How to lie, effectively

Below is a rather long excerpt from the book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, published in 2000 and written by the late Kary Mullis. He won a Nobel Prize for his work on what became known as the polymer chain reaction process, or “PCR”. I intended yesterday as I wrote about world population to start with this, but quickly realized I was trying to ride a horse in two directions at once. Only politicians can pull that off. 

I will comment after:

              Four years later “… I was working as a consultant at Specialty Labs in Santa Monica. Specialty was trying to develop a means of using PCR to detect retroviruses in the thousands of blood donations received per day by the Red Cross. I was writing a report on our progress for the project sponsor, and I began by stating, “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.

I asked a virologist at Specialty where I could find the reference for HIV being the cause of AIDS.

“You don’t need a reference,” he told me. “Everybody knows it.”

“I’d like to quote a reference.” I felt a little funny about not knowing the source of such an important discovery. Everyone else seemed to.

“Why don’t you just cite the CDC report?” he suggested, giving me a copy of the Centers for Disease Control’s periodic report on morbidity and mortality. I read it. It wasn’t a scientific article. It simply said that an organism had been identified – it did not say how. It requested that doctors report any patients showing certain symptoms and test them for antibodies to this organism. The report did not identify the original scientific work, but that didn’t surprise me. It was intended for physicians, who didn’t need to know the source of the information. Physicians assume that if the CDC was convinced, there must exist real proof somewhere that HIV was the cause of AIDS.

A proper scientific reference usually a published article in a reliable scientific magazine. These days the magazines are slick glossy paper with pictures on the front and lots of advertisements, a lot of editorial material by people who are professional journalists, and a few pictures of girls selling you things you might want to buy for your lab. The advertisers are the companies who make the things for scientists to buy and the companies who make the drugs for doctors to sell. There are no major journals without advertisements. Therefore there are no major journals without corporate connections.

Scientists submit the articles in order to report their work. Preparing articles describing their work and having them published is crucial to a scientist’s career. Without articles in major journals they will lose their rank. The articles may not be submitted until experiments supported the conclusions drawn are finished and analyzed. In primary journals, every single experimental detail has to be there either directly or by reference, so that somebody else could repeat exactly what was done and find out whether he comes out the same way in their hands. If it doesn’t somebody will report that in the conflict eventually has to be resolved so that when we go on from here, we will know where “here” is. Most reliable primary journals are refereed. After you send your article, the editor sent copies of it to several of your colleagues for review. They become the referees. The editors are paid for their work on the journal, the referees are not. But what they do gives them power, which most of them like.

I did computer searches. Neither (French virologist Luc] Montagnier, [Robert] Gallo, or anyone else had published papers describing experiments which led to the conclusion that HIV probably causes AIDS. I read the papers in Science for which they had become well known as the AIDS doctors, but all they had done was that they had found evidence of a past infection by something which was probably HIV in some AIDS patients. They found antibodies. Antibodies to viruses had always been considered evidence of past disease, not present disease. Antibodies signaled that the virus had been defeated. Patient had saved himself. There was no indication in these papers that this virus caused the disease. They didn’t show that everybody with the antibodies had the disease. In fact they found some healthy people with antibodies.

If Montagnier and Gallo hadn’t really found this evidence, why was their work published, and why had they been fighting so hard to get credit for the discovery? There had been an international incident wherein Robert Gallo of the NIH had claimed that a sample of HIV which had been sent to him by Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris had not grown and Gallo’s lab. Other samples collected by Gallo and his collaborators, from potential AIDS patients, had grown. Gallo had patented the AIDS test based on these samples, and the Pasteur Institute had sued. Pasteur eventually won, but back in 1989 it was a standoff and they were sharing the profits.

I was hesitant to write “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS” until I found published evidence that would support it. Mine was the most minimal statement possible. My grant request I wasn’t trying to say that it absolutely did cause AIDS, I was just trying to say it was likely to cause it for some known reasons. Tens of thousands of scientists and researchers were spending millions of dollars a year doing research based on this idea. The reason had to be there somewhere, otherwise these people would not have allowed the research to settle into one narrow channel investigation.

I lectured about PCR at innumerable meetings. Always there were people there talking about HIV. I asked them how it was that we knew that HIV was the cause of AIDS. Everyone said something. Everyone had the answer at home in the office or in some drawer. They all knew and would send some of the papers as soon as they got back. But I never got any papers. Nobody ever sent me news about how AIDS was caused by HIV.

I finally had the opportunity to ask Dr. Montagnier about the reference when he lectured in San Diego in a grand opening of the UCSD AIDS Research Center, which is still run by Bob Gallo’s former consort, Dr. Flossie Wong-Staal. This would be the last time I would ask my question without showing anger. In response Dr. Montagnier suggested, “Why don’t you reference the CDC report?”

“I read it,” I said, “that doesn’t really address the issue of whether or not HIV is the probable cause of AIDS, does it?”

He agreed with me it was damned irritating. If Montagnier did not know the answer, who the hell did?

Page 171 forward

An important passage above, among so many, is as follows:

If Montagnier and Gallo hadn’t really found this evidence, why was their work published, and why had they been fighting so hard to get credit for the discovery? There had been an international incident wherein Robert Gallo of the NIH had claimed that a sample of HIV which had been sent to him by Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris had not grown and Gallo’s lab. Other samples collected by Gallo and his collaborators, from potential AIDS patients, had grown. Gallo had patented the AIDS test based on these samples, and the Pasteur Institute had sued. Pasteur eventually won, but back in 1989 it was a standoff and they were sharing the profits.

(Page 117 et seq)

What I am seeing here is a primer in propaganda, known as “how to lie.” I can safely assert there was no lawsuit, and no victory of the Pasteur Institute. It was all misdirection, and Montagnier and Gallo were, apparently, willing participants. It falls under the heading “If they ask the wrong question, the answer will not matter.” Everyone was deflected from asking if there was an AIDS virus, or had it been isolated, and where was the scientific evidence? Instead, they were drawn to a fake lawsuit.

As I often say, governments don’t lie. They misdirect. It works so much better than lying!