Here's my follow-up interview with Dr. David Rasnick. He's the famous AIDS dissident that South African president Mbeki sought out a couple of years ago to offer alternative views regarding his nation's epidemic. Rasnick and UC Berkeley retrovirologist Peter Duesberg strongly believe HIV is not the cause of the 30-some odd diseases the medical establishment define as AIDS.

I interviewed him May 7, 2002 at his East Bay home.

Gene Mahoney: Just to follow up, like I told my readers in the introduction... you've been in the news recently because... well, I'll let you explain it.

David Rasnick: Okay. First I have to tell you, I have to give a journalist praise when due. You wrote a good article.

GM: Well thank yuh very much.

DR: You were a true journalist. You actually wrote your questions, the answers, and I couldn't detect any political agenda going on anywhere. It was basically a straight interview.

GM: You've been subjected to that before? You've had interviews cut up?

DR: Oh, Lord yes! Some of my interviews I didn't even recognize. (Laughs) I've had things taken out of context, but that's just part of the game.

In December of last year, Phillip Machanick, this professor of computer science, challenged me in, I think, the South African Star newspaper to inject myself with HIV. People when they get really flustered and don't know what to do next and can't address our specific criticisms of the contagious HIV hypothesis, call Peter Duesberg and us holocaust deniers and murderers and so forth. Then the ultimate thing is to dare us to inject ourselves with HIV if we're so confident in our views and everything. And every time Peter Duesberg, or I, or anybody I know of, of the dissidents who have been challenged to do that, we always say yeah, and I have my conditions, and Peter Duesberg has his conditions, and my conditions are simple. They're simple to state, they're somewhat expensive to carry out. I say that on national or international television I will be treated with purified infectious HIV, in other words vaccine-quality HIV; such that you know what's there. The only thing is it's not attenuated, it's not dead. So Machanick challenged me to inject myself, and also Peter Duesberg and anybody else, like Sam Mhlongo, a physician in South Africa who's on Mbeki's AIDS advisory panel, in the paper. Anyway, Machanick asked me in the paper, but he didn't know I was going to respond but I always do when I get a challenge. I said, "Oh sure, here are my conditions." And my conditions are on national or international television I will be treated with purified infectious HIV, or vaccine-quality HIV, that is alive HIV. And at the same time he will begin a lifetime course of the three drug anti-HIV cocktail called HAART, or Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy.

The purpose of the study will be for several things. One is it will show my confidence in the harmlessness of HIV and it will show Machanick's confidence in his acceptance or belief in the doctors' view that the anti-HIV drugs are fairly safe, fairly harmless, and that HIV is a lot worse. In other words; what is more harmful? HIV or the anti-HIV drugs? That's the technical side of this experiment. We will see who comes down with AIDS-defining and other disease and who lives longer. Every six months we'll have an internationally televised press conference where we talk about our health and we present the arguments for and against the contagious HIV hypothesis of AIDS, until we are both dead. Now that challenge and my conditions actually work in my favor, because typically a healthy person might survive two to five years on the anti-HIV drugs. But even the HIV establishment says that a person who's HIV-positive can count on living ten years before he comes down with diarrhea or dementia or Kaposi's sarcoma or cervical cancer and dies.

So even if the HIV establishment were right, Machanick is going to have a rougher time than I will, just based on their own literature and what's known. Just by what's in the literature; the drugs are more harmful than HIV. So I'll live, as long as I'm not shot or die in a plane crash or whatever -- HIV won't have any effect on me. But Machanick will probably very soon, within days to weeks or so, start showing signs of the toxic effects of the anti-HIV drugs. If he stays on them religiously as prescribed they'll probably kill him, maybe in two years. I don't want the guy to die, but this is serious business. People bring up, "Well what about the ethical issues?" and I say, "What ethical issues?" Here you have two people, fairly knowledgeable in the area, who are volunteering for an experiment. Every vaccine, every clinical trial you have people volunteering for an experiment. They volunteer. Typically for a Phase 3 Clinical Trial you have about 1200 people volunteering for the study. They're hoping that the drug will do more good than harm, but they don't know that, that's why they're doing the clinical trial. They get placeboes and things, at least they used to. So here you have two guys volunteering for another experiment. This one is to see which is more harmful; HIV or the anti-HIV drugs. We both agreed to it; there's no ethical dilemma there. To the best of my knowledge there's no law against becoming HIV-positive, and there's certainly no law against taking the anti-HIV drugs.

So where are the ethical dilemmas? Dr. Sam Mhlongo has agreed to treat me with [HIV] and he's also agreed to prescribe HAART to Machanick or anyone else who wants to join him. So everything's covered. The only thing we need is the money to do it. The HAART would cost about $10,000 to $15,000 a year. It's not cheap. My air fare, round-trip to South Africa twice a year is $16,000. Then there's accommodations and so forth. Then when Machanick starts getting very sick and has to be hospitalized due to the toxic effects of the HAART that he's taking -- you have to be able to cover that. So it's very expensive. I estimate around $200,000 for a five-year study -- I doubt it will go that far because I think Machanick would stop taking those drugs long before then. Long before it killed him. I hope so, anyway.

GM: You've said the whole focus now of AIDS... they've pretty much given up on it in America and Europe. The AIDS establishment is pretty much just concentrating on South Africa.

DR: Africa in general. There's 650 million, I think, sub-Saharan Africans... that's probably conservative. I mean, this African thing is amazing. Americans are extremely gullible because we've been trained to be gullible by the media. In the first twenty years of AIDS, 1980 to 2000, we've gone from 400 million sub-Saharan Africans to 650 million. We've added 250 million Africans in 20 years of AIDS.  We've added the population of the United States. You can't have it both ways. You can't have AIDS devastating and depopulating Africa and at the same time it's adding the population of the U.S. during this so-called pandemic of AIDS. It doesn't make any sense. If you were to point that out to Americans they would probably scratch their heads and wonder what's going on here. How can you talk about all these millions... 20 million, 40 million, all this and that... HIV-positive people and 25 million dying and this and that... and yet the population just keeps exploding. We don't have any discussion about that in the United States because that goes against the story. And that what the AIDS establishment had to do. I like the ANC (African National Congress) word for AIDS, Inc. They call it the "Omnipotent Apparatus". I love that phrase. So AIDS has virtually disappeared in the United States and in Europe. It never was a big deal in Europe.

GM: Why is that?

DR: Because it's American made -- a red, white, and blue epidemic. Europeans didn't have the investment in it, either psychologically, intellectually, financially, culturally, politically. They didn't have the stake in it that the United States did. The U.S, invented AIDS and inflicted it upon the world, almost like McDonald's. It just never caught on with Europeans. It wasn't a thing that really grabbed them. Even though there are a lot more Europeans than there are Americans.

GM: Fifty percent more.

DR: Yeah. Yet AIDS cases in Europe never even came close to what they were in the U.S. and we still have fewer than a million AIDS cases in the United States. 775,000 I think. Total, cumulative in 22 years of AIDS. There's so few new AIDS cases in San Francisco by December 2000 that you could know them all by name. So when you have it disappearing in the United States and it never took in Europe and yet we spend over a $100 billion in American taxpayer money on AIDS, Inc. to keep it going, that's a gravy train they don't like to see go away. So what do they do? They move it east. What did Texaco do when the oil dried up in Texas? They moved east to Saudi Arabia and places like that. Well, we go to Africa and tap into that potential goldmine for AIDS tests, AIDS drugs, and so forth. Then you crack India, which has got even more people; it will probably surpass China in population in the next ten or twenty years.

GM: I've heard reports now in the media about how the epidemic is exploding in China.

DR: Oh yeah, you'll hear those things. It's a firecracker (laughs); it's not an Atomic Bomb. If you pay attention to the newspapers... it's fairly early in China and India... they haven't gotten too politically cleansed. So they actually do a little bit of straight reporting, which will probably be replaced by political reporting in the next couple of years. The straight reporting is that the AIDS problems are wherever the drug traffic is moving. India and China now have their own drug problems. That's where you see the AIDS problems. They make drugs from poppies.

GM: Generally the first interview I did with you was very well received. There was one critic who called me and said your statistics were skewed when you said we went from 10,000 chronic drug users (heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, etc.) in 1970 to 20 or 25 million in 1989. Care to elaborate?

DR: Yeah. First of all, Peter Duesberg and I reference all of our stuff. All you have to do is got to www.duesberg.com and see where we got the information. Did this person provide documentation or reference for his criticism?

GM: I just spoke briefly on the phone with him.

DR: Next time ask him where he gets his numbers from. We specifically said chronic drug users. We're not talking about casual drug users; people who smoke a joint every now and then or try cocaine off and on weekends for a year or so. Most people who use drugs, which are probably literally in the tens of millions in America, are casual drug users. What we're talking about are the chronic drug users who use these things like amphetamines, heroin, cocaine, nitrites for five to ten years every day, or almost every day -- that is what has gone up astronomically. Those chronic drug users were much, much lower. There were fewer than 10,000 in 1970. There were probably millions of people were using drugs in 1970. In 1971 and 1972 there were probably millions but different millions, and other millions stopped using, according to, I think it was the Drug Use & Abuse Network and some other things, you can look in our paper and find our sources. A lot of these people would O.D. Those are acute deaths, not chronic. But the chronic drug users who used them at a certain level and actually survived five to ten years using these serious, serious drugs (I'm not talking about alcohol or marijuana, I'm talking about heroin, cocaine, poppers, etc.) -- that shot up astronomically from fewer than 10,000 in 1970 to 20-25 million, peaking in around 1989. It's been coming down since. It's not easy to come up with these numbers because people don't admit to this stuff. We get these numbers from the federal government. What they do is base these numbers on things like hospitalization, death, drug overdoses, etc. They base it on going from a few kilograms of stuff you could put in the back of a car or an airplane on an annual basis early on to thousands of tons that are confiscated every year by the federal government, which estimates they may confiscate at most a third of what comes into the United States. So when you look at the level of drugs that are confiscated that has gone up astronomically between 1970 and 1989.

A lot of people don't have quantitative sense. They don't understand what chronic means. They think if you snort cocaine once and if you snort it continuously for five years, you should combine the two and put them in the same statistic.

GM: Where do you see this going in the next ten years?

DR: I can't see the future better than anybody else, but there's one thing I'm pretty sure about. At some point, other generations... the next generation, let's say, or twenty years from now, whatever... will know that this was all a scam and a fraud. It started out as a big mistake, it turned into a fraud. The biggest scientific medical blunder probably of all time. That will come out eventually. Certainly in my lifetime for sure. I can't say exactly when and how it will manifest itself. One reason I keep fighting the establishment is to have a record so that future generations won't think how stupid we were and we didn't know and that they're superior. I want them to look at the record and say, "These people knew it at the time. They knew it was a scandal, a fraud -- and yet all these people were buying into it. There was a massive culpability throughout institutional America, whether it was the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Health and Human Services, the executive branch of the government, congress, journalists, all the media, celebrities -- they all are culpable. They perpetuated this fraud. They protected this delusion. It's just getting worse. It's gotten so far now that it's very, very difficult for people to stop this craziness. The AIDS insanity -- so many people have built their careers and staked their reputations on it, $100 billion in just taxpayer money has been involved in it, American prestige throughout the globe -- it's just such a mess, the biggest scandal of all time; it will become understood and recognized at some point.

 

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