Positively False: Exposing the Myths around HIV and AIDS - 16th Anniversary Edition by Joan Shenton

Author:Joan Shenton [Shenton, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIV/AIDS
Publisher: Joan Shenton
Published: 2015-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

AZT Phase II Trials: Mortality Figures Manipulated

It is the alleged indisputable evidence of AZT’s effectiveness as reflected in the mortality figures that is always quoted as the reason why AZT ‘works’. But 30 of the group on AZT had been so badly affected by the drug that they needed blood transfusions to keep them alive by the time study was terminated. These 30 would have died from anaemia anyway because they did not have enough red cells of their own left and needed to be transfused with red cells from other donors in order to stay alive. In the placebo group there were five cases of anaemia. These could have been due to AZT because the trial had become unblinded, trial participants had had their tablets independently analysed and patients on AZT were misguidedly sharing their tablets with those who had discovered they were on placebo, thereby rendering the trial invalid.

Duesberg worked out that if you included the ‘would be’ deaths in the AZT group (in other words those individuals who suffered such severe effects from AZT that they would have died had they not been kept alive with blood transfusions), a far higher number of deaths would have featured in the group that was given AZT. Instead of one, it would have been 31 (1 plus the 30 who had needed transfusions). In the placebo group, the numbers would also have been different. Instead of 19 it would have been 24 (the original 19 plus the 5 that presumably developed AZT-induced anaemia from the drug sharing). He compared these figures statistically. Instead of only one death in the AZT group and 19 in the placebo group, the figures were now 31 and 24. ‘Now’, he said, ‘there is no longer room for celebration.’16 It is important to know that within weeks of the trial being stopped a further 10 per cent of the patients who had been on AZT, died. Lauritsen writes:

I regret not having previously characterised the AZT trials as fraudulent. I do so now. Fraudulent is by no means too strong a word to use in describing a study which was prematurely terminated for specious reasons, in which false data were deliberately retained, in which cheating was tolerated, and in which improprieties and violations of protocol were deliberately ignored. It is fraudulent to describe an unblinded study, which the AZT trials most certainly were, as being a ‘double-blind’ study, as principal investigators Margaret Fischl and Douglas Richman did in their reports in the New England Journal of Medicine. Either Fischl and Richman were unaware that the study had become hopelessly unblinded, in which case they are guilty of incompetence, or they did know and covered it up, in which case they are guilty of fraud.

If someone set out to make wine, and instead ended up with vinegar, what should he call the final product? Wine or vinegar? Obviously vinegar, because that’s what it is. Nevertheless, Fischl and Richman, and their confederates in the FDA, the NIH and

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