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.
Before I analyze the CDC’s KSOI Task Force’s Case-Control Study, in Episode Twenty-Six of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘Arguments Against CMV Being The Cause Of AIDS’ I will focus on the arguments put forward by opponents of my ‘CMV causes AIDS’ hypothesis, or, more accurately, my ‘CMV helps cause, and exploits, AIDS.’ All the way through my investigation into AIDS I kept looking for any piece of evidence that would derail my hypothesis. That never happened, in fact, the more I researched CMV the more I became convinced I was right. However, there were several explanations mooted as to why CMV could not cause AIDS. I recently found a paper from November 1982, ‘The Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome: Current Status’, which at first states many of the reasons why CMV could be the cause of AIDS, reasons I’ve explored in previous episodes:
- Previous or current CMV infection is a unifying presence in all the CDC case reports
- Homosexual males are at greater risk for developing CMV infections than heterosexual males due to exposure to infected semen in which CMV persists for up to 18 months
- Acute CMV infection has been shown to be associated with a similar pattern of T-cell imbalance as seen in patients with AIDS, this T-cell imbalance has been documented to last for up to ten months
- CMV has been shown in clinical studies of renal transplant recipients to be associated with a high rate of superinfection, especially PCP pneumonia
- CMV may predispose at a local level, along with systemic T-cell imbalance, to superinfecting pneumonia
- Increasing evidence has supported the association of CMV and Kaposi's sarcoma, an association proposed by Giraldo in 1972 when a CMV strain was isolated from a KS tissue biopsy in culture
The author’s counter arguments were as follows
- the CMV isolated by the CDC does not appear to represent a new, more virulent strain. To which I would respond that there did not have to be a new, more virulent strain to cause this damage. According to ‘And The Band Played On’ p132/133, blood sampling of IVDUs by the CDC revealed that although many were infected with CMV (87%), the viral strains were all different. Shilts, who was the CDC’s mouthpiece, states that the lack of a new virulent strain lent weight to the Don Francis ‘new pathogen’ hypothesis and that the CMV causes AIDS hypothesis was now eliminated. This was total moonshine, and shows a lack of knowledge about, and an underestimation of, CMV.
- Patients who are immunosuppressed for other reasons (e.g., steroids) also have a high incidence of CMV infection; thus the immunosuppression seen in these patients may have another etiology which secondarily allows for CMV reactivation. My response to this is that it is a nonsensical argument. AIDS is a syndrome caused by immunosuppression, hence the name. CMV can cause immunosuppression and exploit it too.
- CMV is not a new infectious agent and homosexuality as a lifestyle has been around for centuries, so this hypothesis does not explain why AIDS is apparently new. This was the worst argument of all, to which I respond with the tobacco/lung cancer analogy. The Spanish introduced tobacco to Europeans in about 1528 and for 400 years lung cancer was still rare. Once industrial-scale production and consumption of cigarettes occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century, lung cancer cases rose exponentially around the planet. Michael Callen, an honest, heroic and realistic sexually active gay male, who was right about what was causing AIDS from day one, stated he ‘felt part of the most extraordinary sexual experiment in human history. Never before in human history had so many men had so much sex with so many other men who were having sex.’ Just like lung cancer and cigarettes, AIDS, as Callen knew very well, was the result of a changed lifestyle, not the product of a new infectious agent. The clustering of early AIDS cases in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, was no coincidence, it was due to the fact that Manhattan and the Castro were gay ghettoes where large numbers of homosexuals moved into or visited each year, and the bathhouses found in these areas were amplification systems for the immunodeficiency syndrome.
As JR Thompson, a mathematical modeler and someone whose work I will study in depth in a future episode, stated in the 1980s:
‘An argument is made that, so far from being a disease which is unstoppable in its epidemic consequences, AIDS has produced an epidemic, which owes its present virulence to sociological configurations of rather recent existence. Instead of a vigorous attack on the transmission chain of the epidemic, the emphasis of public health policy has been on finding a vaccine and/or a cure of the disease which produces the epidemic. By means of a simple model, it is argued that by simply closing businesses catering to high contact rate anal sex, e.g sexually oriented bathhouses, the American public health establishment might have avoided most of the tragic consequences of the present epidemic.’
Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-Six of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Twenty-Seven of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will do a deep dive into the CDC’s KSOI Task Force Case-Control study and uncover clear evidence of conspiracy and cover up. 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’
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2596573/pdf/yjbm00111-0058.pdf ‘The Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome: Current Status’
https://cascades.substack.com/publish/posts My Substack site, ‘A Dive Into Darkness’
Michael Callen 4 mins 20 – 4 mins 40.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82150696.pdf AIDS: THE MISMANAGEMENT OF AN EPIDEMIC, JR Thompson
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