This is an interview done at 4ZZZ Radio in Brisbane, Australia with Anthony Brink, a South African lawyer who too Glaxo and AZT to court for an AIDS death but ran out of funds to continue. I’m CC. Anthony is AB.

Cal Crilly- I’m talking to Anthony Brink from South Africa who in mid 2001 took a case against Glaxo Smith Kline for the use of their drug AZT which apparently killed a colleague of his. Now Anthony, I just wanted to know how you first discovered AZT was quite dangerous to use for AIDS patients?

Anthony Brink- Well what happened was there was a tremendous controversy on the go in our country, on account of the government’s reluctance to buy AZT from Glaxo Smith Kline for administration to HIV positive women and there was quite a fuss about this and everyone was going berserk and very angry about the government’s resistance to the company’s solicitations to buy this stuff from it. I chanced on some information on the net, my wife at the time drew my attention to it and I became intrigued and then I began to read quite deeply into this thing and I wound up writing a paper called ‘Debating AZT, Questions of Safety and Utility’ which I sent off to government and Doctor Tshabalala-Msimang, the brand new national Health Minister and President Mbeki who had just taken over from President Mandela.
(Tshabalala) passed it on to Mbeki and he ordered an enquiry into safety of the drug in parliament on the 20th of October 1999.

CC- So it goes back quite a bit then?

AB- It goes back a long way, yeah.

CC- So has the government been under a lot of pressure to take up these drugs?

AB- Huge, huge, under concerted pressure of all sorts of well meaning foundations as well as a very powerful, aggressive and effective, prodigiously effective organization here called the Treatment Action Campaign run by a guy called Zackie Achmat and his sidekick Mark Heywood. And they’ve been able to push the government around and force it into taking drug policy positions against it’s will really. I mean I know Mbeki himself and Doctor Manto Tshabalala-Msimang the Health Minister have expressed themselves vehemently against these drugs, AZT and similar drugs and Nevirapine for example. They’ve just found their administration powerless in the face of massive international and local pressure orchestrated by the TAC, the Treatment Action Campaign, but you know with terrific foreign backing, I mean they’ve got millions, last year they spent more than ten million, a massive budget for an NGO.

CC- Do you think they’re actually targeting the South African government because that’s one of the richer governments in Africa?

AB- Yeah, it’s certainly one of the richer governments in Africa but secondly it’s tremendously influential because of our leadership role as a brightest emerging democracy in the developing world.

CC- Opening new markets in a way?

AB- Absolutely, opening new markets, it’s a portal market, you’re quite right.

CC- Now, when you had the court case in 2001 it was for James Hayman who was a colleague of yours and he died you say from AZT use? What happened in that court case?

AB- We were unable to take the case to trial because it was a very clean case in the sense that there were no complications. The fellow was apart from being tired and stressed out from running a one man band law practice in a small town, he was really busy, he subsequently took on a partner, apart from being tired, he was not sick, he’d been through a whole battery of tests and everything was clear. So it made the fact that his health collapsed after a he went on AZT, after being told he was HIV positive in good health, it was a very nice case to take to court because there were no complications but just before trial the manufacturer or the local supplier, Glaxo Smith Kline South Africa made the allegation he’d suffered from an opportunistic infection.
Something had shown up in a pathology examination and when they did a check it had been disconfirmed, but this new allegation at the last minute threatened a massively extended trial which was beyond our means to maintain and secondly, our key expert was a person indisposed, her mother was on the way out and she in fact died a month and a half or so after the trial date. She wasn’t able to leave her and come to give evidence, so it was just a concatenation of unexpected misfortunes which knocked the trial off the rails, it was totally dismissed without trial.

CC- Not enough money to take them to court as well, so now you’ve been targeting the Medicine Control Council, is that?

AB-We’re not targeting, what I’ve been doing is I’ve written six letters.

CC- Or advising them, sorry.

AB- Yeah, I’ve written six letters to the MCC and I believe the seventh and to be read at www.tig.org.za, that stands for the Treatment Information Group that I’ve set up. And the first letter addressed the pending review of Nevirapine for pregnant women which had been announced in May 2002, which was simply in the air and they weren’t resolving it, and I asked so what are you guys were up to? They didn’t respond directly but the next thing was they announced a recommendation that in future HIV positive pregnant women should take AZT in their pregnancies and this took us to exactly where we all started and I thought we’d moved away from.

CC- Quite terrifying really.

AB- It’s appalling, because then I did some real deep research, I thought I knew my story until I really got into this and researched this very closely and you know what I came up with really made me physically sick. I wrote it all down but it physically sickened me to read the threat of harm that’s posed by this drug, it’s too terrible and I urge listeners to read my sixth letter at T.I.G.

CC- The sixth letter details the damage that the drugs do to children and mothers?

AB- That’s in utero and shortly after birth, they’re all detailed, all the latest research, some of which are still in press for publication in a month or two, none of which, Cal,
none of which was taken account of by the fools who drew the World Health Organizations latest guidelines for interventions to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV. It was simply disregarded, or where it was mentioned at all it was dealt very cursory and dismissively, a really shocking report and our MCC simply slavishly followed what the World Health Organization recommended and by the way it wasn’t a representative panel, nobody who’d written about the toxicity of AZT was represented on the reviewing panel, the thing was drawn by two women who are great AZT and pregnancy fans and then there was a review panel.

CC- Have they taken it themselves?

AB- Well, yeah, that’s an interesting question.
CC- I was wondering, with the testing over there, it’s done mainly at the maternity centres isn’t it?

AB- Correct.

CC- And are you aware of the research by the Royal Perth Hospital Group over here which indicates that pregnant women because of endogenous retroviruses in their placenta will test positive for HIV?

AB- I’m very well aware of it, in fact I’m very close to The Perth Group and I’m an honorary co-author in their some of their writing.

CC- I saw a letter from a prison over there that said that there was only a 2% rate in a male prison, whereas you go into a maternity centres and you have rates of something like 65% of women testing HIV positive, is that an indication that it’s all out of control and really the test is just insane?

AB- Yeah, the tests are just completely worthless. The point is that no one wants to know, I mean I was on the radio a few nights ago and I was making this point and there was such resistance, everyone was just gliding over it and no one was taking account of it. The fact of the matter is that these antibody tests are not designed for diagnosis, they are all designed for screening blood by blood banks. The most you can conclude from a reactive result is that look this blood is a bit risky so we’ll give this pint a miss. These tests are not manufactured for, nor are they licensed anywhere in the world for making diagnosis’ and yet they routinely used for making diagnosis’, it’s lunacy man.

CC- Are the tests in Africa not as comprehensive anyway?

AB- The testing procedures are not as comprehensive but even the most comprehensive range of antibody tests…

CC- Are meaningless.

AB- Still useless. I mean a repeated ELISA is as worthless as a single ELISA even if you confirm an ELISA with a Western Blot that’s also worthless because the manufacturers themselves say you must not use these test results as a basis for making a diagnosis. In fact, Western Blot, which is regarded as definitively diagnostic and confirmatory in many, many countries, is excluded as specifically prescribed in England and Ireland, certainly England, precisely because it’s too non specific.

CC- What are the damaging effects of these drugs to the children and mothers?

AB- They are very serious indeed, the one principle form of damage that’s thoroughly been researched in animal and in human models is mitochondrial damage which leads to every kind of cellular wasting.

CC- Total energy loss, isn’t it?

AB- Yeah, energy loss in some, of course blood marrow destruction causing persistent anaemia, but most tragically as well, I think, is the fact that it gives rise to a form of time bombing, delayed presenting brain damage and in September 1999, just before President Mbeki ordered an enquiry into the drug, the French paediatric AIDS group reported in Lancet, that 8 children had been severely crippled, we’re talking about total and partial spasticity, blindness, you know terrible neurological damage, gross brain damage really. All showing up, not at birth, the earliest case at four and a half months and then these children really started declining, you know it’s tragic man.
The preliminary report was confirmed in June last year in 2003.

CC- Is there much opposition from any other quarters over in South Africa?

AB- No, not at all.

CC- (You can hear my mumbling dismay at this point.)

AB- I’ve been running a solo operation here, I’ve been a one man band, I’ve got a close colleague in the shape of Professor Sam Mhlongo at the medical University of South Africa, he’s now got a couple of doctors with him too, there’s a journalist in Johannesburg who’s been quite vocal about it but I’ve been doing all the fighting, all the warring on the AZT front and then I’ve also written extensively about Nevirapine.
I very actively involved in a Nevirapine case behind the scenes and I haven’t told the story how bad the drug is, what junk it is, listeners can read at the T.I.G. site.

CC- You did mention that Alister Sparks just wrote an article on it?

AB- No, he wrote a book, his third book, he’s written three history books.

CC- What sort of take did he have on it?

AB- Well, Alister Sparks is what I’d like to say an AIDS (fait?) roller, he loves the AIDS cause and you know the AIDS drugs, and the devastation that we’re facing and this new black plaque, the black death and all this kind of heart talk. But at page 286 of his new book ‘Beyond the Miracle, Inside the New South Africa’, he mentions that conversation with Mbeki, an interview with Mbeki for the book he was researching, and he quoted Mbeki, saying that was the first time I became aware of the alternative viewpoint, Mbeki told me, etc. etc.
But I know that I moved him (Mbeki) to order the enquiry into the safety of the drugs because shortly after his parliamentary statement I was repeatedly approached by members of his office and a couple of members of the ANC and so on.

CC-At this point I asked about the Benzene and pollution problems in South Africa and Durban’s 20 fold leukemia rate but that was out of Anthony’s field and the interviewed wound up there.

Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos has just died from a heart attack on the 18th of March 2022.

Eleni was part of the Royal Perth Hospital Group in Australia with Valendar Turner which Anthony mentioned in the interview. Their site is here if curious about their thoughts on HIV/AIDS.

http://www.theperthgroup.com/CONTINUUM/lookingback.html

This is a great video that Channel 4 did in the UK in 1998 but was never aired, Eleni is on this.

This is Anthony Brink’s site on the dangers of AZT, I will leave the entirety of the front page.

TREATMENT INFORMATION GROUP

http://tig.org.za/

On 28 October 1999, after reading an early draft of High Court advocate Anthony Brink’s book Debating AZT: Mbeki and the AIDS drug controversy (PDF, 1.2 MB), then subtitled ‘Questions of safety and utility’, South African President Thabo Mbeki ordered an enquiry into the safety of the AIDS drug AZT (PDF, 188 KB). ‘“That,” Mbeki told me, “is what sparked it off.”’ – Mark Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (Jonathan Ball, 2007). Rasperries and plaudits.

Introducing AZT: ‘A world of antiretroviral experience’ cites research findings published after Debating AZT went to print in November 2000, and liberally quotes South Africa’s leading AIDS experts, AIDS activists and AIDS journalists on AZT to enable you to form your own opinion after hearing both sides (PDF, 1 MB).

For an overview, see Why do President Mbeki and Dr Tshabalala-Msimang warn against the use of ARV drugs like AZT? (PDF, 98 KB). (Hi res version for printing in ‘Quick links’)

Sure, AZT is extraordinarily toxic, but does it have any countervailing value as a medicine? In other words, do its benefits outweigh its risks? Or to put it more directly: is AZT really antiretroviral? An Open Letter to GlaxoSmithKline SA CEO John Kearney on 26 April 2001 addresses this question (PDF, 51 KB), conveying the gist of A Critical Analysis of the Pharmacology of AZT and its Use in AIDS (PDF, 425 KB) by Australian physicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her medical colleagues, published in June 1999 as a special supplement to Current Medical Research and Opinion. It’s summed up in an unpublished letter (PDF, 96 KB).

The AZT triphosphorylation problem examined in this paper has been discussed by other scientists, such as Lavie and colleagues of the Max Plank Institute (PDF, 451 KB) and by Dr Dennis Blakeslee, a medical correspondent for the Journal of the American Medical Association (PDF, 783 KB).

Is AZT a DNA chain terminator as GlaxoSmithKline and even the drug’s critics Professor Peter Duesberg and Dr David Rasnick claim it is? Or is it extremely toxic for entirely different reasons?

GlaxoSmithKline hired its fantastically richly paid consultant and grant recipient (PDF, 114 KB) Professor David Back at the University of Liverpool to claim in an expert report filed in the High Court in South Africa that AZT is triphosphorylated just like the company says (PDF, 1 MB). Papadopulos-Eleopulos and colleagues examined and rebutted his false claims (PDF, 42 KB).

In April 2001 the Medicines Control Council (MCC) conditionally approved nevirapine, another exceptionally toxic drug, for experimental use to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV. The Treatment Action Campaign successfully applied to court to force the government to abandon its UN-AIDS-sanctioned pilot study and to provide the drug in the maternity wards of all government hospitals across the country without more ado. The trouble with nevirapine is a comprehensive exposé of the whole shambles (PDF, 1 MB).

Between June 2004 and January 2005 we addressed ten letters to the MCC, commencing with an enquiry about the status of its review of its special registration of nevirapine for administration to HIV-positive women in labour and their newborn babies, which it had announced in May 2002 after a licensing application for similar special registration had been thrown out two months earlier by the American Food and Drug Administration .

We also provided the MCC with Papadopulos-Eleopulos’s et al. seminal critiques of AZT as an AIDS drug (PDF, 416 KB), and AZT and nevirapine as perinatal anti-HIV prophylactics (PDF, 2.03 MB), along with an easy-to-understand slideshow critically examining the notion that nevirapine prevents mother to child transmission of HIV (PDF, 1.23 MB).

The MCC’s response to our first letter was to issue a recommendation that nevirapine administration to pregnant women and their babies should henceforth always be combined with AZT. Our further correspondence criticized this decision in the light of the many published studies showing how AZT harms unborn and newly born children. On receiving our submissions, individual members of the MCC told Health Minister Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang that they’d been ‘amazed’ by our ‘detailed research’ of which they had been ‘unaware’. Well, clearly. We can reveal that Dr Tshabalala-Msimang read all our correspondence to the MCC with great interest, as did President Mbeki.

Poisoning our Children: AZT and nevirapine in pregnancy collates our letters in a book (PDF, 1.19 MB), including: the MCC’s ultimate non-response to our submissions (PDF, 177 KB); an afterword reviewing the latest research reports on how ARV drugs given during pregnancy stunt infant body and head growth and damage bone marrow causing reduced blood cell production in childhood; and how these drugs are causing brain damage to South African children, crippling them mentally and physically.

A leaflet Why do Zackie Achmat, Nathan Geffen and Mark Heywood want pregnant African women and their babies to be given AZT? What AZT does to unborn and newly born children gives an overview of this horror (PDF, 76 KB). (Hi res version for printing in ‘Quick links’)

Inventing AZT is the scoop story told to Brink by Professor Richard Beltz, the scientist who first synthesized AZT in 1961 – as an experimental cell-poison to kill human cells (PDF, 128 KB). It relates how Brink changed Beltz’s mind about the wisdom of giving AZT to pregnant women by drawing his attention to what it does to their babies.

Licensing AZT (PDF, 178 KB) describes the fraudulent circumstances in which AZT came to be licensed by the Food and Drug Administration as an AIDS drug in the US – with everyone just following suit around the world, no questions asked, our own MCC included.

Here are the front cover (PDF, 988 KB), back-cover blurb (PDF, 15 KB), and prospectus (PDF, 411 KB) for Brink’s magnum opus in the works, ‘Just say yes, Mr President’: Mbeki and AIDS.

What killed Makgatho Mandela?: a press release (PDF, 58 KB).

On 26 November 2004 the Mail&Guardian published an article in its special World AIDS Day supplement entitled Why should South Africans continue to be poisoned with AZT? (PDF, 167 KB), in which we stated matter-of-factly:

• Hundreds of studies have found that AZT is profoundly toxic to all cells of the human body, and particularly to the blood cells of our immune system.

• Numerous studies have found that children exposed to AZT in the womb suffer brain damage, neurological disorders, paralysis, spasticity, mental retardation, epilepsy, other serious diseases and early death.

The Treatment Action Campaign complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about these statements, as if they were untrue. The ASA declined to consider the merits of our submission (PDF, 238 KB), saying it wanted one ‘credible independent expert’ to substantiate our statements, and not the hundreds we cited in two lever-arch files sent up, and banned us from ever repeating them (PDF, 1.4 MB). We then provided a single expert verification statement by Professor Sam Mhlongo (PDF, 72 KB), and followed up with a query (PDF, 94 KB). When the ASA rejected Professor Mhlongo’s supporting statement on spurious grounds, we asked Medicines Control Council chairman Professor Peter Eagles to confirm to the ASA that our statements are perfectly true (PDF, 17 KB), and requested the same of MCC Registrar Dr Humphrey Zokufa (PDF, 24 KB) – but no joy from either.

On 11 November 2005 the Mail&Guardian published Brink’s letter (edited a bit) about the M&G’s editorial policy to promote AZT and the harm it does (PDF, 20 KB). Professor Cyril Karabus of the Red Cross Children’s Hospital in Cape Town and a schoolboy called Alex Myers responded the following week by writing in to say how dishonest and dangerous he is (PDF, 121 KB). Brink replied to Karabus directly (PDF, 48 KB).

A letter to Constitutional Law Professor Pierre de Vos, then at the University of the Western Cape, pulling his leg (PDF, 36 KB).

The Judith Miller Award for AIDS Journalism in South Africa was won in 2005 by Kerry Cullinan (PDF, 19 KB).

A letter (PDF, 90KB) to Dr Olive Shisana, CEO of the Human Sciences Research Council and lead author of the South African National HIV Prevalence, HIV Incidence, Behaviour and Communication Survey, 2005.

This reminder to Dr Shisana posed more rude questions (PDF, 30 KB).

In a letter to Professor Anthon Heyns, CEO of the South African National Blood Service, Brink spelt out the logic of the HSRC’s ‘HIV Prevalence’ report for policy at his blood bank (PDF, 64KB). The day after it was sent, Heyns published an article in JAMA, the world’s leading medical journal, claiming that yes, segregationist policy at the blood bank was the right way to go after all; why, he’d proven it scientifically. Unlike Brink in his ironic letter, the professor wasn’t joking, he really meant it.

The Treatment Action Campaign arranged a hit (PDF, 96KB) on Brink in the Sunday Times on 5 February 2006, to which he replied (PDF, 11KB). These are the commercial plugs referred to in his letter (PDF, 18KB). An edited version of the letter was published two weeks later, leaving out the embarrassing ‘product placement’ story (PDF, 93KB).

Brink posed some questions to AIDS journalist Tamar Kahn (PDF, 44 KB) about an exciting article she wrote (PDF, 162 KB).

And here’s a letter to Dr Francois Venter, president of the Southern African HIV/AIDS Clinicians Society, suggesting an exciting  new way to fight AIDS (PDF, 31 KB).

The Treatment Action Campaign had a go in the Cape High Court at shutting us up and shutting us down. Brink’s answering affidavit (PDF, 514 KB) blew the TAC, its drugs and its virus out the sky (filleted for relevance you can read the TAC’s founding affidavits hyperlinked to it). Professor Mhlongo filed a confirming affidavit (PDF, 31 KB). Three days after seeing our Heads of Argument (PDF, 15 KB), the TAC dropped its case against us and ran for the hills (PDF, 202 KB).

On 4 January 2007 we served (PDF, 719KB) a 59-page draft bill of indictment (PDF, 137 KB) at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, in which we applied for the prosecution of TAC leader Zackie Achmat on a charge of genocide for his direct criminal role in the deaths of thousands of South Africans from ARV poisoning. It caused quite a fuss. Was it serious? Was it a joke? Was it a serious joke? You decide. (See ‘On Satire’, a letter to Zapiro below. And these spoofs in the Onion: here and here.)

We wrote a letter to M&G CEO Trevor Ncube entitled Media Complicity in Genocide: the Case of the Mail&Guardian (PDF, 93 KB) and served a copy on the ICC with supporting annexures (PDF, 23 KB) under this covering letter (PDF, 36 KB). The letter was an appeal to conscience but apparently no one was home.

Brink attended a high-powered AIDS conference in Bonn, Germany, in May 2007 and wrote (PDF, 46 KB) to the organizers afterwards, his head spinning from the experience.

In October 2007, on the 50th anniversary of the thalidomide disaster, we released a Press Statement on AZT in pregnancy: another tragedy of countless children killed and maimed foretold (PDF, 45KB). We followed up with a letter to Dr Tshabalala-Msimang about it but too late (PDF, 133 KB).

In Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki, Ronald Suresh Roberts claimed that ‘Thabo Mbeki is not now, nor has he ever been, an AIDS dissident.’ Brink’s book Lying and Thieving: The fraudulent scholarship of Ronald Suresh Roberts took him to task.

We responded to a request for an interview by Litsa Delli, television producer for MEGA-TV, Athens, Greece (PDF, 171 KB); these are the hyperlinks in the letter.

Politicsweb published Martin Weinel, Thabo Mbeki and AZT: Bogus scholarship in the Age of AIDS: A case study on 27 March 2009. Here’s our email to his university about it on 2 April, two answers, and our reply.

A letter to Essop Pahad, editor of the Thinker.

A letter to psychology lecturer Desmond Painter concerning his review of ‘The trouble with nevirapine’ in Die Burger.

A reply to Rev Julia Denny-Dimitriou’s go at Brink in her gushing review in the Witness of big-time AIDS journalist Kerry Cullinan’s ridiculous book The Virus, Vitamins and Vegetables. The reply was published on 18 May 2009.

Where are all the dead Zulus?, a letter to the editor of the Witness – rejected for publication because ‘the debate has run its course’, the deputy editor said, which is to say is over.

On Satire, a letter to Zapiro, cartoonist for the Mail & Guardian and other newspapers (PDF, 288 KB).

A letter to former Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson about the nevirapine case in the Constitutional Court (PDF, 115 KB).

A critical analysis of child HIV prevalence as presented in the South African national HIV prevalence survey of 2008 (HSRC June 2009) by Chris Rawlins (PDF, 43 KB).

Deconstructing Duesberg: A Critique of ‘HIV-AIDS hypothesis out of touch with South African AIDS – A new perspective’ by Claus Jensen (PDF, 44 KB).

Transparency and Conservative Values in Chigwedere et al.: The 6.7 Years ARV Treatment Benefit Estimate in Chigwedere et al. ‘Estimating the Lost Benefits of Antiretroviral Drug Use in South Africa’ by Claus Jensen (PDF, 36 KB).

A critical analysis of the underlying assumptions used by Chigwedere et al in their article ‘Estimating the lost benefits of antiretroviral drug use in South Africa’ in JAIDS, December 2008 by Chris Rawlins (PDF, 73 KB).

A reply to the TAC’s claim in a press release published on Politicsweb on 6 October 2010, ‘Donor shortfall will cost lives’, that unless Western governments give the pharmaceutical industry billions more for its ARV drugs, millions of poor will die.

Mbeki and AIDS in Frank Chikane’s memoirs.

On 18 December 2009 the Californian Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (‘OEHHA’) added AZT to its list of substances known to cause cancer and reproductive toxicity (PDF, 500 KB, excerpts). The drug was first prioritized as being ‘of High Carcinogenicity Concern’ in October 2003 (PDF, 68 KB) and placed on the OEHHA’s draft priority list that month (PDF, 288 KB). AIDS activists tried preventing their favourite drug AZT’s classification as a known carcinogen on 3 December 2003 (PDF, 499 KB), but unsuccessfully, because on 12 June 2009, after a comprehensive review of the research literature, the OEHHA invited final comments before listing it as such (PDF, 77 KB). The AIDS activists tried preventing this again (PDF, 117 KB), but again unsuccessfully, and on 18 December 2009 the OEHHA listed AZT as a known carcinogen (PDF, 591 KB).

An HIV positive pilot was denied the renewal of his flying license for refusing to swallow an ARV cocktail that made him sick. Brink drew his application for the decision to be reviewed and set aside. Being unanswerable it wasn’t answered, but it got dismissed anyway; see why.

In February 2008 Rhodes University pharmacology tutor Roy Jobson raised the subject of antiretroviral drugs on his ‘Thought Leader’ blog hosted by the Mail & Guardian. Brink and others, including some doctors and another pharmacologist, responded.

Current Medical Research and Opinion and ‘medical publication ethics’: The curious case of the Perth Group’s missing AZT pharmacology paper.

Chris Rawlins performs a comprehensive study (PDF, 120 KB) of the statistical data published by leading government and research bodies since 1996, and demonstrates conclusively that there’s no evidence for a new viral cause of death in South Africa. The irreconcilable contradictions within and between the data published by these bodies, the lack of any correlation between the estimates and the official registered mortality figures, the mathematical impossibility of reconciling the age and gender estimates, and the failure of all the hypothetical model predictions all show that the various tests claimed to detect a transmittable virus have no scientific validity and reliability and are diagnostically useless as a basis for prescribing chemotherapy cell poisons.

Rawlins’s letter about this in the Mercury on 4 December 2015 (PDF, 820 KB), with his final paragraph clipped: ‘For several years I have repeatedly asked the leading academics, like Professors Olive Shisana, Rob Dorrington, Thomas Rehle, Debbie Bradshaw, Salim and Quarraisha Karim, to respond to my statistical analyses but have had no acknowledgement, let alone a response. Mark Heywood and his supporters would never publicly engage with those of us challenging the scientific fraud, because they understand very clearly that suppression of dissent is essential to the maintenance of their careers.’

Rawlins presents a tabular summary (PDF, 122 KB) of his three previous comprehensive analyses, debunking the claims made by a Harvard University paper published in JAIDS in December 2008; the Human Sciences Research Council’s national survey of 2008; and the Actuarial Society of South Africa’s 2008 model based on the Department of Health’s antenatal statistics, that causal relationships exist between the measurement labelled hiv and the increase in child mortality in South Africa up to 2006, and the use of drugs labelled antiretroviral and the decrease in child mortality after 2006. Utilising further data from the latest HSRC survey of 2012; the Medical Research Council study of under-5 mortality statistics of April 2012; and Statistics South Africa’s annual mortality and causes of death reports up to 2012, the summary categorically demonstrates shows that there is no causal relationship between the measurement labelled hiv, the drugs labelled antiretroviral, and child mortality in South Africa.

On 7 March 2016, former South African President Thabo Mbeki posted ‘A Brief Commentary on the Question of HIV and AIDS’ on his Thabo Mbeki Foundation website, and linked it to his Facebook page. And the next day posted a link to TIG general secretary Chris Rawlins’s paper, ‘A critical analysis of the underlying assumptions used by Chigwedere et al in their article “Estimating The Lost Benefits of Antiretroviral Drug Use in South Africa” published in JAIDS in December 2008’. 

Rawlins’s followed up two days later with The irreconcilable contradictions between the HSRC’s hiv statistics and StatsSA’s mortality data (PDF, 10 KB).

On 14 March 2016, Mbeki posted ‘Some Observations on HIV & Mortality in South Africa: 2007, 2008 & 2013’. 

Mbeki’s articles and the renewed controversy they caused are linked here.