of HIV
(PDF, 1.23 MB).
The MCC’s response to our first letter was to issue
a recommendation that nevirapine administration to
pregnant women and their babies should henceforth
always be combined with AZT. Our further
correspondence criticized this decision in the light
of the many published studies showing how AZT harms
unborn and newly born children. On receiving our
submissions, individual members of the MCC told
Health Minister Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang that
they’d been ‘amazed’ by our ‘detailed research’ of
which they had been ‘unaware’. Well, clearly. We can
reveal that Dr Tshabalala-Msimang read all our
correspondence to the MCC with great interest, as
did President Mbeki.
Poisoning our Children:
AZT and nevirapine in pregnancy
collates our letters in a book
(PDF, 1.19 MB),
including: the MCC’s ultimate
non-response
to our submissions
(PDF, 177 KB);
an afterword reviewing the latest research reports
on how ARV drugs given during pregnancy stunt infant
body and head growth and damage bone marrow causing
reduced blood cell production in childhood; and how
these drugs are causing brain damage to South
African children, crippling them mentally and
physically.
A leaflet
Why do Zackie Achmat,
Nathan Geffen and Mark Heywood want pregnant African
women and their babies to be given AZT? What AZT
does to unborn and newly born children
gives an overview of this horror
(PDF, 76 KB).
(Hi res version for printing in ‘Quick links’)
Inventing AZT
is the scoop story told to Brink by Professor
Richard Beltz, the scientist who first synthesized
AZT in 1961 – as an experimental cell-poison to kill
human cells
(PDF, 128 KB).
It relates how Brink changed Beltz’s mind about the
wisdom of giving AZT to pregnant women by drawing
his attention to what it does to their babies.
Licensing AZT
(PDF, 178 KB)
describes the fraudulent circumstances in which AZT
came to be licensed by the Food and Drug
Administration as an AIDS drug in the US – with
everyone just following suit around the world, no
questions asked, our own MCC included.
Here are the
front cover
(PDF, 988 KB),
back-cover
blurb
(PDF, 15 KB),
and
prospectus
(PDF, 411 KB)
for Brink’s magnum opus in the works, ‘Just say yes,
Mr President’: Mbeki and AIDS.
What killed Makgatho
Mandela?:
a press release
(PDF, 58 KB).
On 26 November 2004 the Mail&Guardian published an
article in its special World AIDS Day supplement
entitled
Why should South
Africans continue to be poisoned with AZT?
(PDF, 167 KB),
in which we stated matter-of-factly:
• Hundreds of studies have found that AZT is
profoundly toxic to all cells of the human body, and
particularly to the blood cells of our immune
system.
• Numerous studies have found that children exposed
to AZT in the womb suffer brain damage, neurological
disorders, paralysis, spasticity, mental
retardation, epilepsy, other serious diseases and
early death.
The Treatment Action Campaign complained to the
Advertising Standards Authority about these
statements, as if they were untrue. The ASA declined
to consider the merits of our
submission
(PDF, 238 KB),
saying it wanted one ‘credible independent expert’
to substantiate our statements, and not the hundreds
we cited in two lever-arch files sent up, and
banned us
from ever repeating them
(PDF, 1.4 MB).
We then provided a single
expert verification
statement by Professor Sam Mhlongo
(PDF, 72 KB),
and followed up with a
query
(PDF, 94 KB).
When the ASA rejected Professor Mhlongo’s supporting
statement on spurious grounds, we
asked
Medicines Control Council chairman Professor Peter
Eagles to confirm to the ASA that our statements are
perfectly true
(PDF, 17 KB),
and
requested
the same of MCC Registrar Dr Humphrey Zokufa
(PDF, 24 KB)
– but no joy from either.
On 11 November 2005 the Mail&Guardian published
Brink’s
letter
(edited a bit) about the M&G’s editorial policy to
promote AZT and the harm it does
(PDF, 20 KB).
Professor Cyril Karabus of the Red Cross Children’s
Hospital in Cape Town and a schoolboy called Alex
Myers responded the following week by
writing in
to say how dishonest and dangerous he is
(PDF, 121 KB).
Brink
replied
to Karabus directly
(PDF, 48 KB).
A
letter
to Constitutional Law Professor Pierre de Vos, then
at the University of the Western Cape,
pulling his leg
(PDF, 36 KB).
The Judith Miller Award
for AIDS Journalism in South Africa
was won in 2005 by Kerry Cullinan
(PDF, 19 KB).
A
letter
(PDF, 90KB)
to Dr Olive Shisana, CEO of the Human Sciences
Research Council and lead author of the
South African National
HIV Prevalence, HIV Incidence, Behaviour and
Communication Survey, 2005.
This
reminder
to Dr Shisana posed more rude questions
(PDF, 30 KB).
In a
letter
to Professor Anthon Heyns, CEO of the South African
National Blood Service, Brink spelt out the logic of
the HSRC’s ‘HIV Prevalence’ report for policy at his
blood bank
(PDF, 64KB).
The day after it was sent, Heyns published an
article
in JAMA, the world’s leading medical journal,
claiming that yes, segregationist policy at the
blood bank was the right way to go after all; why,
he’d proven it scientifically. Unlike Brink in his
ironic letter, the professor wasn’t joking, he
really meant it.
The Treatment Action Campaign arranged a
hit
(PDF, 96KB)
on Brink in the Sunday Times on 5 February 2006, to
which he
replied
(PDF, 11KB).
These are the commercial
plugs
referred to in his letter
(PDF, 18KB).
An
edited version of the
letter
was published two weeks later, leaving out the
embarrassing ‘product placement’ story
(PDF, 93KB).
Brink posed some
questions
to AIDS journalist Tamar Kahn
(PDF, 44 KB)
about an
exciting article
she wrote
(PDF, 162 KB).
And here’s a
letter
to Dr Francois Venter, president of the Southern
African HIV/AIDS Clinicians Society, suggesting an
exciting new way to fight AIDS
(PDF, 31 KB).
The Treatment Action Campaign had a go in the Cape
High Court at shutting us up and shutting us down.
Brink’s
answering affidavit
(PDF, 514 KB)
blew the TAC, its drugs and its virus out the sky
(filleted for relevance you can read the TAC’s
founding affidavits hyperlinked to it). Professor
Mhlongo filed a confirming
affidavit
(PDF, 31 KB).
Three days after seeing our
Heads of Argument
(PDF, 15 KB),
the TAC
dropped its case
against us and ran for the hills
(PDF, 202 KB).
On 4 January 2007 we
served
(PDF, 719KB)
a 59-page
draft bill of indictment
(PDF, 137 KB)
at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, in
which we applied for the prosecution of TAC leader
Zackie Achmat on a charge of genocide for his direct
criminal role in the deaths of thousands of South
Africans from ARV poisoning. It caused quite a fuss.
Was it serious? Was it a joke? Was it a serious
joke? You decide. (See ‘On Satire’, a letter to
Zapiro below. And these spoofs in the Onion:
here
and
here.)
We wrote a letter to M&G CEO Trevor Ncube entitled
Media Complicity in
Genocide: the Case of the Mail&Guardian
(PDF, 93 KB)
and served a copy on the ICC with
supporting annexures
(PDF, 23 KB)
under this
covering letter
(PDF, 36 KB).
The letter was an appeal to conscience but
apparently no one was home.
Brink attended a high-powered AIDS conference in
Bonn, Germany, in May 2007 and
wrote
(PDF, 46 KB)
to the organizers afterwards, his head spinning from
the experience.
In October 2007, on the 50th anniversary of the
thalidomide disaster, we released a
Press Statement
on AZT in pregnancy: another tragedy of countless
children killed and maimed foretold
(PDF, 45KB).
We followed up with a
letter
to Dr Tshabalala-Msimang about it but too late
(PDF, 133 KB).
In Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo
Mbeki, Ronald Suresh Roberts claimed that ‘Thabo
Mbeki is not now, nor has he ever been, an AIDS
dissident.’ Brink’s book
Lying and Thieving: The
fraudulent scholarship of Ronald Suresh Roberts
took him to task.
We
responded
to a request for an interview by Litsa Delli,
television producer for MEGA-TV, Athens, Greece
(PDF, 171 KB);
these are the
hyperlinks
in the letter.
Politicsweb published
Martin Weinel, Thabo
Mbeki and AZT: Bogus scholarship in the Age of AIDS:
A case study
on 27 March 2009. Here’s our
email
to
his university about it on 2 April, two answers, and
our reply.
A
letter
to Essop Pahad, editor of the
Thinker.
A
letter
to psychology lecturer Desmond Painter concerning
his review of 'The trouble with nevirapine' in Die Burger.
A
reply
to Rev Julia Denny-Dimitriou’s go at Brink in her
gushing review in the Witness
of big-time AIDS journalist
Kerry Cullinan’s
ridiculous book
The Virus, Vitamins and Vegetables. The reply was
published on 18 May 2009.
Where
are all the dead Zulus?,
a letter to the editor of the Witness – rejected for
publication because ‘the debate has run its course’,
the deputy editor said, which is to say is over.
On
Satire,
a letter to Zapiro, cartoonist for the
Mail & Guardian
and other newspapers
(PDF, 288 KB).
A letter to former Chief Justice Arthur
Chaskalson
about the nevirapine case in the Constitutional
Court
(PDF, 115 KB).
A critical analysis of
child HIV prevalence as presented in the South
African national HIV prevalence survey of 2008 (HSRC
June 2009)
by Chris Rawlins
(PDF, 43 KB).
Deconstructing Duesberg:
A Critique of ‘HIV-AIDS hypothesis out of touch with
South African AIDS – A new perspective’
by Claus Jensen
(PDF, 44 KB).
Transparency and
Conservative Values in Chigwedere et al.: The 6.7
Years ARV Treatment Benefit Estimate in Chigwedere
et al. ‘Estimating the Lost Benefits of
Antiretroviral Drug Use in South Africa’
by Claus Jensen
(PDF, 36 KB).
A critical analysis of
the underlying assumptions used by Chigwedere et al
in their article ‘Estimating the lost benefits of
antiretroviral drug use in South Africa’ in
JAIDS, December 2008
by Chris Rawlins
(PDF, 73 KB).
A
reply
to the TAC’s claim in a
press release
published on Politicsweb on 6 October 2010, ‘Donor
shortfall will cost lives’, that unless Western
governments give the pharmaceutical industry
billions more for its ARV drugs, millions of poor
will die.
Mbeki and AIDS in Frank
Chikane’s memoirs.
On 18 December 2009 the
Californian Office of
Environmental Health Hazard Assessment
(‘OEHHA’) added AZT to its
list of substances
known to cause cancer and reproductive toxicity
(PDF, 500 KB, excerpts).
The drug was first
prioritized as being ‘of
High Carcinogenicity Concern’ in October
2003
(PDF, 68 KB)
and placed on the OEHHA’s
draft priority list
that month
(PDF, 288 KB).
AIDS activists
tried preventing
their favourite drug AZT’s classification as a known
carcinogen on 3 December 2003
(PDF, 499 KB),
but unsuccessfully, because on 12 June 2009, after a
comprehensive review of the research literature, the
OEHHA invited final
comments before listing it as such
(PDF, 77 KB).
The AIDS activists
tried preventing this
again
(PDF, 117 KB),
but again unsuccessfully, and on 18 December 2009
the OEHHA
listed AZT as a known
carcinogen
(PDF, 591 KB).
An HIV positive pilot was denied the renewal of his
flying license for refusing to swallow an ARV
cocktail that made him sick. Brink drew his
application
for the decision to be reviewed and set aside. Being
unanswerable it wasn’t answered, but it got
dismissed anyway; see why.
In February 2008 Rhodes University pharmacology
tutor Roy Jobson raised the subject of
antiretroviral drugs on his ‘Thought Leader’ blog
hosted by the Mail & Guardian. Brink and others,
including some doctors and another pharmacologist,
responded.
Current Medical Research
and Opinion and
‘medical publication ethics’:
The curious case of the Perth Group’s missing AZT
pharmacology paper.
Chris Rawlins performs a
comprehensive study
(PDF, 120 KB) of the statistical data published by leading
government and research bodies since 1996, and
demonstrates conclusively that there's no evidence
for a new viral cause of death in South Africa. The
irreconcilable contradictions within and between the
data published by these bodies, the lack of any
correlation between the estimates and the official
registered mortality figures, the mathematical
impossibility of reconciling the age and gender
estimates, and the failure of all the hypothetical
model predictions all show that the various tests
claimed to detect a transmittable virus have no
scientific validity and reliability and are
diagnostically useless as a basis for prescribing
chemotherapy cell poisons.
Rawlins's
letter about
this in the Mercury on 4 December 2015
(PDF, 820 KB),
with his final paragraph clipped:
'For several years I have repeatedly asked the
leading academics, like Professors Olive Shisana,
Rob Dorrington, Thomas Rehle, Debbie Bradshaw, Salim
and Quarraisha Karim, to respond to my statistical
analyses but have had no acknowledgement, let alone
a response. Mark Heywood and his supporters would
never publicly engage with those of us challenging
the scientific fraud, because they understand very
clearly that suppression of dissent is essential to
the maintenance of their careers.'
Rawlins presents a
tabular summary
(PDF, 122 KB)
of his three previous comprehensive
analyses, debunking the claims made by a Harvard
University paper published in JAIDS in December
2008; the Human Sciences Research Council’s national
survey of 2008; and the Actuarial Society of South
Africa’s 2008 model based on the Department of
Health's antenatal statistics, that causal
relationships exist between the measurement labelled
hiv and the increase in child mortality in South
Africa up to 2006, and the use of drugs labelled
antiretroviral and the decrease in child mortality
after 2006. Utilising further data from the latest
HSRC survey of 2012; the Medical Research Council
study of under-5 mortality statistics of April 2012;
and Statistics South Africa's annual mortality and
causes of death reports up to 2012, the summary
categorically demonstrates shows that there is no
causal relationship between the measurement labelled
hiv, the drugs labelled antiretroviral, and child
mortality in South Africa.
On
7 March 2016, former South African President Thabo Mbeki posted ‘A
Brief Commentary on the Question of HIV and AIDS’ on his Thabo Mbeki
Foundation website, and linked it to his Facebook page. And the next
day posted a link to TIG general secretary Chris Rawlins’s paper, ‘A
critical analysis of the underlying assumptions used by Chigwedere et
al in their article “Estimating The Lost Benefits of Antiretroviral
Drug Use in South Africa” published in JAIDS in December 2008’.
Rawlins’s followed up two days later with
The irreconcilable
contradictions between the HSRC's hiv statistics and
StatsSA's mortality data
(PDF, 10 KB).
On 14 March 2016, Mbeki posted 'Some Observations on HIV & Mortality in South Africa: 2007, 2008 & 2013'.
Mbeki's articles and the renewed controversy they caused are linked here.
