Jeffrey scratched his chin. “That’s proof? I don’t understand. Why is the vaccine trial being a huge success proof of no HIV being present at that time?”
“Ach, I keep forgetting you don’t know anything about this. It’s proof because vaccine efficacy drops off to fifty percent in humans that are immuno-compromised with HIV. If the official theory is that the gay population already had HIV simmering in it, why were the hepatitis B vaccine trials the greatest vaccine success ever recorded? Again, it’s impossible that the young men in the trial had HIV before the trials, or the vaccine wouldn’t have worked.”
Jeffrey digested that piece of simple logic with a dry swallow. An uncomfortable silence stretched between them. “But why target gays?” he asked. “I don’t get it.”
“Remember that up until the early seventies, homosexuality was listed as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, and the World Health Organization defined it as such until 1990. That’s twelve years after AIDS began appearing in the gay population. So to conservative white men, being gay was viewed as a disorder — which perfectly fit the profile of those the government liked to conduct secret experiments on. In the past, prisoners, mental patients, rural black men, retarded children, and its own military were victims of experimentation without their informed consent. Is it such a stretch that homosexuals were lumped into that category back then?”
“But what about earlier patients who died of AIDS? From the fifties or sixties?”
“Most of those have been shown to be either incorrect false positives on tissue samples, or contamination. False positives abound in AIDS research, more than in any other field. Flu shot recipients were testing positive, for Christ’s sake. So how definitive do you think those tests actually are?”
Schmidt paused, as if expecting an answer, but Jeffrey couldn’t think of a thing to say, and the old man continued.
“Probably the most famous, the 1959 tissue sample from Africa, is now conveniently exhausted after being touted as ‘proof’ HIV was there for a long time, so can’t be retested. You just have to believe that it wasn’t yet another false positive, or contamination — something that is also remarkably common in HIV research, and which has affected almost all the American labs. Frankly, I believe the remainder of that handful of cases were carefully manufactured to advance the lie that it’s an old disease. Think of the stakes. Do you really believe that those behind this sort of a cover-up wouldn’t create conveniently discovered tissue samples to test positive in order to advance their agenda? Were you born yesterday? Come on. I already told you the New York stored blood supplies that were tested from pre-1977 were all negative — you can check that yourself.”
“Look, I’m from San Francisco. AIDS is discussed a lot there. There’s evidence — at least, I’m pretty sure there is — that it originated in Africa. Now you’re trying to tell me—”
“Africa is blamed for being the birthplace of HIV, mainly because ‘similar’ viruses were found there, and because simian immunodeficiency virus — SIV — is found in African apes and monkeys — but that’s proof of nothing. Did you know that originally, Africa was implicated because Kaposi’s sarcoma, the cancer that is synonymous with AIDS, is fairly common there? But then, in the mid-eighties, a study found that most of the African Kaposi’s victims tested negative for HIV. It concluded that there was no link between the African Kaposi’s and the same disease appearing opportunistically in Americans.”
“So you’re saying the two weren’t linked?”
Schmidt shook his head. “Simply put, it was unrelated to AIDS. And of course, there’s the massively inconvenient problem of the timeline — Montagnier, the discoverer of the virus, admits that there was no AIDS epidemic in Africa until well after it was well underway in North America — and that the African virus is a different strain. But Africa was already the media scapegoat, primarily because of the debunked green monkey theory that was advanced after the Kaposi’s theory, and nobody remembers they were both a hundred percent wrong. They just know the AIDS epidemic started in Africa, even if it didn’t.”
“Then you’re saying that they’re confusing the origin of the simian virus with the origin of HIV.”
“Correct. I’m saying that the predecessor virus might be SIV from apes; but the origin of the AIDS epidemic isn’t some natural cross-species jumping in Africa. It couldn’t be. AIDS didn’t appear there until after a completely different strain than the African strain appeared in the U.S. and the AIDS epidemic was already well underway.”
He leaned forward and fixed Jeffrey with a penetrating stare. “Do you not understand the significance of that? It’s like blaming a disease that appears in New York in January on something that appears in Africa in late November of the following year — and is completely different in terms of the tissue type it targets. All it takes to debunk that theory is a working knowledge of a calendar. Look, if HIV causes AIDS, which nobody is disputing, why did the epidemic wait to start in Africa until after it was a wildfire in the U.S.?”
“But I read somewhere that they tested the blood supplies in Africa from older samples, and found HIV.”
“Again, false positives. Most of those were retested in Israel and England, and found to have zero HIV. It was malaria and other immune system-destroying diseases that caused the false results. Look, a 1986 study of geriatric Ugandans in nursing homes at the epicenter of the African AIDS epidemic found not one HIV positive, when the general population had a fifteen percent infection rate, so the theory that it had been there for decades or centuries is simply false, predicated on assumptions and tainted lab samples. It couldn’t have happened the way the theories say, and yet they’re parroted as if undisputed fact.”
Jeffrey nodded slowly. “So in Africa, the vaccines were given to everyone, not just one minority.”
“Exactly. And the African strain targets mucous membranes, not rectal tissue. So you have supposedly the same virus appearing after widespread vaccination programs, but which amazingly targets different cell types. I never understood why the medical community never questioned why it was a gay disease on one continent and heterosexual on another. Even better, nobody wants to explore how that happened. It’s one of many scientific taboos in a discipline that isn’t supposed to have any.”
“I always assumed it was lifestyle or something.”
“Lifestyle? Humans have been having sex for millions of years. Why within twenty-four months of the first cases being diagnosed in the U.S. did AIDS suddenly explode in Africa and Haiti? Let’s see. Big vaccination programs in Africa, including fourteen thousand Haitians there who subsequently went back home, big vaccination trials to only gay white men in the U.S., and then bam, there’s an epidemic of a ‘new,’ and yet paradoxically, if you believe the disinformation, a simultaneously ‘old’ disease.”
Schmidt took a sip from a glass of tepid water on the low coffee table. “Look, the vaccine connection in Africa is so obvious to many that some of the accepted theories grudgingly concede that the smallpox vaccine programs might have played a role in the spread… but only because of dirty needles. The only problem there is that there’s no evidence of that. It’s another convenient invention. With AIDS there are so many flights of fancy touted as official explanations, and when one’s debunked, the experts and the media all switch to another, equally absurd theory, absent any evidence.”