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It is now clear that AIDS was the first attempt to convince the world that everyone was threatened by a new pandemic. It was a trial run for covid-19 – the rebranded flu.

(For the record I don’t believe that covid-19 was man-made. It is simply the ordinary flu with a marketing budget. But, as I have explained elsewhere, it suits the conspirators to encourage the myth that it came from a lab in China.)

At the time, I was allowed to write articles and make MSM broadcasts questioning the size of the threat. It was only afterwards that the suppression started. The potential impact of AIDS was wildly exaggerated by the mainstream media and by bodies such as the BMA and the RCN.

Today, the AIDS myth is kept going by describing patients in Africa who have tuberculosis as suffering from AIDS (check it out if you don’t believe me). Today, the conspirators and the CIA have weaponised my opposition to the lies about AIDS. But how many people do you know with AIDS?

This essay is taken from Vernon Coleman’s Betrayal of Trust which was first published in 1994.   A new paperback of the original edition of Betrayal of Trust is available from the bookshops on www.vernoncoleman.org and www.vernoncoleman.com

By Dr. Vernon Coleman

From the way that journalists and politicians have dealt with the AIDS story you might imagine that the virus causing this disease was a completely mystery; that it had arrived from nowhere and that doctors and scientists were now struggling, shoulder to shoulder, to find a cure. That isn’t quite true. AIDS, like so many other modern diseases, was created by man. And to medical researchers AIDS has been more of a financial bonanza than a deadly target to be eliminated.

No one is sure exactly where the virus causing AIDS came from (if, indeed, AIDS is caused by this single virus – there is, at the time of writing, considerable controversy over this though the scientific community, which has an enormous vested interest in the now traditional HIV-AIDS theory, is reluctant even to accept that AIDS may have some other cause). There are, however, several theories about the origin of AIDS and these theories all have one thing in common: they all suggest that the disease originated as a result of laboratory experiments.

Under normal, healthy, natural circumstances there are barriers which prevent the spread of viruses from one species to another. Human beings are not normally vulnerable to viruses which afflict dogs or cats, for example. But scientific researchers, deliberately transferring viruses between species, have overcome this natural safety mechanism and opened up a Pandora’s box of horror that can never be sealed again. Back in 1989, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Dr J Searle pointed out that “Viral species tend to be restricted to the host animal species which they infect” but warned that: “It would appear that the AIDS epidemic may be just one of the latest of several mammalian cross-species viral transfers triggered by the techniques of virology developed in the 20th century, which subsequently spread out of control in the new host species.”

Just when, and how, the HIV virus which causes AIDS was first installed in human beings is a mystery.

One British researcher has claimed that AIDS was introduced into the human blood pool in 1922 when at least 34 people were injected with blood from chimpanzees to see if the animal’s malarial parasites would have any effect on humans. Another 33 people received blood from this initial group and it is claimed that it was these individuals who were the first AIDS carriers.

A second possibility, reported at length in Rolling Stone magazine by writer Tom Curtis, is that the AIDS virus was injected into human patients along with the poliomyelitis vaccine. The medium that scientists used to produce the vaccine – the kidneys of monkeys caught in the wild – was found sometimes to be contaminated by monkey viruses which were then passed onto unsuspecting, innocent and usually healthy human patients. Between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s, many tens of millions of people around the world were injected with a polio vaccine that contained a monkey virus. (The virus was later claimed to make human cells prone to cancer. We’ll probably never know now whether mothers who dutifully took along their children to be vaccinated against polio were unwittingly having their children injected with cancer-inducing viruses.)

What we do know is that vaccines were administered to many people in Africa in the late 1950s. If, as has been alleged, one of the vaccines used was contaminated with an unknown monkey virus then it is, I suspect, possible that the AIDS virus may have come from that mass inoculation programme.

Sadly, I doubt if we are ever likely to know for sure whether or not the AIDS virus did originally come from a vaccination programme. Leaders of the medical establishment seem reluctant even to discuss the possibility and orthodox medical journals have dedicated little space to the study of this question. One wonders if their reluctance to investigate could be inspired by an awareness that if a link is discovered the cost to their beloved pharmaceutical industry could be unbearable; both through expensive lawsuits and through the fact that if a link is proven it might permanently frighten members of the public into refusing to accept vaccinations.

Those are by no means the only theories about how the HIV virus first came to affect human beings. But all the theories I’ve been able to find involve laboratory animals and research scientists.

Whichever animal research laboratory the AIDS virus came from there is little doubt that once AIDS had arrived on the scene the world’s pharmaceutical companies were quick to leap upon the idea of making a profit out of the disease.

It was the pharmaceutical industry, largely through its more or less total control of the medical establishment, which helped to manufacture and maintain the AIDS myth. The myth – the inaccurate assertion that AIDS was the greatest threat to mankind since the Black Death plague – began by accident, was built up for crude commercial reasons and was eventually exaggerated by pressure groups who had their own very special reasons for turning a nasty disease into a global threat. AIDS brought together several groups of people who had nothing at all in common and united them in a unique way.

In the beginning it was just a good news story: another potentially lethal disease for which there seemed to be no obvious cure available. A few well known victims – particularly film stars – gave the disease a rare glamour that enabled the feature writers to put a little spin on what was basically a rather low-key story. The drug companies quickly recognised that AIDS offered unprecedented opportunities to make money; within a short space of time, they were making millions of dollars out of selling AIDS tests and new drugs.

At the peak of the AIDS scare – in the mid-1980s – shares of companies offering AIDS-related products were rocketing skywards. In April 1987 Fortune, the American business magazine, ran a special feature entitled ‘Aids stocks worth the gamble’ in which it reported that shares in several individual companies had gone up by as much as three hundred and sixty per cent in twelve months. In the first three months of 1987, a portfolio of shares offering AIDS solutions rose by a staggering forty-one per cent.

The medical establishment stoutly supported the plague theory. In the 1980s a spokesman for the British Medical Association warned that by 1991 every family in Britain would be touched by AIDS and attacked me viciously when I quoted evidence supporting a less “scary” point of view. Other medical establishment groups jumped on the “AIDS is going to kill us all” bandwagon and the official line was defended with unprecedented ferocity. (I have fought many campaigns against the establishment but the AIDS campaign seemed to arouse particularly self-righteous, sanctimonious venom and I was mocked and vilified by many “AIDS is the modern plague” theorists.) The World Health Organisation forecast that 100 million people might be infected by the year 1990 and the Royal College of Nursing forecast that one in fifty people in Britain would have the disease by the early 1990s.

Then, with the drug industry behind the promotion of AIDS, at least four separate groups of people realised that there were advantages to be gained out of turning the story into a major international threat.

The first to realise the significance of AIDS were probably the religious activists who had for years hated the “free sex” attitudes that had survived the 60s. They quickly realised that in AIDS they had a heaven-sent opportunity to frighten people into abandoning their promiscuous ways. In the early days, much of the most terrifying AIDS propaganda came from religious pressure groups who wanted to spread their own sanctimonious message and were perfectly prepared to exaggerate the facts a little in order to scare the electorate into their arms.

Second, there were many other business groups who recognised the profit-making opportunities associated with AIDS. Insurance companies used the threat of AIDS as an excuse to push their premiums up at a far faster rate than they would have ever dared do without AIDS. Hospital and clinic managers started making money out of offering AIDS tests and AIDS counselling.

Even companies which were not directly involved greeted the AIDS scare with delight. The tobacco industry, for example, must have been extremely grateful to see pundits on television warning of a coming plague that they predicted (using figures that were plucked out of the night) might eventually kill as many as a hundred thousand Britons a year. The tobacco companies knew that cigarettes were already killing one hundred thousand Britons a year.

Naturally, politicians were not slow to take advantage of the disease. They realised that AIDS was a heaven-sent opportunity to scare the living daylights out of their electorates. Politicians love scaring people – it gives them a good excuse for introducing tough legislation that would otherwise never get passed. And conservative administrations – particularly those in power – know very well that people always vote for right-wing politicians (and for the status quo) when they feel threatened. Once they saw just how rapidly the AIDS scare campaign was growing the politicians leapt onto the bandwagon and did what they could to exaggerate the threat. Some of the advertising campaigns launched to warn the public about the threat of AIDS would have been laughed at if people hadn’t already been frightened out of their wits.

There was one final group who had a vital part to play in helping to create the AIDS myth. Right from the beginning it seemed clear AIDS was primarily a threat to homosexuals and this worried the gay pressure groups enormously. They quickly realised that if AIDS remained a predominantly “gay” disease there would be a real risk that politicians, doctors, researchers and the public would quickly tire of the disease and funds would not be made available to continue the research work that had been started. They realised that in order to keep public interest in the disease high they had to change the public perception of the disease; AIDS had to become a predominantly heterosexual disease. So, all around the world gay pressure groups worked hard at changing public perceptions. Since there are many homosexuals working in television and radio, in publishing, in journalism and in the world of entertainment the campaign wasn’t difficult to build up and within a very short time, the message had been distorted so successfully that many people really began to believe what was being broadcast.

Despite the international media blitz provided by a willing army of drug company-controlled medical journalists it had been clear from the earliest days that AIDS was not going to be a major threat to society in general.

Way back in 1987, the medical magazine Pulse reported that the “only sexual practice” likely to lead to AIDS virus infection was receptive anal intercourse. The magazine was quoting data from the San Francisco Men’s Health Study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study, of more than one thousand heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual men reported that – and I quote – “receptive anal genital contact is the major mode of transmission of HIV infection.” The report went on to say that “there was no evidence of epidemic spread due to any other sexual mode of transmission.”

This report made sense. After all, the evidence showed that AIDS was primarily a blood borne disease and whereas ordinary vaginal sex does not usually lead to damaged tissues (and therefore bleeding) anal sex does.

In 1988 the British Medical Journal published a paper entitled ‘Heterosexual transmission of HIV by haemophiliacs’.

The paper was written by three doctors from the University Hospital in Rotterdam, the Netherlands who had for three years followed thirteen haemophiliacs and their partners. Their conclusion was, – and I quote – “in the absence of other risk factors transmission of HIV from men to women by vaginal intercourse is infrequent.”

In a paper entitled ‘Human immunodeficiency virus infection, hepatitis B virus infection and sexual behaviour of women attending a genito-urinary medicine clinic’ authors from the West London Hospital, Charing Cross Hospital and Central Public Health Laboratory in London studied 1,115 women who attended a genitourinary clinic in west London. The authors reported that more than half of 424 women who said that they had non-regular sexual partners never used a condom. They also said that the two women who were seropositive for HIV who completed a questionnaire on their sexual behaviour reported that they had had anal sex.

The authors of this paper concluded that – and I quote – “heterosexual women in London are at a low risk of becoming infected with HIV.”

In another scientific paper, also published in the British Medical Journal, researchers from the London School of Economics and Political Science and St Mary’s Hospital studied prostitutes. They came to the conclusion that – and I quote from their paper – “the most important risk factor for prostitutes in the West is sharing needles and syringes for drugs.” In 1992 researchers found that fewer than 30 of 1,000 prostitutes in Glasgow were infected with the AIDS virus – all of them were injecting drug users. The researchers in Glasgow pointed out that the virus was more likely to be spread by prostitutes through the use of dirty injecting equipment than by unprotected sexual intercourse.

One of the most important papers published on the subject of AIDS was probably the one produced by the European Study Group in 1989. This was published in the British Medical Journal under the heading ‘Risk factors for male to female transmission of HIV’. The coordinating centre for this report was the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre on AIDS in Paris and there were participating centres in Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain. The authors of this report concluded – and I quote – “The only sexual practice that clearly increases the risk of male-to-female transmission was anal intercourse.” The authors went on to say that – and again I quote – “no other sexual practices have been associated with the risk of transmission.”

As it became clear that AIDS was not going to become the feared plague there were many attempts to justify the original forecasts. In some areas, it was suggested that patients suffering from cancer should be listed as AIDS victims. In others areas, it was suggested that patients suffering from tuberculosis should be included in the AIDS statistics.

Eventually, in an editorial in the British Medical Journal in the early 1990s the International AIDS Coordinator at the National Cancer Institute in the United States of America, announced that “the HIV epidemic in North America and Europe probably peaked…in the mid-1980s” while the Institute of Actuaries in Britain eventually admitted there was “no evidence to support the hypothesis of a ‘heterosexual explosion’ of AIDS or HIV infection in this country.” But by then it was too late for the AIDS myth had created a new industry of researchers, advisers and self-styled experts and newspapers were regularly carrying stories of areas where the number of AIDS counsellors exceeded the number of AIDS sufferers. By 1992 in many areas there were found to be two or three times as many AIDS counsellors as victims. Many of the under-employed AIDS experts seemed to keep themselves busy doing their very best to maintain the AIDS myth – the myth which paid their quite unjustified salaries.

Despite the evidence, AIDS was constantly promoted as a “plague.” By devoting an extraordinary amount of time to the problem of AIDS and by refusing to put forward any point of view which did not support the idea of AIDS as a major plague television caused more fear and more hysteria than anything else I can remember. It is worth remembering that by September 1987 – probably the peak year for AIDS, when it was difficult to turn on a television set without finding a programme outlining the horrors of AIDS – the official Government estimate in Britain was that eight heterosexuals had contracted AIDS through sex since 1981. Just to put things in perspective it is worth pointing out that in just two years four times as many people had died while horse riding. Instead of spending millions trying to encourage heterosexuals to wear condoms, the Government would, perhaps, have been better occupied spending its money trying to encourage horse riders to wear hard hats.

The effectiveness of the industry lobby to promote AIDS as a fearful (and therefore profitable) disease came home to me on numerous occasions in the 1980s when I was vilified for telling the truth about the disease. Guests at a dinner where I speaking as the guest of honour walked out when I dared to suggest that AIDS was not a major threat to heterosexuals. Editors who published my articles about AIDS received indignant telephone calls from self-styled experts insisting that I should not be allowed any sort of public platform for my views. I was repeatedly threatened and attacked for daring to quote the research papers which proved that AIDS was not the new plague.

By the second half of the 1980s, it had become professionally dangerous to dare to suggest that AIDS was not a killer plague. Few people in television or in publishing would even listen to a rational scientific argument.

In early 1987 I had a telephone call from a researcher for a TV company who told me that he was planning a documentary about AIDS.

‘What do you think about AIDS?’ he asked me.

I told him that I thought that AIDS was a serious problem, but it was just one of many serious medical problems and that the threat it posed had been exaggerated by some doctors, a lot of politicians and most journalists. The researcher was silent for a moment or two. I could tell by the silence that he was disappointed. It wasn’t quite what he hoped to hear.

“We’re planning a major documentary,” he said. “We want to cover all the angles. Haven’t you got anything new to say about AIDS?”

“I don’t think AIDS is a plague that threatens mankind,” I insisted. “I think it is a dangerous, infectious disease that currently affects a small number of people and that may, in the next few years, affect thousands more.” I then pointed out that I believed that the evidence about AIDS had been distorted and the facts exaggerated.

“We really want you to come on to the programme and talk about some of the problems likely to be produced by the disease,” persisted the researcher.

“I’m happy to come on to the programme and say that I think that the dangers posed by the disease have been exaggerated,” I said.

The researcher sighed. “Quite a few doctors have said that to me. But it really isn’t the sort of angle we’re looking for.”

I didn’t expect to hear from the researcher again and I didn’t. His company produced a networked television programme about AIDS that appeared on our screens a short time after that conversation and most of those who viewed it will have gone to bed thinking that AIDS was the greatest threat to mankind since the Black Death.

During the last few years, I’ve lost count of the number of times I have had that same conversation with TV researchers and producers. During the late 1980s, I received an average of three or four requests a week to appear on television. But during that same period (when countless programmes about AIDS were being made) I received no invitations to speak about AIDS on television.

Time and time again the facts about AIDS have been carefully selected to satisfy the public image of the disease (and to provide a good story) rather than to relate the truth.

When it became quite plain that the talk of plagues had been wildly exaggerated an attempt was made to maintain the myth by claiming that the disease was about to devastate Africa.

Once again, the claim was fraudulent.

The cruellest of cruel ironies must surely be that AIDS, which was almost certainly created as a result of experiments on animals, has led to the creation of a massive sub-industry devoted to using laboratory animals to try to find a cure for the disease. The research industry which has been created has consumed vast amounts of money, has inspired accusations of professional double-dealing and jealousy and has never got anywhere near to finding a cure for the disease.

Throughout the 1980s research institutes around the world who needed extra funds simply had to add AIDS onto their project titles and then sit back to wait for the cash to roll in. The AIDS industry has become vast. In 1991 the total amount of money spent on AIDS research around the world was $1,500,000,000. In 1992 it was estimated that the expenditure on AIDS research would reach $1,625,000,000. Most of that money was allocated for animal experiments. (This sum doesn’t include the vast amount collected by voluntary workers, large numbers of whom seem constantly eager to help raise money for AIDS. I wonder if they would be as keen to raise money for unfashionable but nevertheless lethal disorders such as cancer of the colon).

The AIDS story, which had begun in an animal experimenter’s laboratory, has gone full circle. In the end, the industry which had created the disease has made the greatest profit from it. Hardly a “triumph’ for medical science.”

This essay is taken from Vernon Coleman’s book ‘Betrayal of Trust’ which was first published in 1994. A new paperback of the original edition of ‘Betrayal of Trust’ is available from the bookshop on Dr. Coleman’s website.

Featured image: HIV/Aids in South Africa