An HIV vaccine raises more questions than it answers

I admit for more of my adult life I was a hardcore HIV dissident than not. Only in the last few years have I "fair and balanced" my views to complement them with Western Medicine. I have not thrown the dissident baby out with the bathwater. Western Medicine is still part and parcel to our corporate establishment, which is why - shamefully - poor communities within the West and poor countries of the Third World see deaths by easily preventable means were they able to access medicines.

So I do not rejoice too quickly at the prospect of a vaccine.

Adding to this skepticism, news reports point to the uniqueness of Thai HIV. I remember on one of my many HIV tests in the 90's, the pamphleteer [since a pamphlet was the extent of their HIV education] asked me if I had had sex with any Brazilians in the prior 6 months. I scoffed, and the pamphleteer told me to my surprise Brazil has its own special HIV.

Again, should this so-called vaccine be produced, I fear the poor communities and poor countries, like Brazil and Thailand, will be left, business as usual, to die from lack of access to the modern technology of available medicines because they are poor and structurally kept poor. We see this in Africa every day while the West wrings its hands with operatic majesty.

Second, something many dissidents queried to deaf ears a generation ago was: if such a vaccine for HIV is ever successfully created and administered, the recipient will then test POSITIVE for HIV. Since, until the coming of the human immunodeficiency virus, the presence of antibodies in the body was thought to be a good sign, a sign the body had mounted a counter attack on an imbalance.

I say again: imbalance. Our bodies are full of microbes, and despite the Western fetish for sanitizing and killing 99.9% germs, we won't live and live well if such a dream came true. Thank the gods we are fundamentally backwards.

With HIV, a positive antibody was a scourge, rightly or wrongly. Will a positive result from a purported vaccine be different?

Third, as Commerce is the West's True Religion, US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher changed the rules for private capital to access medical research and profit from it. These rules were changed at the exact time HIV was "discovered." A toxic, poisonous medicine called AZT brought back from its lethal failures in the 1960's to kill - err, I mean treat - thousands of gay men, killing many. More medicines followed: arguably life-saving medicines, less toxic but not without consequences.

Today, AZT in its pure form is once again shelved until a future generation with no sense of witch doctoring will take it for baldness and/or chronic unease about a job whose wage is low and provides no health benefit.

Since, the Reagan-Thatcher reform, there is no end to the invention of Yuppie conditions for which there is a pill, if only you talk to your doctor!

I would hope that universal, single-payer health care - the public option - would wipe the grins off pharmaceutical executives, since saving lives and treating the masses will be a priority over Big Pharm's only mandate: its fealty to the True Religion, commerce. Big Pharm is not empaneled to save the poor, reach the needy, but rather to make quarterly profits for its shareholders.

You want to see a Death Panel, look to the boardrooms of the pharmaceutical industry.

HIV is a scourge, affecting hundreds of millions. I have lost dear friends and comrades from it and from our official adherence to Commerce that denied them health care and housing. HIV is also a psychological scourge, implanted by Pres. Reagan's deafening silence while hundreds died, and pinning a truly scarlet letter on the breast of many warriors, adult and child (Ryan White's name flows like a song from our lips today, but who remembers when that child was hounded from his school?!)

A vaccine for HIV? I sincerely hope we can treat all preventable illness and launch investigations to prevent the mysterious ones, like Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer's, ALS, ... and breast cancer in women. But I believe as a socialist the first step to this is a vaccine for modern capitalism.

- This essay is dedicated to Martin Llambelis (Baba Funke), who would have celebrated a birthday today.

For more information:
Dr. Peter Duesberg's site and his book INVENTING THE AIDS VIRUS
Celia Farber's SERIOUS ADVERSE EVENTS
Celia Farber's article in Harper's magazine.

HIV vaccine reduces infection [BBC] * Researchers reports AIDS vaccine success [LA Times]