Debunking the Perth Group's Arguments

WIP

!!! Currently I'm focused on things unrelated to HIV/AIDS (From May to October). So this will have to wait. !!!

But still feel free to leave comments.

We will hereby debunk the arguments of the Perth Group regarding the existence of HIV and the reliability of the HIV tests.

The intention here is to collect all the scientific arguments against them, and to present how ridiculously weak the arguments of the Perth Group are. I decided to do this myself because there is no response to the Perth Group within the scientific literature or anywhere else, probably because it's not considered necessary since it's rather obvious that they can't be right. But I think it would still be cool to show everybody how wrong they are, so that we can prevent more people getting fooled by their pseudoscience. If one is not an expert on the issue it's very easy to confuse pseudoscience with real science.

I encourage everybody to contribute to this important project.

Please feel free to contact me through my email address and/or leave highly detailed scientific comments. I'll also be getting in touch with some people to get their opinions. After I can gather enough material I'll prepare a compact document where all the scientific arguments against the Perth Group can easily be found and then I'll "donate" it to AIDSTruth.org

Here's a slightly edited version of what I received from someone who uses the pseudonym "Phillip Duke" and claims to be a virologist for starters:

No virus has ever been isolated by the exact criteria invented by the Perth group. The 1970 papers the Perth group cites as the basis of their method actually describe the inability of density gradient centrifugation to separate the mixture of 3 viruses that the authors were working with. It was not until new methods became available, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that such mixtures of viruses were separated, and the exact nature of the oncoviruses and their helper viruses (the third virus in the mix was the packaging of one oncovirus genome and one helper genome in a single particle) was worked out.

Lentiviruses have a cone-shaped core, it is not a sphere. So lentiviruses look different when viewed from the side, than they do when viewed looing down the axis of the cone. Thus, no preparation of lentiviruses will every show all particles looking identical by electron microscopy. Thus the Perth group added this as one of their criteria, to make it impossible to use their criteria for isolating a lentivirus.
...
Infectious molecular clones of HIV-1, HIV-2 and dozens of other lentiviruses have in fact been made and studied in detail. The methods used to make infectious molecular clones of HIV-1 are the same as those used to make infectious molecular clones of any other retrovirus. There are many different methods, all of which work but some of which are easier than others.

The first infectious molecular clones of HIV-1 were in fact made by using density gradient centrifugation as one of the steps in the process.

Right now I'm continuing an email exchange with "Duke". I'll update this here later with more information.

I'll spend some more time collecting arguments from other people and from the BMJ debate and the like, and then proceed to put together the document I'm talking about. All contributions are extremely welcome.

This will hopefully silence the denialists who deny all the evidence for HIV's existence, or at least stop more people from believing in their lies.

* ADDITION: Recently this video appeared on youtube, partially due to my efforts:



See here for more on that: Perth PR

NOTICE: This blog post has been deliberately formulated in a pro-HIV way to make the process more attractive for potential contributors. I would've preferred to be able to formulate all that more objectively, but I don't think it would've worked that way, unfortunately. And I'm serious about the potential cooperation with AIDSTruth.org.

UPDATE: It didn't really work this way either. The orthodoxy followers are stubborn at not even attempting to debunk the arguments of the Perth Group. Mostly they just insist that it's all scientifically worthless without giving any real reasons. I find this a little annoying, and this sort of behavior was what made me an AIDS skeptic in the first place. (The video above can be considered an exception, but it's also not satisfying. In fact it's very dissatisfying.)