Book Review

Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS Celia Farber, Melville House Publishing (mhpbooks.com), 2006 Review by Mike Pursley

It could be argued that not knowing much about AIDS is a blessing, for ignorance implies a lack of personal experience on such an ugly subject. For an AIDS layman such as myself, Celia Farber’s Serious Adverse Events was a bomb planted at the very center of the beliefs I had previously held.

Celia Farber, “the most dangerous AIDS reporter” according to POZ Magazine’s Richard Berkowitz, wrote and edited SPIN magazine’s AIDS column, “Words From The Front” for a decade. The majority of the chapters are pulled from the pages of SPIN dating back to 1988. Even Farber’s earliest reports continue to illuminate and resound.

Farber’s central argument throughout this collection questions the link between HIV, the virus that causes AIDS according to conventional theory, and development of AIDS. AIDS, a crushing total collapse of the body’s immune system, is the set of symptoms that may or may not be caused by HIV. Considering the 4,000 cases of AIDS where not a trace of HIV is present, and that patients may test positive for HIV antibodies and never develop AIDS, it seems there is more to the picture than the HIV-causes-AIDS model currently uncontested by most scientists.

The scientific community is spared no mercy by Farber. The development of the HIV-AIDS theory by Robert Gallo in the mid 1980s quickly closed the door on any alternate views on the cause of the disease. Money for research into the cause of AIDS was directed into development of drugs to attack HIV, many of them horrifically toxic. Open minded scientists such as Peter Duesberg, who questioned whether researchers came to consensus much too early, were condemned, denied funding, and eventually ostracized from the scientific community.

“Today scientists are wholly dependent for their survival upon the will of a conjoined financial megalopolis connecting government, academia, and the bio-tech and pharmaceutical industries” writes Farber. Beginning with heavy FDA push of AZT, many other promising drugs were abandoned for a chemical that was toxic, expensive, and only effective in the short term. Chemical cocktails were tested on patients under questionable circumstances, rushed through the drug approval process, and destroyed many patients’ liver tissue.

Farber devotes chapters to the rampant infection of the African continent, where she reveals that an AIDS diagnosis is given too liberally in African hospitals. Fatalities from diseases such as TB and “wasting sickness” are hastily deemed to be AIDS cases. This practice skews statistics and leaves African doctors unsure of how to effectively treat their patients.

By the end of Serious Adverse Events a central paradox to the AIDS question emerges. There is too much money and interest involved to find a cure. Prescription drugs and clinical trials are too much of a big business to benefit those truly in need. AIDS is “like a global corporation, and what is produces and sells primarily is fear.” AIDS is more than a compromised immune system. Also compromised in this nasty business is science, ethical reporting, human rights, human dignity, and a nonpartisan pharmaceutical industry. Luckily, Celia Farber has not failed in her reporting. This book will make you angry.