Aren’t they so cute when they’re young? Awwww…
Actually David Icke used to be a football division 1 goalkeeper i think in the early 80`s, then began work as a football pun befrore writing the most incredibly insane book called I think ‘The Light Experience’ in which he wrote in all seriousness that he is an angel sent to earth by god. It should be somewhere so look it up on google. Therefore anything this guy says is very interesting just to see how nutty some people can really let themselves go.
My mistake the book is actually called ‘In The Light Of Experience’.
We’ve done this two times in recent memory. I didn’t read the David Icke article specifically, but it is probably a rehash of all of the HIV/AIDS denialist stuff out there already. Unfortunately I cannot get the search function to behave correctly and I cannot find the links. Perhaps they have not finished parsing the old threads into the search engine yet.
The virusmyth guys are kind of the ringleaders of the whole thing. They have a typical conspiracy website – arguments from authority which consist mainly of out-of-context quotes, data cited which doesn’t support their hypotheses, bad studies, outdated research and old theories, bad science, and other wackiness. In at least one of those threads which I promise I will cite if the search engine behaves, a few other posters and I laid ground conditions for debate: we would only debate the papers in the scientific literature.
There are thousands of different scientific journals. One can find a voice for just about anything in the literature, and the denialist folks have published many times in many journals. Many of these are letters to the editors and reviews, but there are some primary peer-reviewed papers. Critically analyzing the data in these papers puts the nail in the coffin of the denialist argument. They make really awful logical mistakes in their reasoning: one typical example is they link HIV rates to drug infection by showing how a graph of the number of AIDS patients by year resembles a graph of the number of heroin addicts by year. Well, as most scientists (and non-scientists) can tell you, correlation is not causation. Furthermore, many curves look very similar, for instance personal computer usage.
The graph thing is only one of their logical leaps. I clearly remember a table published that was the centerpiece of one of their papers. They took 20 or so people who were HIV+ and convinced them never to take antiretrovirals, attempting to show that these people never develop AIDS. Looking at the list of clinical outcomes, well over half were either dead from AIDS, had developed AIDS, or had CD4+ counts hovering around 200 (below which one develops AIDS with an opportunistic infection). Most of the others had been diagnosed as HIV+ under 10 years before, and one doesn’t necessarily expect to see clinical manifestations in that timeline.
What no virusmyth person can ever deny is the efficacy of highly active antiretroviral therapy or HAART. This usually consists of two drugs like AZT – polymerase inhibitors, plus one of a new class of drugs called HIV protease inhibitors. This has been the standard of HIV therapy in the US since protease inhibitors hit the market in 1996. And they work incredibly well. People with full-blown AIDS get up out of their sickbeds to go to work. CD4+ counts rise from nothing to normal. HIV viral loads become undetectable. Since the protease inhibitors were specifically designed to inhibit the HIV protease, there are no other plausible mechanisms for HAART’s actions other than against HIV. Once one of them comes up with a legitimate argument, then we can start a new debate.
In short, it is crap. Don’t believe it. Wear your jimmy hat and use clean needles.
I think you’re a killer.
I think that’s probably false, but you just never know.
Therefore, off to the gas chamber with you!
AsherElite, David Icke believes that the world is controlled by the Royal family of the U.K., who he claims are not human, but a species of shape-shifting lizards. As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.
I think that should tell you something about this man’s credibility.
David Icke
David Icke is a complete joke in the UK. He gave up a successful career as a sports commentator to wear a turquoise tracksuit and claim he was the Son of God. He preached that turquose and pink were the colours of peace/love, and went on well respected talkshows where he was pretty much ridiculed. I remember that he later retracted everything, saying had made a mistake. More info on him here.
He is widely regarded as a total wacko and certainly the last person to heed when seeking medical advice. The tragedy for people like David Icke is that they may indeed stumble across genuine conspiracy theories and government-suppressed truths. But after years of crying wolf (or in this case, reptile men) they have even less chance of being believed than the the prophet Cassandra.
Even without knowing the figures that other posters have quoted, you can answer this question by using the old “chicken or the egg” trick: Which came first, AIDS or AIDS treatments?
If AIDS came first then the treatments can’t be the cause. If the treatments came first then why would anyone be taking them?
The deniers believe that illicit drug use plays a role too. That’s their chicken (or egg, I’m not sure which).
This OP is a great illustration of why critical thinking classes should be required in high school. IMHO tax money much better spent than on petty squabbles over whether or not to require Hebrew creation myth in biology class. Ugh.