AIDS in the US, early period : interview with Michael Ellner, president, HEAL

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, August-Sept, 2005 by Marcus A. Cohen

Dr. Giraldo chimed in on this mindset: "And if I infect somebody, I don't care."

"They were angry at the world," explained Ellner. "If I got it, somebody else should get it."

Ellner thought, this was the dark side of hypnosis. This was mass hypnosis ... people were being hypnotized to get sick and die. "I wanted to stand up against it," he said, "and I have never looked back."

Again ripping the medical establishment slant on AIDS, Ellner remarked, "I didn't need a Duesburg to tell me they were full of s__t.... Just in the groups ... I'm meeting hundreds of people.... These people have low T cells, but they're not sick. I meet somebody with high T cells, and he has TB and dies. I'm beginning to watch the T cells and how it affects people. And I started saying, 'don't take T cell tests ... they're totally misleading.'"

Later on, noted Ellner, science confirmed his empirical advice about T cells and the unreliability of tests measuring them. When widespread testing went into use, around '85, '86, he had been forced to educate himself on the T cell and the antibody tests [ELIZAS and Western Blots].

"These guys with AIDS were desperate. They were reading everything they could. You couldn't have an intelligent conversation, if you didn't know what they knew."

By the time he started talking to doctors, Ellner had done his homework; he had learned as much about the subject as anybody.

"I'm not the kind of person who defers," he said, "and I began to see a huge, glaring problem.... People were testing positive on antibody tests and told they had an active infection. And everything I read suggested that they were testing for previous exposure. I wanted someone to explain to me why this was different historically [speaking] ... When you have an antibody test, normally it says you've been exposed ... it doesn't say you have an active infection.... So why were these people told, convincingly [that they had AIDS], and treated as if they had an active infection? This predates viral load BS.

"How do you justify the treatment?" Ellner asked. "If the person had symptoms, and was ill, I didn't have anything to say; but [these] were basically healthy people.... So I had this concern ... I would go to the different meetings. HEAL ... was considered a viable AIDS organization, because people were open about alternative therapies.... It seemed that HEAL had a niche, and at the time I wasn't viewed as political."

At these meetings, remembered Ellner, they had somebody from the Department of Health, New York City, or from the state AIDS institute, or from the CDC. "They would be there to educate us.... I would raise my hand and I would say 'could someone explain to me the difference between exposure and infection.' And they would say something to the effect, 'well, this is a public health issue, and we're trying to prevent future infections, and we know what we're doing.'"

"I kept hearing this, and then I thought, well, maybe I'm the problem. Maybe they're right. Maybe this does make sense, public healthwise. But I started noticing something that I felt was criminal. It wasn't that they were only telling these basic[ally] healthy guys they were infected, they were treating them as if they were infected.... And I was saying to myself, 'wait a second, you know it's one thing to say we're going to protect people and scare them. It's another to murder them.'"