The Great AIDS Drug Cover-up

 What if scientists discovered a drug or nutritional supplement that worked excellently against HIV, and most other viruses - but no one knew about it? That has happened more than once.

            If a researcher makes a scientific discovery and does not publish a scientific journal article explaining their findings, did they really discover anything at all? Or, if it was a highly significant breakthrough, and they did not publish a paper about it, did they try to cover it up for some reason? Two quick examples.

            The first entails research conducted at the Community Research Initiative on AIDS – CRIA – New York in 1989 and 1990. CRIA conducted a laboratory test of a type of aspirin called asacol or 5-ASA. It showed that asacol by itself was about 65% as effective in reducing HIV viral replication as AZT, the first HIV drug. Then CRIA conducted a small clinical trial of asacol on people with HIV. It showed excellent benefits. Then without explanation they discontinued that research. A decade later I showed that moderate daily doses of aspirin could strongly increase CD4 count for many months, up to one year. If CRIA had continued this line of research it could have opened the door to expanding that seemingly insignificant finding, and testing other drugs that work like, but are much stronger than aspirin. Added to other therapies, that could have saved many more lives of people with HIV in the early 1990s. If the medical community had learned that lesson then, it could have saved millions of lives worldwide during the current Covid pandemic. While most of this broad class of over a dozen NF-kB inhibitor drugs still awaits testing specifically against Covid, these drugs are as likely to reduce viral replication as water is likely to put out a fire. Aspirin or ibuprofen will not put out a fire of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Physicians need diclofenac, resveratrol, curcumin, or dexamethasone for that. Those are 14.9, 67.5, 131, and 210 times as strong as aspirin. They will help quench the viral fires of SARS-CoV-2. This is basic science. NF-kB inhibitors reduce viral fires. However, aspirin and ibuprofen can be used at the very beginning of infection. The only problem is these older NF-kB inhibitor drugs are not profitable for the pharmaceutical industry. Big Pharma would rather people not know about them.

The second, more vivid example of the cover-up of an effective antiviral medication concerns research conducted in Nigeria in the early 2000s by a lead scientist from the Harvard School of Public Health in cooperation with researchers from the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research. They published the following abstract of their findings at the Sixteenth International AIDS Conference in 2006 in Montreal, Canada - abstract number MOAB0403. An abbreviated version of that abstract follows:

Title: The role of selenium as adjunct to HAART among HIV-infected individuals who are advanced in their disease.              

Investigators: N.N.Odunukwe, et.al.

Conclusions: Selenium supplementation results in higher CD4. This supports selenium supplement as an adjunct to HAART in HIV positive individuals with severe immune suppression.

            The above abstract reports a remarkably powerful result for selenium added to HAART therapy.

            In this clinical trial two thirds of participants started with less than 50 CD4 count. The participants were on the study for one year, three months. Those who were only on the three ARV drugs increased their CD4 from 50 at the beginning to 100 at the end. The group that added one 200mcg tablet of selenium increased their CD4 count by 120 to 170. That is above the point people develop most life endangering infections. That is a 140% better increase than the group that was only on ARVs. Because of this much higher increase in CD4, the group with added selenium had significancy fewer expensive hospital visits. This significantly reduces the cost of treating HIV disease.       

            The second main factor that was measured by the clinical trial was hemoglobin. This is a measure of how much oxygen is carried in the blood and reflects if a person is suffering from anemia. This also indicates how much energy a person will have.  

            According to the trial results the group that was only receiving HAART increased their hemoglobin levels by 10 grams per liter of blood. The group that received selenium increased three times as much, by 30 grams. This reflects the fact that red blood cells that carry oxygen require selenium for their formation. Advanced HIV patients are low on selenium, low on red blood cells, and suffer from anemia. Thus, supplementing selenium back into the body provides enough selenium to increase red blood cells and increase the hemoglobin and the level of oxygen getting to the body. Red blood cells require high levels of both iron and selenium for their formation. However, iron is a prooxidant. It will increase both viral replication and bacterial reproduction. Therefore, treating an AIDS related anemia with iron is counterproductive.

            This Nigerian finding confirmed a huge breakthrough in AIDS research. This represents the addition of a unique method to strongly increase CD4 and better understand viral disease progression. Although four or five previous smaller studies had shown how powerfully selenium could increase CD4 count, none of those studies had been nearly as large as this one or had been conducted on such advanced cases of AIDS. The very clear difference in results between the two study arms was striking. All things being equal, the results of this study should have been elevated to center stage of the Montreal AIDS Conference in 2006 for thousands of delegates to see and discuss. Instead, it was relegated to a mere poster presentation that would hang on a wall for two hours. But that was only the beginning of the coverup.

            For years I wondered where or if a medical journal article existed reporting these fundamentally important results. If no article had ever been published, this research would be totally lost to science. No wonder most people in the HIV treatment and care community were not aware of the power of selenium to help treat this disease. Selenium is a safe, available, effective, affordable supplement that is not contraindicated to any other drug. Although it is not nearly as effective as ARVs in suppressing viral replication, it is much more effective at quickly increasing CD4 count and treating anemia. Over the years researchers have shown it helps against almost all opportunistic infections. It is the best possible additional or complementary treatment for HIV. Yet it is not being used. Why? A major reason is no medical journal article reporting the above results was ever published.        

            But these were not fantastic results for everyone. They were not fantastic for the makers of the other three drugs used in the study. Those pharmaceutical companies would not want people to know that adding selenium alone could double the benefits of their much more expensive patented drugs.

Pharmaceutical companies often have clauses in their research contracts that scientific investigators cannot publish anything about any research that includes their drugs as part of a trial. Since in some ways selenium outperformed the ARV drugs used in that trial, those companies would definitely not want that information released. Thus, the Nigerian research investigators were allowed their abstract to be posted for two hours at the conference in Montreal, but the HIV/AIDS community worldwide was kept in the dark about this historic research. The lives of millions with HIV could have been saved or at least extended with better health if this advance in therapeutic knowledge had been widely applied. Since selenium is as applicable to Covid-19 as it is to HIV, millions of lives could have been saved in the Covid-19 pandemic as well, if only this information had not been covered up and had seen the light of day.      

            The organizers of the Montreal AIDS Conference should have elevated this research to center stage at the conference. Is doubling the benefit of HAART therapy in increasing CD4 count and tripling hemoglobin increase not something to shout about rather than hide? While millions with HIV suffered the consequences of this coverup, when Covid passed through, tens of millions suffered from the gap in knowledge.

            The people who die of AIDS, Ebola and Covid-19 all die due to the same phenomenon - the severe depletion of selenium due to increased viral replication.

            Research coverups kill. How many millions will that one kill in the next pandemic? It has already killed plenty due to Covid-19.