Stop the Scientocrats!

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor

Originally composed June 18, 2000. Portions copyrighted © 2000 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine and used by permission.

NOTE: The fluoridation of San Diego’s drinking water was successfully delayed for over a decade after
this was written but began last month. [M.G.C., 2/25/11]

“There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportu-
nity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its
refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which jus-
tifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human fac-
ulties have any rational assurance of being right.”
—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“The status quo is totally opposite to the concept of public health. It’s difficult when you’re talking about
major social and behavioral changes. … We have to be very careful of community input if it’s not edu-
cated. We have to have individuals with technical expertise [in charge], and be very careful about not let-
ting less educated individuals set policy on public-health issues.”
— Dr. Donald Francis [ex-CDC], public speech, November 2, 1994

“James Buchanan noted 30 years ago — and he is still correct — that, as a rule, there is no vested inter-
est in seeing a fair evaluation of a public scientific issue. Very little experimental verification has been
done to support important societal issues in the closing years of this century. Nor does it have to be done
before public policy decisions are made. It only needs to be convincing to the misinformed voter. Some of
the big truths voters have accepted have little or no scientific basis. And these include the belief that AIDS
is caused by human immunodeficiency virus, the belief that fossil fuel emissions are causing global warm-
ing, and the belief that the release of chloroflurocarbons into the atmosphere has created a hole in the
ozone layer. The illusions go even deeper into our everyday lives when they follow us to the grocery store.

“People believe these things, and a slew of others, not because they have seen proof but because they are
ingenuous: they have faith. These issues don’t have to be on faith. They are not transcendental. Some of
them are hard to investigate, because you can’t do experiments easily with people’s daily lives, but they
can be investigated, then confirmed or dismissed. If not, scientists should not be talking about them. …

“We accept the proclamations of scientists in their lab coats with the same faith once reserved for priests.
We have asked them to commit the same atrocities that the priests did when they were in charge. We have
forced this situation by requiring that they bring us relevant innovations. We have turned them into some-
thing almost as bad as lawyers. Something to toy with us and our strange needs. Scientists could be some-
thing to entertain us and invent nice things for us. They don’t have to be justifying their existence by scar-
ing us out of our wits. Can’t they be comforting? It’s up to us, not them, because they depend on us for
support. We have to arrange them in sich a way that they and we benefit from the arrangement.

“Hundreds of years after [Robert] Boyle’s experiments, we still haven’t learned to separate matters of fact
from our beliefs. We have accepted as true the belief that we are responsible for global warming and a
growing hole in the ozone layer — without scientific evidence. We have faith in disaster. Scientists have a
considerable financial stake in our continuing to believe that these problems threaten our lives and must
be solved. They get paid for it. What do we get out of it? Is it a feeling of comfort, of knowing that our
 lives are being protected?”
— Kary Mullis, Ph.D., Dancing Naked in the Mind Field [1998],
pp. 113-114, 119-120

On April 11 the San Diego City Council yielded to pressure from the medical establishment, the state of
California and a private consortium and authorized the fluoridation of San Diego’s drinking water, despite
the fact that the people of San Diego voted twice (in 1954 and 1968) not to allow their water to be fluori-
dated. At the Council meeting, speakers in favor of fluoridation — almost all of them public or private health
officials — repeatedly said that fluoridating water was a “greater good” and that people who are allergic to
fluoride compounds will just have to accept the “greater good” and buy expensive bottled water to avoid it.
Right now one of the leading health controversies in the world is over the increasingly sophisticated
genetic engineering of foods. Companies like Monsanto and Novartis have pioneered the use of gene-splic-
ing to put animal genes into plants, add built-in genetic pesticides into crops and create new plant varieties
that won’t be vulnerable to the herbicides the companies make. They’ve also persuaded the U.S. government
that they should have the right to market these products without even labeling them and giving consumers a
choice whether or not to buy them, on the grounds that “experts” at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) have certified them as safe and therefore we don’t need to know whether our food has been gene-
spliced or not.
In addition to forcing us to take powerful medication with our drinking water, health officials are also
becoming more aggressive about using the judicial process to compel reluctant parents to medicate their chil-
dren. Pregnant women who test so-called “HIV-positive” are increasingly being ordered to take the power-
ful, highly toxic AIDS drug AZT during the last stages of their pregnancy, and not to breast-feed their chil-
dren, to prevent HIV “transmission” from mother to child during birth. The fact that AZT use during preg-
nancy also triples the risk of bearing a child with birth defects doesn’t enter into it. Mothers who have chal-
lenged the health professionals have had their children taken away by child protective services departments
and courts, and organizers like Christine Maggiore (an “HIV-positive” mother himself who died in 2008)
have had to help set up a new “underground railroad” so “HIV-positive” women unwilling to expose them-
selves and their unborn children to AZT can have their babies drug-free.
Right now, as I’m writing this editorial, I’m listening to a National Public Radio broadcast on the contro-
versy surrounding South African President Thabo Mbeki’s willingness to talk to scientists who challenge the
conventional wisdom that AIDS is caused by a sexually transmitted virus, HIV. The guests on this program
repeatedly said that it was “dangerous” for a head of state even to discuss the possibility that HIV might not
cause AIDS on the grounds that it might create “confusion” among the citizens of his country and lead them
to take unnecessary sexual risks. Mark Wainberg, Canadian-based AIDS researcher, president of the
International AIDS Societies and co-chair of this year’s upcoming international AIDS conference in Durban,
South Africa, has even said that people who publicly question the HIV/AIDS model should be criminally
prosecuted on the grounds that, merely by expressing that idea, they are threatening other people’s lives.1
Welcome to the brave new world of scientocracy, in which individuals with scientific or professional cre-
dentials are increasingly demanding that governments enshrine their version of the “truth” as holy writ and
use their powers to compel their citizens to do what the scientocrats believe is “best” for them, whether they
want to or not. On issue after issue — from the “fact” that HIV causes AIDS to the supposed benefits of flu-
oridated water, from the “safety” of nuclear power to the existence of global warming — coalitions of sci-
entists, universities and the private industries that make money off their discoveries have successfully lob-
bied governments to fund only one side of a scientific debate, and have actively repressed and destroyed the
reputations of scientists like John Gofman, Peter Duesberg and Phyllis Mullenix who have stubbornly insist-
ed on being guided by the facts as they see them, rather than the conventional wisdom.
Scientocracy is largely the creation of the U.S. government and other countries and international organi-
zations which have followed our innovation of making massive subsidies available for certain kinds of sci-
entific research. Government funding of research has helped build the scientific establishment, but it’s also
pretty much wiped out the scientific method. Instead of competing with each other to validate their hypothe-
ses through experiment and evidence, the way scientists are supposed to do, scientocrats compete by lobby-
ing government officials to adopt their pet hypotheses as truth and stop all funding of alternative possibili-
ties. The result has been that scientific “truth” is no longer determined by a fair competition between ideas,
but by government bureaucrats who decide, often on the most arbitrary grounds, which ideas shall be
declared “true” and supported by funding — and which shall be declared “false” and read out of the debate.
Another factor in the development of scientocracy has been the shabby, woefully inadequate state of sci-
entific education. Schoolchildren are no longer taught the truth about science — that it is a process for acquir-
ing knowledge. Instead people have been led to believe that you turn to scientists for results, for “truths” on
which society can form its public policy and act on medical, environmental and physical issues. Real scien-
tists ask questions, and frequently don’t get the answers they expect; scientocrats make statements and con-
sciously or unconsciously skew their research designs to generate the answers they believed to be “true” all
along. Scientocrats have also carefully cultivated a cult of expertise, in which we are led to believe that these
issues are too complex for us to understand and only the officially credentialed “experts” with lots of letters
after their names can tell us what to think about them.
Scientocracy is not science. In fact, scientocracy is the opposite of science, even though it dresses itself
up in scientific drag and adopts the trappings and appearance of science. The essence of science is that every-
thing we think is always subject to change if new evidence arises that challenges what we think we know.
The moment you hear a supposed scientist say that a certain issue is “definitively settled,” “absolutely estab-
lished” or “beyond question,” you’re really listening to a scientocrat — and you should beware.

SCIENTOCRACY NOTES

1) Scientocracy is the belief that scientists should have control over public policy on important issues, and
that their “expert” advice is unassailable and should be followed without question.

2) Scientocracy is based on a culture of expertise, which holds that the “truth” about what is going on in the
real world is so complicated that only a handful of people can possibly understand it, and the rest of us
must take on faith what the “experts” are telling us, and act accordingly.

3) Scientocracy is based on the idea that there is one readily discernible and absolute “truth” about a scien-
tific question. Therefore, it is opposed to the spirit of genuine science, which is based on the idea that there
are no absolute truths, and what we believe about any given question is merely our best guess/hypothe-
sis/theory based on the available evidence as observed in the real world and in controlled experiments.
(Mention the evolution of heliocentrism from Copernicus to Newton to Einstein.)

4) Scientocracy almost always operates in a crisis mode. It attempts to repress both scientific and lay dissent
by creating a sense of panic and fear, using the classically loaded language of all propagandists: the “cri-
sis” of global warming, the “war” on cancer, the “epidemic” of AIDS. The objective is to argue that the
crisis is so immediate, and needs to be responded to so quickly, that there is no time for scientific debate
or any questioning of what the scientocrats want us to do.

5) Because scientocracy depends for its credibility on the appearance of absolute authority and unanimity in
the scientific community, it is particularly harsh on other scientists who question its beliefs. Scientocracy
has developed effective ways to discipline scientists who attempt to reopen questions the scientocrats have
declared closed, through loss of employment, grant funding and prestige. (Mention John Gofman and
nuclear power; Phyllis Mullenix and fluoridation; Peter Duesberg and AIDS.)

6) Scientocracy could not exist without the active support of the political system and the private sector. Much
of scientocracy’s power to repress genuine scientific dissent comes from its control of employment oppor-
tunities, public or private, for scientists in the relevant fields of expertise.
7) Scientocracy could also not exist without the lack of scrutiny given to scientific issues in the mainstream
media. As alternative journalist Celia Farber has noted, reporters who write about scientific issues gener-
ally allow themselves to be controlled by their sources far more than other journalists do. Because jour-
nalists themselves are part of the “cult of expertise,” they merely report what scientific authorities say to
them instead of questioning them skeptically, or looking for vested interests that might affect their
sources’ reliability and objectivity, as journalists routinely do with politicians and other professionals they
interview.

8) Scientocratic beliefs always are powered by ulterior motives: particularly the desire to make money and/or
to influence the polical system and/or the private behavior of individuals, which are more easily facilitat-
ed if certain things are assumed to be “true” than if these questions are reopened for genuine scientific
debate.

9) The only reason science can claim more validity for its conclusions than religion is if it is subject to the
self-discipline of the scientific method. Scientocracy turns science into a religion by setting aside the sci-
entific method and replacing it with the pronouncements of credentialed “experts” which no one — sci-
entist or lay person — is allowed to question. Indeed, often scientocratic beliefs are framed in the same
language as religious ones — as when mainstream AIDS researchers incredulously asked Kary Mullis,
“You mean, you don’t believe that HIV causes AIDS?”

10) Under pressure from scientocratic beliefs, public policies are being shaped and people are being forced
to behave in certain ways and limit their activities in others (i.e., pressure to undergo possibly unneces-
sary medical procedures; forced medication, especially of children; virtually forced consumption of pos-
sibly unsafe food). Therefore, humanists should be as concerned with the abuses of social power and
human freedom in the name of scientocracy as they are with those abuses in the name of religion.

APPENDIX: Basic presentation of the arguments against the scientocratic HIV/AIDS model:

I) Introduction
1) 1981: first AIDS cases — a medically (and arbitrarily) defined condition from the first!
2) from the beginning cases were referred to as “clusters” — no consideration given to common
lifestyle factors, other non-infectious explanations or multi-factorial explanations — search for the
cause immediately focused on idea there was “single underlying microbe” (Fauci, Nightline, 4/4/94)
and CDC representatives regarded scientists looking for “lifestyle explanations” as political prob-
lems rather than legitimate researchers
3) April 23, 1984: HIV press conference-Heckler/Gallo — no peer review and no publication in
scientific press prior to announcement — still no established reference that definitively establishes
HIV/AIDS hypothesis
4) immediate cessation of all funding for AIDS research not involving HIV
5) results: no cure, no vaccine, no effective treatment, no lives saved and no accurate predictions
(predictions continually overestimate the numbers of new cases)
II. Why HIV Cannot Cause AIDS/Why AIDS Cannot Be Infectious
1) Infectious agents have a short time window in which to cause disease (days or weeks) before the
immune system either destroys the “bug,” confines the “bug,” or loses to the bug and death occurs
a) TB, hepatitis, herpes, syphilis as partial exceptions to above rule — immune system con-
fines these germs but can’t kill them completely — later damage or weakening of the
immune system can allow these diseases to become active again — but the microbes that
cause these diseases do not cause the immune system to weaken!
b) AIDS “latency period” is estimated at 10 years — not consistent with viral or bacterial
 infection, but is consistent with diseases caused by environmental or chemical toxins (i.e.,
10-year gap between time you start smoking and first health complications from tobacco)
2) Infectious diseases spread evenly between men and women; AIDS in U.S. and Western Europe is
still 80 to 95 percent male (depending on which definition is used)
a) Viruses do not discriminate (Duesberg: “To a virus we are just 73 kg. of meat”), but
AIDS does — to believe AIDS is caused by a virus, one must believe it’s a virus that knows
men from women, people of color from whites, Gays from straights and Westerners from
Africans
3) Infectious agents cause similar symptoms in all patients; they do not cause different diseases in
people on different continents or with different lifestyles, but AIDS is defined differently and has
different characteristic diseases in different groups (KS in Gay/Bi men, PCP in drug users, TB in
POC’s, diarrhea and “wasting” in Africans)2
4) HIV is a retrovirus — weakest type of virus there is and most dependent on its host cells to func-
tion at all
a) therefore a retrovirus would not cause a disease that killed cells (the characteristic associ-
ated with AIDS) — if a retrovirus caused any disease at all, it would be one associated with
cell growth (i.e., a cancer, which is why retroviruses were researched as cancer agents from
1971-81)
5) HIV is assumed to have properties unknown to any other microbe known to science — yet it is
no larger than any other retrovirus, it has the same amount of genetic information (10,000 DNA
base-pairs) and needs virtually all of its genetic information just to survive and replicate
a) HIV is assumed to cause disease only after a “latency period” of up to 10+ years
b) HIV is assumed to cause disease only after an antibody reaction (a “positive” test) — yet
for most microbial diseases, the formation of antibodies is considered proof of long-term
immunity, not certain evidence that you will get the disease and will die from it
c) HIV is assumed to kill cells it doesn’t infect (HIV is only found in one of 500 CD4 cells
and only active in one of 10,000 — yet far more CD4 cells are commonly lost in AIDS)
6) The so-called “HIV test” is actually a test for antibodies, which are generally considered protec-
tive agents against viral disease (indeed, the purpose of vaccination is to induce the body to develop
antibodies!). Yet, whereas for all genuinely viral diseases the presence of antibodies is said to confer
immunity, for so-called “HIV/AIDS” the presence of antibodies is said to predict, to a virtual 100 per-
cent certainty, that the person will get AIDS and will die prematurely. Also, at least 64 conditions that
can cause false-positive HIV tests have been documented in the scientific literature, including such
common diseases as tuberculosis, hepatitis, herpes, malaria, leprosy and lupus — as well as preg-
nancy, especially in women who have been pregnant before.

1 — Toronto Globe and Mail, Monday, May 1, 2000:

HIV deniers should be jailed: researcher

Head of AIDS body slams fringe movement

ANDRÉ PICARD
Public Health Reporter, Montreal

Those who contend that HIV does not cause AIDS are criminally irresponsible and should be jailed for the menace
they pose to public health, one of the world’s top researchers says.
Dr. Mark Wainberg, president of the International AIDS Society, said yesterday [April 30] there is little doubt that the
statements of HIV deniers have caused “countless” individuals to contract the deadly immunodeficiency virus.
“People have died as a consequence of the Peter Duesbergs of this world,” he said, singling out the guru of the fringe
movement. Dr. Duesberg, a biochemist at the University of California at Berkeley, argues that HIV is harmless and that
AIDS is caused by drugs, including those used to treat HIV. What angers public-health advocates most is the dissident’s
 view that condoms and safe sex are “irrelevant.”
Dr. Wainberg said he believes in free speech, but limits to free speech are justified when it grossly undermines pub-
lic-health efforts.
“If we could succeed and lock a couple of these guys up, I guarantee you the HIV-denier movement would die pret-
ty darn quickly,” he said in a fiery speech at the closing of the annual conference of the Canadian Association for HIV
Research, being held in Montreal.
Dr. Wainberg, a renowned researcher who has become an activist in his role as head of the largest international AIDS
body, has in the past dismissed HIV deniers as “crazy kooks who should be ignored the same way we should ignore
Holocaust deniers.” But, lately, he has mounted a public rhetorical crusade.
There are two reasons for the change of heart. Domestically, the McGill University researcher has been angered by
publication of The Virus Within, a book by journalist Nicholas Regush that argues AIDS is caused by herpes virus 6, not
by HIV.
Internationally, Dr. Wainberg is troubled by the fact that the President of South Africa, one of the countries hit hard-
est by HIV-AIDS, has publicly endorsed the views of Dr. Duesberg [sic].
President Thabo Mbeki has lashed out at those refusing to debate the cause of AIDS for waging a “campaign of intel-
lectual intimidation and terrorism” and has likened their intransigence to the “racist apartheid tyranny we opposed.”
Dr. Wainberg disagrees, saying that to even debate the question “Does HIV cause AIDS?” leads to irresponsible sex-
ual behaviour and prompts those undergoing treatment to abandon their medications.
He told delegates that, in other matters of public health, such as smoking, the debate would not be tolerat-
ed.

2— AIDS in Africa is defined by a different set of criteria than those used in the U.S. and Western Europe.
These are a series of clinical criteria called the Bangui case definition, that were worked out at a confer-
ence in Bangui, Central African Republic, in 1985. Africans can be diagnosed as having “AIDS,” without
any testing for HIV antibodies, if they have any three of the following four clinical symptoms:

a) prolonged fever
b) persistent cough
c) chronic diarrhea (loose stools) for 30 days
d) 10 percent loss in body weight over a two-month period

The problem with the Bangui definition is it encompasses a lot of other things besides “AIDS.” Many trop-
ical infections endemic to sub-Saharan Africa can generate any or all of the symptoms of Bangui AIDS.
Australian AIDS researchers Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and Valendar F. Turner published an article,
“AIDS in Africa?” (Reappraising AIDS, January 1995), in which they offered the following explanation of
the Bangui definition and its significance in terms of the non-comparability of AIDS statistics between the
Western world and Africa:

“Unlike the West, AIDS in Africa is diagnosed without any laboratory tests. Patients are classified
as AIDS cases without laboratory proof that they have either immunodeficiency or an HIV infec-
tion. All that is required is to have various clinical conditions. But the conditions accepted as form-
ing the ‘S’ (syndrome) of ‘AIDS’ in Africa bear no relationship to AIDS in the West. In the West,
AIDS is diagnosed if a person has one or more of approximately 27 relatively rare diseases.

“However in Africa, AIDS is diagnosed according to the World Health Organization’s 1986/87 [sic]
‘Bangui’ definitions that can best be described as a collage of common non-specific symptoms,
such as cough, fever, diarrhea, tuberculosis (TB) and a cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. [Other
researchers have disputed the classification of Kaposi’s sarcoma as a cancer. — M.G.C.] Every one
of these diseases has been endemic in Africa for generations.

“Kaposi’s sarcoma, for example, was described in the Ebers papyrus dating from 1600 B.C. (In the West,
Kaposi’s sarcoma [as an AIDS-associated condition] is restricted to Gay men.) Of the 661 million people
in sub-Saharan Africa, 2-3 million have active TB with an annual mortality of 790,000. Despite this and
the fact that in adults, ‘HIV infection’ usually follows TB infection, TB has now become an AIDS-defining
illness. In fact, 30-50 percent of African ‘AIDS’ deaths are from TB. In spite of all this, AIDS experts
expect that we should accept that something ‘new’ is afoot in Africa and that it is caused by a new agent,
HIV.”

Reappraising AIDS is available for $25 per year from the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the
HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, c/o Charles A. Thomas, Jr., 7514 Girard Avenue, #1-331, La Jolla, CA 92037,
[fax] (619) 272-1621, [e-mail] cathomas@netcom.com.