Mikulas Popovic’s original typed draft of the 1984 Science paper credited with establishing HIV as the cause of AIDS contained a single sentence, in the present tense, that Robert Gallo could not allow to reach the publisher: “Despite intensive research efforts, the causative agent of AIDS has not yet been identified.” Gallo crossed it out in his own hand and replaced it with words saying precisely the opposite. The original manuscript survives because Popovic hid it with his sister in Austria to protect it from Gallo’s shredder, and it is reproduced in full in the appendix of Janine Roberts’s Fear of the Invisible (Impact Investigative Media Productions, 2009 second edition), a twelve-year documentary investigation of vaccines, virology and the AIDS thesis. Two federal investigations, the Office of Scientific Integrity and the Congressional Dingell inquiry, found the paper “conspicuously lacking in significant primary data and fraught with false and erroneous statements.” Gallo escaped criminal prosecution for fraud in the development of the HIV blood test only on a statute-of-limitations technicality. The paper was never retracted. It remains among the most cited papers in medical literature.
Roberts came to this material as an investigative journalist with a background in documentary work on human rights and the diamond industry, not as a virologist or a terrain practitioner. Her investigation began narrowly, with the brain-damaged children of the UK Measles-Rubella campaign; the 1997 National Institutes of Health emergency workshop on Simian Virus 40 pulled her into vaccine contamination a year later; the 2000 Royal Society debate on the origin of AIDS pulled her further; and the primary documents she assembled over twelve years pulled her into the whole framework. Her method throughout is documentary. When establishment scientists said one thing at a press conference and another in scientific session, she reproduced the transcripts. The FDA meeting records appear next to the FDA press releases they contradict. Popovic’s typed draft is reproduced in full at the back of the book, so that any reader can compare it, sentence by sentence, with what appeared in Science. The second edition carries a preface by Roberto Giraldo, MD, and scientific checking by Etienne de Harven, emeritus professor of pathology at the University of Toronto and one of the first scientists to micrograph a retrovirus.
The book appeared at a moment when the HIV-causes-AIDS thesis had become unfalsifiable in mainstream medicine, when antiretroviral drugs were being marketed aggressively into Sub-Saharan Africa, and when the autism debate around thimerosal and MMR was reaching its peak. Peter Duesberg, member of the US National Academy of Science and the first to sequence the genetic structure of a retrovirus, had lost his research funding for publicly questioning HIV. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the PCR technique now used to detect “viral load,” had been dismissed as fringe for stating that his invention was misused in HIV research. The 2000 Royal Society meeting had closed ranks against the polio-vaccine origin of AIDS. The 1994 Republican House had shut down the Dingell investigation into Gallo before its forty-eight scientific witnesses could testify. Robert Shope’s 1931 finding that the 1918 epidemic deaths were primarily bacterial had been forgotten. Doctors who had cured what was then called polio with intravenous ascorbic acid and heavy-metal chelation, and whose testimony to the US Congress in 1950 and 1951 is on the record, had been written out of the story. Roberts assembled the evidence that had been left behind.
The book belongs to the tradition of documentary investigations by writers whose evidence converges on terrain-compatible conclusions, alongside Whitaker on psychiatric medication and Gøtzsche on pharmaceutical corruption. The full summary walks through the 1997 NIH workshop admissions that the polio vaccine had been contaminated with SV40 throughout the years ninety-eight million Americans received it; French research showing that aluminum adjuvant crystals persist in muscle for at least eight years after vaccination; sworn 2007 courtroom testimony in Adelaide in which the prosecution’s own expert Dr David Gordon acknowledged that no virus, whether measles, mumps, polio, hepatitis or smallpox, has ever been isolated in the traditional sense of the word; the WHO’s Bangui Clinical Definition allowing African “AIDS” to be diagnosed on weight loss, fever, diarrhea and cough with no HIV test required; and a 2007 admission published in peer-reviewed literature that HIV “is fully an exosome in every sense of the word.” Matthew Gonda’s letter to Popovic of 26 March 1984 informed him that the electron micrographs Gallo intended to publish did not show HIV. The Science papers went to press four days later, with the images over Gonda’s name.
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