Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.
In Episode Thirteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘Occam’s Razor’, before I begin telling you about my research into cytomegalovirus, CMV, I will explain how Occam’s Razor works and how I think it applies to theories about the cause (s) of AIDS.
Occam’s Razor states that, suppose there are two explanations for an occurrence, the one that requires the smallest number of assumptions is usually correct. Or, the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation is. Or, the simplest explanation is often closer to the truth than a complicated one. Or, the more complicated and absurd a story is, the less likely it is to be true.
In terms of the cause of AIDS, the official narrative is that at some point in the first half of the 20th century, a hunter/soldier was infected by a chimpanzee virus in Cameroon, which, despite this probably happening 1000s of times previously, this time then morphed into ‘HIV.’ Without infecting anyone in Cameroon, the hunter/soldier travelled hundreds of miles to the Belgian Congo city of Leopoldville (Kinshasha), infected someone else and, hey presto, some twenty / thirty years later, ‘African AIDS’ began in Kinshasa, with the virus affecting mainly heterosexuals. Meanwhile in the late 1960s, the virus was carried across the Atlantic by Haitian professionals, who then passed it onto gay male Americans in the early 1970s and this led to the gay male AIDS epidemic, followed by the IVDU and hemophiliac epidemics. Despite this complicated scenario, Gallo still titled one of his chapters in his AIDS book, ‘Virus Hunting: Cancer, AIDS, and the Human Retrovirus: a Story of Scientific Discovery’, ‘A Single Disease With A Single Cause.’ Apparently the ‘Syndrome’ part of the AIDS acronym didn’t register with the esteemed Professor Gallo aka ‘The Charlatan’.
The alternative narrative in terms of the cause of AIDS doesn’t involve any of the following: hard to find African chimpanzees, zoonotic transfers, Haitians, gay male exceptionalism, decades where nothing happens until miraculously, simultaneously, on either side of the Atlantic two epidemics occur, or a 40 year global conspiracy to cover up the truth. The immune system overload explanation simply states that small subsets of gay males, IVDUs and hemophiliacs, due to the amplification systems provided by the 1970s bath-houses and shooting galleries, and the arrival, also in the 1970s, of Factor 8, which overloaded, burnt out and collapsed their immune systems, and left them powerless to resist the rather characteristic and relatively uniform patterns of infectious diseases collectively known as ‘AIDS’.
Of course, the gay male sex and poppers industries and the Factor 8 manufacturers, denied the links but don’t forget, ‘lung cancer was once a very rare disease, so rare that doctors took special notice when confronted with a case, thinking it a once-in-a-lifetime oddity. Mechanisation and mass marketing towards the end of the 19th century popularised the cigarette habit (the amplification system), causing a global lung cancer epidemic. Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of the epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics. Naturally, cigarette manufacturers disputed this evidence, as part of an orchestrated conspiracy to salvage cigarette sales. Propagandising the public proved successful, judging from secret tobacco industry measurements of the impact of denialist propaganda. As late as 1960 only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established. Part of the ease of cigarette manufacturing stems from the ubiquity of high-speed cigarette making machines, which crank out 20 000 cigarettes per min.’ Now, that’s what I call an amplification system!
So, which of those two explanations of the inception of AIDS best satisfies Occam’s Razor? I’ll leave that to you to decide.
Thank you for listening to Episode Thirteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. I will begin telling you about my research into CMV and AIDS and an amazing series of ‘firsts’ in Episode Fourteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’
Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.
‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1916399/pdf/amjpathol00192-0119.pdf ‘Autopsy Pathology in the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’
https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87 ‘The history of the discovery of the cigarette–lung cancer link: evidentiary traditions, corporate denial, global toll’
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Virus-Hunting-Retrovirus-Scientific-Discovery/dp/0465098061 Gallo’s book
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