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-Nine of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘The CDC’s Response To AIDS – Part Three, I will focus on the official explanations provided as to why publication of the most important report into GRID / AIDS thus far, the ‘KSOI Task Force’s Case-Control Study’, was delayed for twenty months, by which time it had become almost an irrelevance as the ‘retroviral cause of AIDS’ snowball got bigger and bigger, and the AIDS net had widened to include hemophiliacs, Haitians, heroin addicts, transfusion cases and victims in Europe and Africa.
In ‘And The Band Played On’, Randy Shilts says that the raw data compiled between October and December 1981 had to be ‘neatly analyzed, with all the scientific ratios that the general public doesn’t understand,’ or else the ‘conclusions would never stand up in a court of science. To utter them publicly would threaten the CDC’s credibility.’ On p119, Shilts writes the ‘case-control study was hopelessly mired because they didn’t have the staff and money to tabulate the questionnaires.’
Harold Jaffe, the CDC’s lead on the report stated that ‘It took a long time to analyze the case control study, partly because we didn't have a full-time statistician working with us. We had to borrow one from the epidemiology program office, who is, I think, a very bright statistician, but a bit difficult to work with. So he basically said, Well, give us the data and I'll give you the answer, but leave me alone. So that was kind of the way it worked. He was doing what at the time were fairly sophisticated multivariable analyses.’ He also said ‘that really the differences between the cases and the controls involved lifestyle. The cases were much more sexually active, they were much more sort of out there, they were going to bathhouses all the time, they were using a lot more drugs. Men who were very sexually active were using a lot of drugs.’
Harry Haverkos had his say on the delay in 2016: ‘The problem was, yes, I was very interested in the analysis, and so were Harold and a guy named [Dr.] Keewhan Choi, the statistician who was assigned to work with us. I worked with them for several months, but they did not agree on so many things, and I just saw myself as getting in the way. Harold, I think, argued as a biologist. He was saying, all these variables are confounded with each other; numbers of partners, rates of STDs, drug use. We need to group these variables to lead us to an infectious agent. Is it a toxin? Keewhan Choi was kind of rigid--I see him as a statistician, and so I described them as two artists. Harold's an impressionist, and Keewhan Choi is a photographer. Choi basically was going to look at the data, and let the numbers speak. They couldn't agree, and so they grouped them different ways. The analysis took forever because they couldn't agree on how to do it. We didn't publish that work until October of '83 (actually August). We had preliminary data by December of '81. By December we had the first printouts, percentages that did this or that. But I don't think the results--I don't think we announced the results to the general public because Harold and Keewhan couldn't agree on the results. I don't know what happened.’
Despite being one of the most eagerly awaited reports in the CDC’s history, with 1,000s pf lives depending upon it, the KSOI task force’s case study report really died a death. Shilts doesn’t mention it much after the early part of 1982. This reflects the fact that ‘lifestyle as the cause’ was replaced by ‘virus as the cause’ from the middle of 1982 onwards. The kicking of the report into the long grass cost 1,000s of lives. If CMV infection had been given the prominence it deserved, hundreds of thousands of gay men would have been told that even kissing was a risk because one of the most effective means of CMV transmission is saliva exchange.
Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-Nine of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Thirty of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will look at the event which convinced me that the CDC’s James Curran was guilty of serious malpractice.
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’
https://globalhealthchronicles.org/items/show/5385 Harold Jaffe
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