From AIDS to COVID - A History of Dissidence

Interview with Kevin Corbett, PhD

May 29, 2026

Michael Wallach, director of The Viral Delusion, has conducted this remarkable interview with Kevin Corbett, PhD — a pivotal AIDS dissident from the 1980s who worked on the UK's first commissioned AIDS ward at the Middlesex Hospital, completed doctoral research on HIV testing, and was later one of the very first to publicly oppose the 2020 lockdowns, co-authoring the first scientific paper calling for retraction of the claim that the SARS-CoV-2 genome had been properly sequenced. I am delighted at the opportunity to publish it here on Lies are Unbekoming. What follows is a forty-year arc told from inside the wards: the "prognostic pessimism" that functioned as blanket assisted-dying protocol; the antibody tests that never had a reference standard; Mbeki's AIDS Advisory Panel and the CDC's hurried damage control; the Perth Group, Duesberg, the bitter factional splits; and the through-line connecting all of it to COVID. If you don't know this history, Kevin's account is one of the clearest places to begin.

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Below is an interview with Kevin Corbett, PhD, a pivotal AIDS dissident in the 1980s and afterward, who was also one of the very first to speak publicly against the lockdowns in 2020 - co-publishing the first scientific article calling for the retraction of the claim that the “SARS-Cov 2” genome had been properly sequenced and could be tested for with PCR.

Kevin is one of the many extraordinary scientists we interviewed in The Viral Delusion Episode Five — AIDS: The Deadly Deception, which is now available in its entirety for free. The episode is one of very few documentary re-tellings of the AIDS dissident movement and the scientific fraud at the heart of the claim that “HIV” was the cause of AIDS. If you don’t know this history, it’s a remarkable story that has been suppressed for nearly three decades now that forever broke open my entire understanding of science, medicine, politics, and culture.

— Michael Wallach, Director, The Viral Delusion

1. Kevin, thanks so much for participating in this. What’s your connection to AIDS? How did you become involved in speaking publicly about AIDS?

My initial connection to AIDS was through hearing about it whilst volunteering in 1982 for a helpline for lesbian, gay and bisexual people. There were many reports of gay men without symptoms being secretly tested for HTLV-III (the precursor acronym for ‘HIV’) antibodies without their knowledge. At that time the mainstream media and health services cast gay men as ‘suspects’, ‘infected’ or ‘diseased’. I attended the public meeting where the first UK AIDS support group was founded.

I also learned about AIDS when starting nurse training in 1983. On qualifying in 1986 as a registered nurse (RN) a male gay patient awaiting a test result for HTLVIII antibodies told me how professional staff isolated him. In 1986 my ward’s first AIDS patient arrived accompanied by staff in full HAZMAT-like suites.

During the 1980s the AIDS field offered great professional and scientific challenges. In 1987 I began working as a RN on the UK’s first commissioned AIDS ward at The Middlesex Hospital, London. Patients were often admitted seriously ill due to multiple morbidities. I saw how prognostic pessimism predominated with many patients treated under what were in effect blanket ‘assisted dying’ protocols.

This formative experience led me into a clinical career up until the mid-1990s, working in various clinical and academic leadership roles, during which time I was researching the technologies associated with AIDS, including tests for ‘HIV antibodies’. My doctoral research featured different viewpoints on AIDS science including dissident AIDS discourses all of which were instrumental in my subsequent professional development.

2. What’s the connection between AIDS and the global health dialogue today?

The ‘global health dialogue’ of corporate pharmaceutical companies abetted by national health agencies (e.g. CDSC / UK PHLS) created the medical tests and the toxic AIDS pharmaceuticals from April 1984 when AIDS was first said to be caused by a retrovirus.

AIDS is a real set of different medical conditions first reported in 1981 pre-dating the 1984 retroviral causation claim. Many AIDS conditions are caused by exposures due to human behaviour(s).

Gay / bisexual men were societally targeted due to the sensationalised levels of drug abuse / sexual promiscuity (no different from heterosexuals), which combined with the social / theological opprobrium levied against male-male sex, resulted in fulminating levels of projected hate which in turn precipitated social shaming.

After 1984, the orthodox notion that AIDS was due to a ‘virus’ was propagated to open the floodgates for lucrative medical tests and toxic drugs.

Journalists like Celia Farber (NYC) and Joan Shenton (UK), community volunteers like Tom DiFerdinando (NYC) and Michael Ellner (NYC), as well as gay community voices like John Lauritsen (USA), Ian Young (Canada), Jody Wells and Huw Christie (the latter two of Continuum Magazine, UK), critically opposed this orthodoxy.

Together these voices advertised the work of AIDS dissenting scientists like the virologist Peter Duesberg (USA) (who contested the notion of a retrovirus causing AIDS), biochemist David Rasnick (USA) and the self-styled ‘Perth Group’ of biomedical scientists (led by the late biophysicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos who contested the virology of ‘HIV’ isolation’).

In 1991 the USA-based group ‘Rethinking AIDS’ was formed around the work of Peter Duesberg. It was subsequently led by David Crowe (Canada). Rethinking AIDS was a broad coalition of AIDS dissidents (controversially omitting The Perth Group) and included non-scientists like African historian Charles Gershekter (USA) and journalists (e.g. Celia Farber; Joan Shenton).

The AIDS dissidents mostly produced literature critiques of mainstream science due to limited laboratory resource / expertise for undertaking programmes of experimental work to counter the science outputs compounded by the more relatively well-funded orthodoxy. Mainstream journal publication was almost wholly closed to any authors disputing the orthodoxy that HIV was an isolated virus and caused AIDS. However there were some journals whose gatekeeping were not so watertight and articles contesting the orthodoxy were published. For example, the 1993 paper in BioTechnology by Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al, Is a Positive Western Blot Proof of HIV Infection? Non-mainstream journals were open to the AIDS dissidents.

Overall, the AIDS dissidents morphed into two mutually-opposed groupings over the existence of ‘HIV’ with subsequent (bitter) internecine debates. This ‘two-tier’ grouping was essentially replicated on a far bigger scale with ‘SARS-CoV-2’: a small number of dissenting scientists opposed the isolation science of so-called ‘SARS-CoV-2’ but had limited access to the necessary funds or laboratory expertise to contest the viral isolation science; a relatively larger number of scientists accepted the viral isolation science of ‘SARS-CoV-2’ whilst hotly contesting the associated ‘vaccines’ and other medico-pharmaceutical interventions.

The ‘global health dialogue’ has historically replicated ‘AIDS’ with ‘COVID’. A new ‘viral’ syndrome was propounded by the resource-rich science mainstream abetted and / or seeded by corporate interests / national health agencies (Centre for Disease Surveillance and Control) which was subsequently refuted non-experimentally by relatively resource-poor scientists and their supporters.

3. We see and hear a lot about risk-calculation and infectious disease. A lot of pressure to get tested, get vaccinated, for your own health and those around you? You said some really eloquent things about dialogue around risk-calculation in the documentary. Can you elaborate on that?

The mainstream (‘HIV’) AIDS risk calculation depends upon so-called epidemiological group profiles which are based on various so-called self-reported risk behaviours. For example, in the 1980s these were cited as unprotected sexual (mainly anal) intercourse, intravenous injecting and receipt of poorly screened blood products. The mainstream’s AIDS/virus hypothesis side-stepped personal behavioural choices by positing that a ‘virus’ caused AIDS (and not as a result of the decisions people make with what to do sexually or otherwise with their own bodies).

Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos’ 1988 critique of the AIDS/virus hypothesis in her Medical Hypotheses paper entitled ‘Reappraisal of Aids - Is the Oxidation Induced by the Risk Factors the Primary Cause?’ showed how semen is an oxidative agent producing immunosuppression. She said: “The vagina is lined by thick stratified squamous epithelium which makes ulceration and penetration of the semen into the vascular lamina unlikely. In contrast the semen in the rectum is separated from blood vessels and lymphatics by a single layer of cells which is easily penetrated and ulcerated during anal intercourse.” This significant point, in a relatively obscure journal, was of enormous import for those (especially gay men) calculating their risks associated with anal intercourse. This message was ignored by a mainstream then blinded in 1988 by gay identity politics and captured by the virus hypothesis as the cause of AIDS.

Unprotected sexual (mainly anal) intercourse was being plugged as allowing exposure to what was an un-isolated virus ignoring the known oxidative and immunosuppressive effects of sperm. What Papadopulos-Eleopulos also said in her 1988 paper was prophetic: “It must be emphasised that unlike other viruses HTLV-III/LAV [‘HIV’] has never been isolated as an independent stable particle. By isolation of the virus, in fact, it is meant transient detection in the cell culture of: viral antigens, viral anti-bodies, the enzyme reverse transcriptase (RT) and of virus like particles budding from the cellular membrane into the extracellular space. In the vast majority of cases isolation is synonymous with RT detection.” Fast-forward to 2020 and this sums up the whole of the testing edifice enacted later on for ‘SARS-CoV-2’ where no stable particle was ever identified just genetic fragments said to have viral provenance.

4. You became something of an expert on the validity of testing for AIDS, and on the social and health impact that testing had, can you tell us about that?

I became aware of the impact of HIV testing through my volunteer, professional and research experience. For example in the early 1980s testing for AIDS induced great fear because of the associations of imminent death and profound social stigma. Gay men were being publicly humiliated, shamed and blamed for causing AIDS.

Testing has been normalised since the 1980s as more generally testing for all sorts of phenomena has expanded. HIV testing has created a ‘viral’ culture amongst gay men with the prevalence of post-, and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PEP/PrEP) (parallels heterosexual women medicated for pregnancy prevention).

These pharmaceuticals are marketed with a promise of ‘zero’ or ‘limited’ side effects which of course is vastly untrue. Populations are leveraged towards drug compliance using fear inducing messages and with spurious notions of duty and or shame.

5. We are inundated with disease messaging today, how can a normal person without a background in all of this sort through this messaging?

When you say a ‘normal person’, I take it to mean the ‘average Joe’ with little or no medical/professional/mainstream scientific expertise. If one has a critical outlook, the time available, and if one can carefully apply oneself then one can sift through the messaging to unravel biases and vested interests by which these messages are created, sustained and promulgated.

This applies equally to unravelling the biases in any sources – even so-called ‘alternative’ sources.

It can be an onerous and exhausting process for some whilst for others it isn’t so difficult.

People are often bamboozled by the status and so-called authority of those doing the messaging such that they are encouraged to ‘outsource’ their health: transfer the responsibility of their bodily sovereignty to so-called experts and other presumed authorities. Mainstream disease messaging is directly linked to corporate pharmaceutical interests and the bio-warfare industry, both of which are instrumental in creating fear-based phenomena like ‘disease outbreaks’ and ‘pandemics’. Some people are more targeted than others playing on mechanisms of shame, duty and fear of public exposure so as to encourage compliance to undertake medical tests, treatments, prophylactics and more generally consume an array of ever-changing drug regimens.

6. What’s the simplest way to explain to someone who doesn’t know the history what we’ve learned from the AIDS movement and the dissident AIDS movement?

Some people may come to see through the falsehoods of any orthodoxy, especially if they experience the caveats for themselves. For example those taking HIV antiretroviral (ARV) drugs are told they should expect their T cell counts to ‘go up’ and their viral load counts to ‘come down’; but this ‘pattern’ is often not experienced (the ‘pattern’ is an artefact of the test technology). If this anticipated pattern is not experienced, it can lead people to become disenchanted and non-compliant, possibly leading to an awakening of critical insight into the whole ARV / HIV testing experience. This was one of the areas covered in my own research. There are many HIV patients who are highly critical of the ARVs even though they ‘believe’ they embody a ‘virus’.

Dissenting scientists can always find some way to publish and advertise their findings even though they may not have the finance and resources to successfully counter the AIDS mainstream. The dissident AIDS movement has not overturned the mainstream AIDS orthodoxy yet it has influenced both non-scientists and scientists. To overturn the mainstream orthodoxy would require financial and laboratory resources in excess of those possessed by individual dissidents or even groups of dissidents.

Working outside the mainstream has both advantages and disadvantages. One must expect profound fractures and internecine arguments to permeate any dissident movement. For example, those (following Duesberg) think ‘HIV’ isolation is proven but that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Others (following The Perth Group) consider that ‘HIV’ has not been proven to be a stable particle (isolation unproven). Although each approach may be seen as lying within the ‘dissident AIDS movement’, each approach implies quite a different strategy for not only to dealing with AIDS (and those affected) but also for the epistemology of the field of Virology. The Perth Group approach non-experimentally critiqued the epistemology of HIV virology (citing the ‘traditional’ Pasteur rules for isolating a retrovirus) and implied that AIDS experts should trial treatments to combat oxidative stress. The Duesberg approach was less radical concerning the epistemology of ‘HIV’ virology yet was radically opposed to the orthodox ARV treatments for HIV.

7. Has AIDS treatment grown at all from the dissident movement? Did it have an impact? Is it better today, worse?

Reviewing citations in bibliographic scientific databases may show there has been little if any formal impact of AIDS dissidence on mainstream AIDS science and treatments. In that sense, the AIDS dissident movement could be judged by some as a failure. However on the margins there are suggestions that the mainstream has benefited from some dissident work e.g. The Perth Group website suggests some of their work citing oxidative stress has tacitly influenced the mainstream. Social scientists have cited the work of AIDS science dissidents but often from a mainstream standpoint.

There may has been more impact of AIDS dissidence on the ‘lay public’ (including HIV patients) as the various discourses emanating from AIDS dissidents do feature within both qualitative research samples and non-science publications. This is why there have been significant voices calling for censorship of AIDS dissidence as patients start questioning their orthodox treatments, exercise their right to withdraw consent and so take themselves out of routinized mainstream care.

There is also a lack of solidarity demonstrable historically within the AIDS dissenting factions. In 2006 two members of The Perth Group (Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and Val Turner) were legally instructed as expert witnesses for the defence in the 2006 Australian trial of Andre Chad Parenzee, a man accused and later convicted of wilful sexual transmission of HIV to three woman. David Crowe, the leader of the biggest AIDS dissident group ‘Rethinking AIDS’ interfered with the defence counsel.

The two Perth Group members were instructed for the defence based upon their work showing HIV was never isolated. Crowe reportedly wished to move the defence towards dropping Papadopulos-Eleopulos and Turner for a virus-espousing expert witness whom Crowe thought had greater credibility and chance of acquittal. This situation caused huge political fallout within the AIDS dissident movement after the judge dismissed The Perth Group following Crowe’s interference with the defence counsel.

More recently, not all those who were AIDS dissidents were COVID dissidents; and vice-versa. One dissenting faction does not translate into another. Many COVID ‘anti-vaxxers’ were not ‘anti-virus’. A noted AIDS dissident even publicly admitted to taking a COVID ‘vaccination’ whilst being on the board of a group supposedly mandated to “unmask COVID” thereby showing an illogical scientific stance while publicly espousing the opposite.

The socio-political disputes over AIDS and AIDS dissidence are fraught. They are peppered with challenge, and counter challenge, fractures and cleavages of enormous proportions even from within the lines of the dissenting factions themselves.

8. You saw first-hand what a positive test did to people on the AIDS wards — the death pathway, the Kübler-Ross counselling. Is there a patient or moment you still carry with you that captures what was being done to people in the name of treatment?

Historically, seriously ill AIDS patients with multiple morbidities were treated under a medical regime governed by what could only be described as ‘prognostic pessimism’: many patients were expected to die; and nurses were advised ahead of any actual physiological deterioration, and especially when undertaking invasive procedures (like bronchoscopy), not to institute resuscitation procedures.

Death was expected, anticipated and in many cases, I would argue, precipitated through this form of prognostic pessimism.

One episode concerned a patient diagnosed with Pneumocystis pneumonia who was prescribed 15mg of diamorphine to be given intravenously in one bolus dose (see Continuum Magazine Vol 5 (1), p.24). The patient was unresponsive to the protocol drugs, had a high respiratory rate and the medical team decided not to admit him to intensive care for intubation and ventilation.

(Few AIDS patients in my experience were ever offered such potentially life-saving treatments; although in the COVID era such treatments were turned into a death trap because they were instituted unnecessarily.)

As the nurse in charge, I refused to administer the prescribed dose but reduced the dose to 2.5 mg administered subcutaneously over a more protracted period of time than the normal bolus dose would take. I subsequently crossed off that particular medical prescription (and later faced disciplinary action for so doing). However, in the meantime a change in antibiotics was required and without the prescribed overdose of diamorphine the patient actually survived. In several weeks he was discharged home and lived for four more years. This case served to show us all how profound was the medical pessimism over AIDS such that it potentially hastened death.

This sort of ‘treatment strategy’ was in effect a form of a blanket ‘assisted dying’ protocol. Many patients’ notes were labelled ‘not for resuscitation’ using a colour code in the form of a black spot placed by a senior doctor on the front of their hardcopy medical file, ahead of any patient or their family member ever first being so notified, or any legal consent ever first being obtained.

This was taking place in a local hospital setting and in other hospitals different patterns of practice occurred. However, from my experience I doubt that there was that much variance in the practice at that time (1987) between other hospitals and the one within which I was working.

9. The dissident movement had serious scientists — Duesberg, the Perth Group, Mullis — and yet most people have never heard of them. What happened to the dissenters, and how closely does it resemble what happened to dissenting voices during COVID?

What happened to the AIDS dissenters was they separated into two factional strands: a small number of dissenting scientists followed The Perth Group who contested the ‘HIV’ isolation science and had limited access to the necessary funds or laboratory expertise to undertake the necessary programmes of experimental work to fully expose the work of Montagnier and Gallo. A relatively larger number of scientists followed Peter Duesberg who accepted Montagnier / Gallo’s HIV isolation science yet hotly contested the claim that ‘HIV’ caused AIDS and refuted the actions of the associated pharmaceutical interventions (‘antiretrovirals’).

Similarly these two historical factional approaches were subsequently replicated with ‘COVID’/‘SARS-CoV-2’. So there is an arguable similarity between what happened to the dissenters in the critical epistemology of both AIDS and COVID.

10. “AIDS in Africa” remains one of the great moral arguments for the whole HIV apparatus. From your work, what does an AIDS diagnosis in Africa actually represent on the ground, and how should we read today’s global health machinery — Gates, GAVI, the WHO — in light of that?

Within the HIV / AIDS paradigm there were many reports in the 1980s medical literature concerning the non-specificity / hyper sensitivity of the HIV antibody tests and how these were applied in Africa thereby yielding greater numbers of positive results. There were clinical definitions of AIDS (e.g. Bangui definition) applied to patients which did not require any antibody tests and which undoubtedly yielded greater numbers of positive results in terms of the epidemiology statistics. Reference testing may not have been routinely undertaken which also likely yielded greater numbers of positive results.

All of these case expanding anomalies occurred within the orthodox frame of reference. It was difficult to understand what any AIDS diagnosis actually represented because of the wide differential encompassed by the definitions and the tests. The global health machinery in the 1980s worked to exacerbate and sensationalise any reportage of AIDS in Africa as part of the post-colonial approach to the African continent that aimed to reign in the drug markets of African countries for exploitation by western pharmaceutical cartels.

The efforts of President Thabo Mbeki in 2000 to publicly unpick the orthodox AIDS science in South Africa were initially ignored until he announced his AIDS Advisory Panel to which he publicly appointed notable dissident AIDS scientists like Peter Duesberg, David Rasnick, Harvey Bialy, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Val Turner and others. This radical development was embarrassing for the global health machinery. Mbeki’s actions precipitated the hurried involvement of the CDC who quickly reacted by dispatching a last minute delegation led by Helen Gayle in order to try to influence the proceedings in favour of the orthodoxy and the drug cartels.

Today’s global health machinery has learned from this global embarrassment by moving from being reactive to proactively constructing ‘pandemics’. It helped formulate and roll out the global COVID panic as well as directly deterring any nation states who attempted dissention.

11. The HIV tests have never been validated against HIV itself — the inserts admit there’s no reference standard. Can you walk us through what “isolation” is supposed to mean, what the Perth Group showed, and why this isn’t a technicality but the foundation collapsing?

The following is my own summary of what retroviral isolation is supposed to mean. Retroviral isolation is a laboratory-based set of physical and chemical procedures. It begins with a human cellular sample which contains genetic material. The sample is then crushed into a liquid form, filtered and spun within a centrifuge in order to purify the specimen. Retroviral particles have a density of 1.16g/ml in a sucrose solution. This particular density enables such particles to be separated from other cellular material by spinning the sample in a centrifuge. Therefore the 1.16 g/ml band in the sucrose solution is extracted for purposes of electron microscopy and biochemical analysis because it is considered to contain the retroviral particles.

Electron microscopy is used to identify and confirm those particles are of identical size and shape such that their physical uniformity can be duly confirmed. The genetic composition is analysed through extraction of the genetic material from the purified particles by genetic sequencing techniques. Biochemical analysis is undertaken to confirm that the resulting genetic material is not the broken down material derived from within (endogenous to) the human cells but come from outside (exogenous to) the human cell.

It is the above steps which The Perth Group show through their non-experimental written critiques were not duly followed in the published papers by Montagnier / Gallo when claiming HIV isolation in the early 1980s. Thus the Perth Group argue that “…the HIV/AIDS experts have not proven the existence of a unique, exogenously acquired retrovirus, HIV” https://www.theperthgroup.com/whatargued.html

Please refer to the following paper for a more detailed description of retroviral isolation and The Perth Group’s analysis of the Montagnier / Gallo HIV isolation deficiencies: Papadopulos-Eleopulos, E et al. HIV – A virus like no other. Posted at the Perth Group website July 12th 2017. www.theperthgroup.com/HIV/TPGVirusLikeNoOther.pdf

12. If HIV was never properly isolated and yet became the basis for diagnosing millions, what does that tell us about how virology “discovers” viruses generally — cell cultures, PCR, consensus sequences? Is HIV a one-off fraud, or is the method itself producing these results by design?

It is the methods themselves which are producing these results by their intrinsic design. These methods over the years have become easier to perform and are more widespread than ever because of the ease of availability of genetic sequencing and ease of deployment of technics like the polymerase chain reaction. Even from within the mainstream, the story of HIV isolation tells us that modern biotechnology has redefined what it terms ‘viral isolation’ away from the application of ‘traditional’ classical methods and more towards the use of those methods which identify and utilise only amplified genetic sequences.

Most crucially Fredericks and Relman (1996, p.24) stated in their landmark publication in which they attempted to update the traditional Koch’s postulates for the 21st century:

“…with only amplified sequence available, the biological role or even existence of these inferred micro-organisms remains unclear. And the absence of a purified intact micro-organism prevents experimental reproduction of disease (Koch’s third postulate).”

So even within the orthodox mainstream, scientists question modern methods of isolating micro-organisms.

Inferences or traces of something are not the same as stable material entities.

Either something exists or it does not.

See: Fredricks, D.N., and Relman, D.A. (1996) Sequence-based identification of microbial pathogens: a reconsideration of Koch’s postulates. Clinical Microbiological Review, 9(1), 18-33. DOI: 10.1128/CMR.9.1.18