Kary Mullis excerpt:
The Corona Simulation Machine: Why the Inventor of The “Corona Test” Would Have Warned Us Not To Use It To Detect A Virus. Our talk focused on AIDS. Though Mullis has not been particularly vocal about his HIV skepticism, his convictions have not, to his credit, been muddled or softened by his recent success and mainstream acceptability. He seems to revel in his newly acquired power. “They can’t pooh-pooh me now, because of who I am,” he says with a chuckle – and by all accounts, he’s using that power effectively. When ABC’s “Nightline” approached Mullis about participating in a documentary on himself, he instead urged them to focus their attention on the HIV debate. “That’s a much more important story,” he told the producers, who up to that point had never acknowledged the controversy. In the end, “Nightline” ran a two-part series, the first on Kary Mullis, the second on the HIV debate. Mullis was hired by ABC for a two-week period, to act as their scientific consultant and direct them to sources. The show was superb, and represented a historic turning point, possibly even the end of the seven-year media blackout on the HIV debate. But it still didn’t fulfill Mullis’ ultimate fantasy. “What ABC needs to do,” says Mullis, “is talk to [Chairman of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony] Fauci and [Dr. Robert] Gallo [one of the discoverers of HIV] and show that they’re assholes, which I could do in ten minutes.” But I point out, Gallo will refuse to discuss the HIV debate, just as he’s always done. “I know he will,” Mullis shoots back, anger rising in his voice. “But you know what? I would be willing to chase the little bastard from his car to his office and say, ‘This is Kary Mullis trying to ask you a goddamn simple question,’ and let the cameras follow. If people think I’m a crazy person, that’s okay. But here’s a Nobel Prize-winner trying to ask a simple question from those who spent $22 billion and killed 100,000 people. It has to be on TV. It’s a visual thing. I’m not unwilling to do something like that.” He pauses, then continues. “And I don’t care about making an ass of myself because most people realize I am one.” While many people, even within the ranks of the HIV dissidents, have of late tried to distance themselves from the controversial Duesberg, Mullis defends him passionately and seems genuinely concerned about his fate. “I was trying to stress this point to the ABC people” he says, “that Peter has been abused seriously by the scientific establishment, to the point where he can’t even do any research. Not only that, but his whole life is pretty much in disarray because of this, and it is only because he has refused to compromise his scientific moral standards. There ought to be some goddamn private foundation in the country, that would say, ‘Well, we’ll move in where the NIH [National Institutes of Health] dropped off. We’ll take care of it. You just keep right on saying what you’re saying, Peter. We think you’re an asshole, and we think you are wrong, but you’re the only dissenter, and we need one, because it’s science, it’s not religion.’ And that was one of the reasons why I cooperated with ABC.”
“I am waiting to be convinced that we’re wrong,” Mullis continues. “I know it ain’t going to happen. But if it does, I will tell you this much – I will be the first person to admit it. A lot of people studying this disease are looking for the clever little pathways they can piece together, that will show how this works. Like, ‘What if this molecule was produced by this one and then this one by this one, and then what if this one and that one induces this one’ – that stuff becomes, after two molecules, conjecture of the rankest kind. People who sit there and talk about it don’t realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so. You don’t need to look that far. You don’t discover the cause of something like AIDS by dealing with incredibly obscure things. You just look at what the hell is going on. Well, here’s a bunch of people that are practicing a new set of behavioral norms. Apparently, it didn’t work because a lot of them got sick. That’s the conclusion. You don’t necessarily know why it happened. But you start there.”
That was a historical detour, shared in hopes of rooting this conversation historically.
When you see the word “cases” on your TV screen, in this world that has now been hijacked by one single event, one dread, one Idol, you will be forgiven for thinking those are cases of Covid-19.
The number of “cases” is often a very big number, back-lit in red. Today for example, the number of “total cases,” in the US, according to Worldometer, is 309,728. The total death figure is 8,44
