Opinion :: Letters
Bay Windows off base on ’House of Numbers’Wednesday Apr 29, 2009 Dear Ethan Jacobs,
The Tuesday night screening of House of Numbers turned into a "Crazy House’" indeed! But you’ve reversed the scenario in your reporting. (See "Crazy House," April 23)
Not that it will matter to you, but I, one of the individuals who sat "uninvited" at the table with the "experts," would have loved to have had a discussion with AIDS expert and never-say-die pharmaceutical advocate Dr. Kuritzkes, and whoever else about the film.
You wrote that people in the audience wanted to "silence" your expert, but the reality was that those of us in the film, who were invited from far and wide to the festival, were also told, as was Mr. Leung, the director, that we were all to be on a bi-partisan panel - a panel open to the "establishment," and its critics (those you cleverly call "denialists," without regard to their humanity, actual politics or actual points of view).
We were told that we were to be part of an open discussion about some the controversial statements revealed in the film, by notable AIDS experts like Luc Montagnier, 2008 Nobel Prize winner for "discovering HIV," who said some absolutely wild-eyed things, like:
"We can be exposed to HIV many times without being clinically infected. Our immune system will get rid of the virus within a few weeks, if you have a good immune system."
He then talked about how Africans who are helped out of poverty (fed and given clean water, etc) can "clear" the virus.
Dr. Nancy Padian was also in the film, talking about her study in which 175 heterosexual mixed (HIV positive/HIV negative) couples failed to transmit HIV to each other over a six-year period of vaginal and anal sex, with and without condoms. She said that HIV was one of the hardest viruses to transmit and added that "everybody knows that."
So, when your "expert" arrived on the scene to "debunk" the movie -- a film that had been accepted to a festival -- we who were in the film thought we were going to be part of an open discussion. After all, this would have been the same consideration shown to your "expert," who was also in the film.
But he was given center stage, the rest were excluded and, to use your word, "silenced." The room was shut down, Kuritzkes began a lecture-cum-soliloquy and wouldn’t pause or break for questions until forced to by the moderator.
I’m sure you left those details out for some good reason. But the questions raised by the film remain: What the devil is Luc Montagnier talking about? What does Nancy Padian mean by "HIV is hard to transmit?"
And finally, is the AIDS industry honest? Is it even slightly honest? And are you in the bag for all things AIDS?
I think based on your "report," we know the answers to at least some of these questions.
Best regards,
Liam Scheff
Investigative journalist
Boston
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