Book Review of Celia Farber's Serious Adverse Events

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Amazon is taking its time with this.  They may be playing games with me again.  This important book should be read now. 

In 2023, the uncompromising truth tellers are standing tall.  Including Celia Farber on AIDS

2023 is an incredible year. As layer after layer of lie after lie are being peeled away, the uncompromising truth tellers are standing tall. The lies were pervasive, from every quarter: government, corporations, media, academia, medicine – just about every trusted institution in Western civilization.

The motivation behind the lies was generally quite simple – financial gain. Those financial gains came at the expense of common people’s financial interests, well-being, health and lives.

The truth tellers often come from unusual quarters. Today we have Naomi Wolf, fighting the covid battle as “The Valliant Fox,” who came on the scene as author of The Beauty Myth. Matt Taibbi came up through Rolling Stone magazine, writing about the giant vampire squid Goldman Sachs. And Celia Farber came up through Spin Magazine, writing about music.

All of these truth-tellers were offered rich rewards for compromising their integrity, shutting up and letting the official narrative slide by without question. Some, like Farber, have had their careers blighted, been blacklisted for their refusal to compromise their principles. Farber’s strong sense of justice can be felt in the prose of every paragraph she writes. Injustice makes her seethe.

Writing about the New York music scene, Farber was on the scene as AIDS developed in the 1980s.  This book, which came out in 2006, is a collection of articles that she had written earlier, primarily for Spin Magazine.  She talked with the prime movers from that time, such as Randy Shilts, author of the 1987 “And the Band Played on” about the political handling of the AIDS epidemic.

An AIDS victim told her exactly how it was at an AIDS conference in 1988:  "'You're an AIDS reporter?' he asked. He had a feline beauty about his face and looked right at me with green eyes, introducing himself as Michael Callen. 'I can save you a lot of time,' he said. 'There is no parallel in your culture, in straight culture, for what goes on in the fast lane of gay life today. I have AIDS. To me, it is no mystery why I am sick but rather a miracle I am still standing. By the time I was twenty-five, I figure I had had sex with 3,000 people. I had had every STD you can imagine, several times, bacterial infections, parasitic infections ... and unending rounds of antibiotics. This is not to speak of the drugs. There is no mystery here, about why we are getting sick. AIDS is a multifactorial syndrome, but straight people can't bring themselves to talk about what these factors are, and gay people don't want them to. We'll see if you're up to the task. I can tell you what you need to pursue.'  'But let me warn you, this will not be a good career move. You will have your head handed to you.'"

Farber didn’t accept the warning.  This book is about what followed.

We start with what AIDS is.  Robert Koch set forth the four conditions defining the causal agent of a disease in 1890:

1.        The microorganism must be found in abundance in all organisms suffering from the disease but should not be found in healthy organisms.

2.        The microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown in pure culture.

3.        The cultured microorganism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy organism.

4.        The microorganism must be re-isolated from the inoculated, diseased experimental host and identified as being identical to the original specific causative agent.

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus discovered by Luc Montagnier (and subsequently stolen by American Robert Gallo), said to cause AIDS, arguably does not meet any of these four conditions.   Many people have HIV and don’t suffer from AIDS.  Many people have all the symptoms of AIDS but don’t have HIV.  Gallo, Fauci et. al. thus invented different names for the same thing, AIDS with and without HIV.

The fact that researchers have never been able with certainty to isolate the virus per step (2) – see Kary Mullis below - makes (3) and (4) moot.  In a similar vein, Farber reports as I write this (March 2023) that 211 freedom of information requests for isolates of the Covid virus also have yet to identify an isolate.  Are they making that up as well?

The first three chapters of the book focus on the work of virologist Peter Duesberg, whose 1995 book [[ASIN:0201624664 Inventing the AIDS Virus]] claimed that the AIDS virus is not just elusive.  Per the Koch postulates it does not exist.  In related news, expert virologist and former Pfizer executive Michael Yeadon hypothesizes that the Covid virus likewise may not exist. 

There are other anomalies. A virus should not discriminate among classes of victims. AIDS, however, remains stubbornly confined to male homosexuals, intravenous drug users, and people like hemophiliacs who get multiple blood transfusions. Viruses characteristically multiply aggressively.  They don't lie dormant for 20 or 30 years as Gallo and Fauci would have it.

Duesberg concluded that it was properly called a syndrome, one associated with general abuse of one’s health, use of drugs such as amyl nitrate to ease anal sex, subjecting the body to foreign proteins by a blood transfusion and indiscriminate acceptance of body fluids from of large numbers of sex partners.

Duesberg ran up against many vested interests. As Callen would have predicted, they called him a homophobe for associating it with the gay lifestyle. They pointed out that whatever the cause of AIDS, safe sex would cut down on the gays' sexually transmitted diseases. More than that, the higher-ups at CDC and the FDA had financial interests in drugs such as AZT to address AIDS. Their target market was all of humanity, which is mostly heterosexual. They could not allow the message that it was mostly a gay disease.

Tony Fauci did his best to cancel Duesberg, but you can’t keep a good man down.  Forced out of AIDS research, he went on to challenge another theory, this one that cancer can be caused by viruses.  Duesberg’s position – considered somewhat extreme, but with a lot of support – is that cancer is really a type of speciation, in which cellular division goes awry creating excess chromosomes, a situation called aneuploidy.  It can appear spontaneously but often appears in reaction to toxins.  A cancer tumor consists of aberrant cells reproducing out of control.

Many in the AIDS community, especially the activist organization ACT UP, supported AZT because it was better than nothing. No other drug got approved by the FDA. AZT was all there was.

AZT's clinical trials were flawed, just like covid "vaccines." It was rushed through, just like the covid injectable biological products would be. It was political, just like covid. The tests were unblinded, just like covid.  The effects of AZT didn't last more than a few months, just like covid.

The theories about AIDS simply did not apply to Africa. Governments there are corrupt. There were strong incentives for the Africans, to attribute every death to "slims" because that's what the foreigners wanted to hear. It put money in their pockets.  Kind of like calling things covid in this era. The WHO allotted $6,000,000 for AIDS in 1992-93 in Uganda. All other diseases received only $57,000. No wonder they learn to call everything "slims."

NGOs did not understand Africa.  They were trying to get people to "use a condom every time" in rural Uganda.  Africans had many higher priorities, like eating and finding shelter. 

The prostitutes in Africa were not contracting or spreading AIDS.  One researcher identified 175 couples, one positive and one negative, all of whom had unprotected sex for 10 years to measure at what rate AIDS would transmit. There was not one transmission.

People in Africa, who had been suffering from a vast number of diseases known by other names before 1981.  Now rebaptized, they were held up as proof that the West was menaced by the threat of heterosexually transmitted AIDS.  Fear sells drugs, and the heterosexual population of the rich west was the target market. AIDS has been the most generous source of disease research funding ever.

The theory that it was sexually transmitted never held up. They (mis)used the then-new PCR technology to put it under a magnifying glass, and even at that it was illusive.  They could find little or no trace of HIV in the semen or breast milk of supposedly infected people.  As Kary Mullis, inventor of PCR told Farber, “You take next to nothing and multiply it, but there's still nothing.”

Our immune systems are pretty good at fighting off pathogens.  Overcoming natural immunity requires a quantity of organisms in excess of what is called an “Infectious dose.”  For the flu it is about 800 organisms, for gonorrhea about 1000.  Even counting the organisms requires that a researcher successfully satisfy Koch Postulate #1 – isolate the pathogen.  With HIV they could not isolate it, count it, or in most cases provide any evidence that a virus had ever been present.

Kary Mullis invented the PCR test, winning the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1993.  The process magnifies little bits of DNA, resulting in enough that it can be analyzed and identified.  It can be used for anything from which DNA can be salvaged, even including dinosaur remains.

Mullis's was a skeptic.  He approached every prominent AIDS advocate with a simple statement and a question:  "HIV is the causative agent in AIDS. Now I would like to reference that. How do we know?”  Nobody could answer. He concludes:

 “We're dealing with a bunch of witch doctors. The whole medical profession—except for the people that patch you up when you get a broken leg or you have a plumbing problem—is really f*cked. It's just a bunch of people that have become socially important and very rich by thinking about the face that they might be able to cure the diseases that actually cause people in our society to die. And they can't do sh*t about it. It's scary, that's what it is."

Farber presents the story of David Ho, who developed a drug cocktail supposed to cure AIDS by inhibiting HIV.  She writes that Ho claimed: “But a person could be HIV-infected if it touched only a trivial number of T cells – the cells that AIDS patients were deficient in. It was a crime scene with many more bodies than bullets."

On the assumption that HIV was the problem, Ho’s cocktail included protease inhibitors, which would inhibit the reproduction of HIV.  It is the same mechanism as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for covid.  However, the fact was that unlike covid, the levels of HIV were minimal in the first place, and even in theory it is not possible to reduce them to absolutely nothing.

Farber and Duesberg and others considered protease and other inhibitors nonsensical.  However, the AIDS community wanted "drugs into bodies," and this drug got a good press from the New York Times and Time magazine. The FDA was pressured to approve Ho's coctail. They did.

The protease inhibitors did appear to help some people, but they hurt more than they helped. However, people see only the bright side.

Most significantly, David Ho promoted putting healthy people on the drugs to prevent coming down with AIDS.  It would have made more sense the other way around, to treat people who work already HIV-positive and chronically ill.  A 2004 paper published in the Journal AIDS reported that all four classes of antiretrovirals, and all the 19 FDA approved antiretrovirals, had been directly or indirectly associated with life-threatening events and death. In plain English AIDS drugs caused death far more effectively than AIDS itself.  Nonetheless the AIDS magazine POC carried a great many protease inhibitor ads.

Farber concludes:  [A scientist who wishes to be anonymous] "laughs when I express alarm at this. 'My God are you naive! Everybody—not just David Ho—the reporters, the doctors, everybody is part of this system. They're all part of the same club, and they all play the same game. They all have the same, big egos.'

'And nobody—certainly not the reporters—is going to stand up and wave their finger and say, 'It is all a big horrible machine!'  You know why? Because they're all profiting from it.... Every year we go to these AIDS conferences, and all the professional AIDS-sters come in, all pumped up. And this is the moment where everybody gets blown. It's just gross.'

'Look,' he says, 'if it were not for the profit motive, there would be no incentive for drug companies to make drugs. Drugs come from drug companies. They don't come from anywhere else. It's an industry, okay? It's just another industry.'"

There had been other scandals in the drug approval process. Merck suppressed bad data for a couple of years as Vioxx killed a lot of people.  Farber concludes that for big pharma "People are expendable. It is dollars and cents.”

Back in the days of thalidomide and DES it was considered acceptable for the FDA to take years to approve a drug. ACT UP's AIDS mantra "drugs into bodies" got AZT approved very quickly with minimal testing.   ACT UP had initially been against Burroughs Wellcome because their price for AZT was so high. When the price was lowered they changed sides and became allies.

The drug companies deploy their money to co-opt people all the time. They used foster children in New York City's Incarnation Children's Center for a test of HIV-positive orphans. They forced kids to take the HIV drugs even though many violently rejected it. They would chain the kids down, force the drugs into them.  The children died and were put into a common pauper's grave. There was no follow-up or accountability.

A PCR test showed that a pregnant Joyce Ann Hafford tested positive for AIDS, despite having no symptoms. She was roped into participating in a clinical trial for a new drug.  Though she started going downhill immediately and despite her pleas, they kept her on the drug for 38 days.  She died shortly after her baby was born.

"This, then, is precisely where the ideological battle was drawn: to those who were convinced that HIV is "always fatal" AZT, even during pregnancy, was essential. But to those who question that presumption, this now standard treatment for non-symptomatic and risk-free HIV-positive patients and – and their children – came to seem almost diabolical."

Farber is quoted by Bobby Kennedy in “The Real Anthony Fauci” as having told him: 

“You have set yourself the formidable task of deconstructing him. Why is he ‘evil’? (Which he is.) It’s not because he is so ‘banal,’ so bureaucratic, so boring. That’s the drag costume. In fact, he is a revolutionary—a very dangerous one, who slipped behind the gates when nobody understood what he was bringing in. What was he bringing in? He was bringing in—as a trained Jesuit and committed Globalist—a new potion that would achieve any and all aims for Pharma and the powers he served. The potion was then known as Political Correctness—now called ‘woke.’

“Fauci switched the entire linguistic system of American science, from classical ‘speak,’ to woke ‘speak.’ He brought in Cancel Culture, essentially, before anybody could imagine what it was. It was too perverse for genuine scientists to conceive of such a thing mixing with science, they could not believe it, or grasp it. Like a rape. It was incredibly confusing. That’s what I documented, on the ground, that horror and confusion among real scientists, as American science changes so radically before their eyes, to accommodate HIV.”

Celia Farber was made to suffer for writing this book.  The book became unavailable; Sales were suppressed.   Many magazines stopped accepting her work.  Two decades later, after the big pharma bulldozer has flattened the whole world, she is getting the attention that could have alerted us in the first place.

Read it for the history, but keep in mind that Spin magazine was entertainment.  Farber's compelling writing style will captivate you from beginning to end.