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Reviewed by Rebort

Does a virus called HIV cause AIDS? If you thought that this was a given, then the arguments put forward in this controversial low-budget DV documentary may come as a big surprise. Robin Scovill's film challenges the received science, suggesting that HIV tests are flawed, that patients are more likely to die of the AIDS drugs like AZT than of AIDS itself and that current treatments encourage a negative mentality that reduces life expectancy and quality of life.

Interviews with experts, including nobel prize-winning biochemist Kary Mullis, ex-Sunday Times science journalist Neville Hodgkinson, and Dr Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular cell biology from the University of California, hammer away at the widely held assumptions about AIDS. Follow the money, suggests Mullis, who views the network of subsidised bodies that have grown up around the AIDS industry as a large self-serving corporation.

Interviews with those diagonised as HIV positive who have survived medication-free since the early Eighties, often living longer than those who took the drugs, provide a compelling argument at a human, anecdotal level. Gay men and HIV positive mothers, some who died in the course of filming, reveal just how much pressure their doctors, social workers, the law and even law-enforcement officers, put upon them to take the meds in spite of the many unpleasant physical and psychological side-effects on them and their children. Duesberg, who has been ostracised from the medical community for not toeing the line, suggests that zapping HIV viruses with prescribed AIDS drugs is akin "to shooting at bunnies with nuclear weapons".

One of the most passionate spokespersons for living with the virus drug-free is author Christine Maggiore, a HIV-positive mother of two. Maggiore, it turns out in the closing credits, is also the filmmaker’s wife, and author of the book What If Everything You Knew About Aids Was Wrong, so perhaps there should be no surprise that the doc appears so one-sided. The voices that we do hear from the AIDS establishment come across as entrenched, arrogant and patronising, reinforcing the sense that corporate drug interests rather than sound science have been driving AIDS and HIV treatment over the last two decades.

One of the most troubling interviews is with leading AIDS expert and President of the International AIDS Society and Professor of Molecular Biology at McGill University, Mark Wainberg, who goes on the immediate defensive in interview, before drawing it prematurely to a close for apparently little reason other than he had said his piece and that was that. He suggests rather melodramtically that the constitution should be changed in order to punish “dissident” scientists like Dr Peter Duesberg for suggesting that HIV does not cause AIDS. Wainberg also calls Duesberg a “scientific psychopath.”

Scovill and Maggiore who made the film have been called irresponsible for giving people who have tested HIV positive false hope, but after weighing the comments from the reactionary Wainberg with the often reasonable arguments from the so-called dissidents you will wonder if the received thinking is just plain wrong. Although the film could benefit from some polish and comment from more familiar names to back up these highly controversial arguments, the filmmakers should be congratulated for bringing the debate to a wider audience.

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