Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.
In Episode Twenty-Eight of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘The CDC’s Response To AIDS – Part Two’, I will continue examining one of the key areas of my HIV/AIDS research, the area which led me eventually to write the conspiracy-thriller ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, the CDC’s response to the new immunodeficiency epidemic, especially its ‘KSOI Task Force’s Case-Control Study’.
Once Harry Haverkos established the first case definition in July 1981, over a year before KSOI / GRID became AIDS, according to Shilts in ‘And The Band Played On’ p81, the members of the Task Force agreed that what they needed was a Case-Control Study. They would match up the cases of KS and PCP pneumonia with controls who did not have the ‘disease’. ‘The differences between the cases and the controls would point the way toward what was causing the epidemic.’ What actually happened was that one of the main differences, that of the levels of CMV in cases and controls, was ignored. As the Case-Control study was going to take weeks to set up, the questionnaire totaled twenty-two pages and contained sixty-two questions, two investigators went out into the field. Their initial data was analyzed at the end of July by the only sociologist in the Task Force and expert in gay STIs Bill Darrow. He said that the ‘only thing that seemed to matter in these cases was the number of sexual partners.’ Some cases had 2,000 lifetime sexual partners. Michael Callen had had 3,000 sexual partners by the age of 26 in 1980, when he gave up sex because ‘every time he had sex he caught something’. As I said in previous episodes the best analogy to make is that of lung cancer and cigarette smoking. GRID was the product of a lifestyle. On p96, Shilts writes that by October 1981, ‘the only factors that seemed to distinguish cases from controls was the number of sexual partners, the incidence of venereal disease, and attendance at gay bath-houses.’ It took nearly two years from this date for the final report to come out, a report which confirmed these findings. What is astonishing is that Shilts states that ‘the evidence for a new and deadly (infectious) viral disease was becoming incontrovertible.’ Absolute codswallop! What was clear was that GRID patients suffered from KS but IVDU patients did not. I have discussed the reason for this before, fast-lane gays were addicted to poppers, IVDUs weren’t. The CDC’s conspiracy to cover up ‘poppers as a cause of KS’ will be explored in future episodes. By the beginning of December the data from the Case-Control study was in, but media interest, and therefore political interest, in GRID was negligible. James Curran, the head of the Task Force, was scrabbling around for funds and ever-fearful of the organization’s closure. Shilts writes that in December 1981 ‘thousands of lives depended’ upon the ‘newly completed’ Case-Control Study, those thousands would have to wait 20 months for the report to be published. However, ‘a preliminary review of the untabulated data showed one difference between the gay plague cases and the control cases - sexual activity. There was also a tendency amongst cases to use poppers and street-drugs.’ Shilts does not mention another clear difference - patients were also found to have significantly higher titers of antibody to cytomegalovirus and a higher frequency (3 times higher) of isolation of cytomegalovirus. Don’t forget I have already told you that by 1981 it was known that CMV was closely associated with PCP pneumonia, KS and toxoplasmosis, and was known to be a killer in an immunosuppressed demographic, renal transplant patients. The CDC knew all this by December 1981 but did not release the information fully to the public until August 1983.
Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-Eight of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Twenty-Nine of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will look at the excuses given to explain the delay in the publication of the Case-Control study.
Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.
A reminder that ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon and all the references/links connected with this podcast can be found at my ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ Substack page.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/0285640194 ‘And The Band Played On’
Harry Haverkos interview
https://cascades.substack.com/publish/posts My Substack site, ‘A Dive Into Darkness’
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