Via Orac comes Skeptico's takedown of Barnes' numerous misuses and abuses of logical fallacies he claims the "HIV orthodoxy" employs. For a lawyer, he sure hasn't had much training in logic, it would seem.
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I also get the impression that Hank doesn't understand the difference between an argument being "logically viable" and empirically sound. In fact, it appears that HIV deniers and creationists studiously leave out the empirical part of scientific arguments, making their arguments merely philosophical.
GE
GE -
I don't know about "rethinkers" (or dissenters or deniers or whatever to call them) but Creationists will often insist that evolution (or rather those parts they are unwilling to accept) are not empirical, but are themselves philosophies or worldviews. They are demonstrably wrong of course, but this is what they insist.
As for the logical fallacy accusations, I've only rarely heard them used correctly from either group. Especially the ad hominem, which they are certain is just a fancy Latin way to say 'insult'.
Hank is one of those lawyers who for some reason seems to want to be taken seriously for their scientific acumen. Unfortunately, like in Hank's case, they more often than not fail miserably. Even more unfortunately, they don't seem to realize that that has happened, and so they carry on stumbling.
Lawyers aren't concerned with facts but rather their spin of the facts.
This reminds me of my favorite part of Jurassic Park... the part where the lawyer gets eaten by the T-Rex!
Speaking of Gaffes by Hank, he must figure he's abused "the Padian paper" as much as it can take. So, now he's picked up on a recent study in the Lancet that looks at HAART over the past ten years. Over 20,000 patients, ten year study, and then the quote mine from the abstract:
"Virological response after starting HAART improved over calendar years, but such improvement has not translated into a decrease in mortality."
From which he concludes that HAART does not decrease mortality at all. It apparently slipped his notice that the study followed patients for one year and is only saying that 2003 HAART did not decrease mortality compared to 1995-96 HAART. He declined to discuss it with me on his blog.
Then Dean Esmay repeated Hank's claims without looking at the paper himself, even adding that "anti-retroviral drugs do not increase the lifespan of AIDS patients." And "HAART is a failure, in other words."
So now
Required: Useful nomenclature.
Some suggestions:
'Dissenter' - One who disagrees with some conclusions or policies related to AIDS treatment or measurement. This, unfortunately, is a broad category that would cover practically all scientists in the field at some point because there are always some details (if however small) that are never nailed down to everyone's satisfaction. The term, 'rethinker' would be synonymous in this scheme. It would help to be specific about the actual area of disagreement when using this description.
'Denialist' - Further sub-classification: One who denies that HIV has a role in AIDS or been demonstrated to exist as an infectious agent in humans (One could partition 'denialists' into sub-camps on this basis). For the former, there is also a split about whether HIV correlates with AIDS.
Examples: Root-Berstein was at one time a dissenter/rethinker, but not a denialist. Duesberg is a denialist about the effects of HIV (Calling him a dissenter or rethinker would merely be redundant and less informative).
"I don't know about "rethinkers" (or dissenters or deniers or whatever to call them) but Creationists will often insist that evolution (or rather those parts they are unwilling to accept) are not empirical, but are themselves philosophies or worldviews. They are demonstrably wrong of course, but this is what they insist."
I agree, Dave. They are demonstrably wrong. They are wrong because, they when presented with evidence for the parts of evolution they are unwilling to accept, they reject that, too! This denialists do while all the time trying to claim that they have empirical evidence for the existence of their god, e.g.; and they misuse the findings of other scientist in an attempt to prove their point.
GE
"The term, 'rethinker' would be synonymous in this scheme. It would help to be specific about the actual area of disagreement when using this description."
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Lincoln/Michael characterizes self as a "rethinker" but by your nomenclature would be a "denier". Duesberg? By the movement, they call him a rethinker, but by your nomenclature, he's a denier. Maybe "rethinker" is closer to "denier" than "dissenter"...
I see a real qualitative shift between being a member of the scientific community on AIDS and crossing that line into rethinker... there are all these cofactors of paranoia, delusions of grandeur, conspiracy obsessions, fanatacism, fixation on specific ideas regardless of evidence... stuff that isn't related to the HIV/AIDS hypothesis at all.
People who don't believe that AIDS exists can be in the same camp as Duesberg, who thinks it has been demonstrated to exist by the strongest methods of science... because they share what I can only describe as a sense of religious communion.
Maybe Root-Bernstein just never drank the kool-aid, he never bought the other stuff.
"People who don't believe that AIDS exists can be in the same camp as Duesberg..."
He doesn't deny the existance of HIV nor the existance of AIDS. He merely says that the two are unrelated and that the concept of "Aquired Immune deficiency Syndrome" is therefor redundant. He firmly believes in "Immune deficiency" he just says it is not "aquired". But you are so entrenched in the "Them vs Us" that you can't even tell the difference. Your logical fallacy is "people-profiling" ad nauseam.
sorry for posting twice. It is not meant as a propaganda tactic.
Well, still no. He believes it's acquired, but due to drug use instead of a virus.
yes indeed, he says it is not VIRALLY ACQUIRED. thank you for the correction.
"He doesn't deny the existance of HIV nor the existance of AIDS."
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Yes, I know that, and I never said any differently. The words after the comma are "who thinks it has been demonstrated to exist by the strongest methods of science." The "who" in that clause refers to Duesberg, the last proper noun before the comma. I'm pretty sure that is grammatically correct.
In any case, I'm creating a contrast between Duesberg, who does believe AIDS exists, and completely different people who do not believe AIDS exists and yet can comfortably claim to be in the same camp as Duesberg. This is because of their sense of religious communion, of being members of a rethinker community which is broader than specifics of HIV/AIDS, but extends to the other factors I pointed out.
"who does believe AIDS exists, and completely different people who do not believe AIDS exists"
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DAMN. "AIDS" should be "HIV", which is what I actually meant. Sorry.
Hank's grotesque misrepresentation of the recent Lancet paper from the CASCADE collaboration is much worse. The paper looked at AIDS events and mortality after one or two years of ART in different periods starting with 95/96 and ending with 2002/03 (or 2001 for the two year analysis).
Here are the mortality data.
One year after starting ART:
1995/96: total n=1232 / #deaths=27 (2.2%)
1997: 4785 / 98 (2.1%)
1998: 4583 / 85 (1.9%)
1999: 3699 / 67 (1.8%)
2000: 3203 / 63 (2.0%)
2001: 2783 / 49 (1.8%)
2002/03: 1932 / 25 (1.3%)
Two years after starting ART:
1995/96: 1232 / 53 (4.3%)
1997: 4785 / 151 (3.2%)
1998: 4583 / 144 (3.1%)
1999: 3699 / 109 (3.0%)
2000: 3203 / 99 (3.1%)
2001: 2783 / 69 (2.5%)
Hank read the abstract and the hazard ratios (which use 1998 as the reference year) and wrote that ART does not reduce mortality. This was then repeated by Neville Hodkingson in a Business Online article entitled "Anti-retro drugs fail to increase HIV patients' lifespan" and also then parroted by Anthony Liversidge on his "New AIDS Review" blog and Celia Farber in her interview with BookSlut.
Note that people in the later period started ART around 200 CD4s but two year survival was 97.5%. Two year survival for untreated people whose CD4 count is below 200 is around 25%. In the pre-ARV era (1986 or earlier), median survival after a CD4 count below 200 was 28.4 months.
Osmond D, Charlebois E, Lang W, Shiboski S, Moss A.
Changes in AIDS survival time in two San Francisco cohorts of homosexual men, 1983 to 1993.
JAMA. 1994 Apr 13;271(14):1083-7.
Schim van der Loeff MF, Jaffar S, Aveika AA, Sabally S, Corrah T, Harding E, Alabi A, Bayang A, Ariyoshi K, Whittle HC.
Mortality of HIV-1, HIV-2 and HIV-1/HIV-2 dually infected patients in a clinic-based cohort in The Gambia.
AIDS. 2002 Sep 6;16(13):1775-83.
I gotcha Seth. I stand corrected.
A very interesting site, I think. The Idea of Technometry was new for me but worth to be read and thought abot it (although I'm not a native english-speaker and have some difficulties whith this language)
Regarding nomenclature, although I have used it in the past I try not to use the term Denialist because the people in question normally conflate this with holocaust denial even if this was not meant at all. I refuse to call them dissidents because although HIV dissidents that are persecuted and censored by the authorities do exist Duesberg and co do not fit in this category.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/09/07/asia/AS_GEN_China_AIDS_Activi…
I've taken to using the term "rethinker" in quotation marks in an ironic sense in that they rarely do any rethinking and instead just regurgitate the same nonsense over and over again.
Hank is at it again.
http://barnesworld.blogs.com/barnes_world/2006/09/the_mathematics.html
This paper was discussed on Dean's World
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1128845313.shtml#45155
Bialy appeared to concede at that time that Duesberg's claim that Goedert's paper demonstrated that AZT increased the risk of AIDS and death was at least unwarranted but apparenetly not.
If we listen to Duesberg then corellation does not equal causation except when I say so.
If we accept the Duesberg/Bialy "logic" then insulin causes diabetes related death, ambulances cause deaths from traffic accidents etc.
Chris Noble writes I've taken to using the term "rethinker" in quotation marks in an ironic sense in that they rarely do any rethinking and instead just regurgitate the same nonsense over and over again.
I've been seriously considering referring to them as refuse-to-thinkers.
Chris Noble writes I've taken to using the term "rethinker" in quotation marks in an ironic sense in that they rarely do any rethinking and instead just regurgitate the same nonsense over and over again.
I've been seriously considering referring to them as refuse-to-thinkers.
"If we accept the Duesberg/Bialy "logic" then insulin causes diabetes related death, ambulances cause deaths from traffic accidents etc."
what insulin is to diabetes, Haart is not to HIV/AIDS.
I believe (having lived with diabetics in the past and currently) that insulin is a naturally occuring substance lacking in diabetics thus the injections of insulin to replenish what is missing. I do not believe that HIV/AIDS patients are naturally lacking HAART; therefor the two do not compare.
Ambulances do contribute in an insignificant way to traffic deaths. They sometimes run over pedestrians, skid and crash, etc.
"I do not believe that HIV/AIDS patients are naturally lacking HAART; therefor the two do not compare."
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You are missing the point of both analogies. The point isn't that HAART is the same as insulin in a clinical sense, it is that HAART a drug with side effects that treats a chronic condition, and Insulin is a drug with side effects that treats a chronic condition.
As for ambulances, the claim is that if Duesberg's logic were applied to someone who died IN an ambulance AFTER being run over by a car, that person was killed by the ambulance and not by the car. It is not being claimed that an ambulance is not a vehicle that can be involved in accidents.
to compare the side effects of insulin injections to the side effects of HIV medication remains a bad analogy. I'm sorry but everything points to HAART being a helluvalot more dangerous than insulin.
to compare the side effects of insulin injections to the side effects of HIV medication remains a bad analogy. I'm sorry but everything points to HAART being a helluvalot more dangerous than insulin.
some posts are landing in the garbage it seems
"to compare the side effects of insulin injections to the side effects of HIV medication remains a bad analogy."
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Pat, both of these things, if improperly administered, can kill you... but the comparison is not between the side effects anyway, its a comparison of situations and the logic of Peter Duesberg applied to a different situation.
You are totally missing the point.
Insulin is given to people because they have diabetes. There is therefore a correlation between insluin use and diabetes and diabetes related mortality.
In exactly the same way AZT was prescribed to people that were infected with HIV the majority of which were already immunesuppressed with CD4+ counts below 200 or with opportunistic infections. There is therefore a correlation between AZT and AIDS but it is no more causal than the relationship between insulin and diabetes, CPR and heart attacks and ambulances and automobile deaths.
"Rethinkers" go on and on about correlation not being causation but when they find a correlation that suits them they insist that it must reflect causality.
This is another example of "rethinkers" making conclusions that are not possible from the data.
For people that are posting at Barnesworld
Contrary to the assertions made by Bialy the claims about AZT being a causal factor for AIDS in haemphilia patients have been thoroughly addressed in the past.
Response: Arguments contradict the "foreign protein-zidovudine" hypothesis
Patients were given AZT after the development of AIDS or CD4+ counts had fallen below 200.
Duesberg and Bialy want people to accept that AZT can travel back in time and cause AIDS before it is given to people. Unfortunately some people like Hank appear to be able to accept this nonsense.
What Duesberg and Bialy do not answer is why did these people progress to AIDS before they were given AZT!
It isn't the purity of factor VIII. It isn't AZT. The only factor that can explain it is HIV.
Chris Noble strikes again:
"Duesberg and Bialy want people to accept that AZT can travel back in time and cause AIDS before it is given to people."
Of course that's a distorted version of what they mean. Otherwise Michael Gottlieb, the inventor of AIDS, could not have found an epidemic (of 5 wretched souls!) with abnormally low CD4 counts. AZT existed at the time, but was still resting on the shelves, along with other failed cancer chemo drugs.
What Bialy and Duesberg are saying (and if they don't, then I'm saying it: When you're treating somebody who is already sick, and has a weak immune system, with AZT, then you're just bumping the poor guy off.
And because the DNA chain terminators give rise to exactly the same symptoms as are claimed to belong to AIDS, the perpetrators can get away with saying the patient was beyond help, and died of AIDS.
OK. I cleared up that point. Now what about HAART (Super High Intensive Treatment)? That lies a little trickier. Deaths ascribed to AIDS were already going down since 1994 (explanation below). So that was a lucky coincidence. When HAART started in 1996, patients just kept on dying, of course. But now they died mainly from liver failure. And - sad to say - that was not in the grab bag of AIDS-related diseases. So they quickly invented a new virus - Hep-C - to explain those deaths. "Co-infection with Hep-C". That sounds good, don't you think? But as "death by Hep-C (or death by anything) cannot be counted as "AIDS-death", it looks good in the statistics too! So from 1996 on, we see a sharp decline in "AIDS deaths", so everybody short on brainpower or long on pharma money can clearly see how wonderfully effective HAART is.
I promised you an explanation for the decline in AIDS deaths from 1994 on. Well, that's simple too: The CDC had been changing its AIDS definition several times, adding more diseases all the time. Of course, as you start calling more causes of death "AIDS", then this arbitrary classification leads to statistics showing more and more "AIDS deaths". When you stop this process, the virtual increase ceases too, and the effect of people moderating their behavioral exccesses kicks in, leading to a decrease in mortality.
By the way, instead of HAART, they could also simply have shot a large number of patients. These would sure as hell not have died from AIDS either. Good for the statistics.
"When HAART started in 1996, patients just kept on dying, of course. But now they died mainly from liver failure... So they quickly invented a new virus - Hep-C - to explain those deaths."
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10 minutes on pubmed yield:
The first paper on a "possible third form of hepatitis", 1975. The first paper to mention Hepatitis C by name was published in 1977, in Swedish. The first Lancet article to name Hepatitis C was published in 1978. I wish Godshalk would put a little more effort into his paranoid fantasies, this one was just too easy to debug.
A "possible third form" of hepatitis? I'm sure somebody will write a book some day, entitled: "101 Ways to screw up your liver". And most of them are chemical in nature. But the mad bunch of virus hunters existed already in the sixties and throughout the seventies. They see a virus behind every disease. Even if somebody dies in front of a firing squad, they would claim that the bullets are just a cofactor activating a virus, killing the victim. The invention of HIV in 1983 was just an extention of the virus-madness of the seventies. So when patients started to die in droves from the HAART drugs, which fact could not be explained by HIV, what could be easier than to reach back to that other virus that was pure fantasy and had never been isolated either? Yes, yes, that illusion from the late seventies: Hepatitis-C.
Why don't you spend some time digging up the first paper where they describe the isolation of Hep-C, Seth, before you dare to speak about "debugging".
HCV exists. It was long ago been determined to be the primary cause of non-A non-B hepatitis (NANBH). Yes, it is safe to say that most ways to damage the liver are chemical. HAV, HBV and HCV, however, are three good examples of viruses that have hepatotoxic effects. Add on HEV, mumps, EBV and a handful of others, and you have a nice mob of viruses that can cause hepatitis.
Seriously, Wilhelm. You give the impression that you don't believe in any modern science, making such claims that well characterised and isolated viruses don't exist, constantly moving the goalposts before you claim victory. Its sad. The evidence is solidly against you.
NANBH was proposed to have a viral mechanism in 1975. Solid epi data exists for NANBH to be caused by a transmissable agent. An agent that was ID'd in 1989. Doubtless, this won't be good enough for you.
Choo QL, Kuo G, Weiner AJ, Overby LR, Bradley DW, Houghton M. Isolation of a cDNA clone derived from a blood-borne non-A, non-B viral hepatitis genome. Science. 1989;244:359-362.