From AIDS to COVID

Joan Shenton

Joan Shenton is an independent tele-journalist whose documentaries include “Positively False – Birth of a Heresy” (which was based on the original edition of “Positively False: Exposing the Myths around HIV and AIDS”) and “Positive Hell.”

She has produced documentaries on a variety of health issues for mainstream British television, earning Royal Television Society Journalism and British Medical Association awards.

David Rasnick

David Rasnick is former President of Rethinking AIDS, a group for the scientific reappraisal of the HIV hypothesis, and former President of the International Coalition for Medical Justice. From 2000-2008 he was a member of the Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel of South Africa.

He has B.S. degrees in biology and chemistry, and received his PhD in chemistry from Georgia Tech in 1978. For ten years, he worked closely with Professor Peter Duesberg at UC Berkeley on the aneuploidy (chromosomal imbalance) theory of cancer.

Celia Farber

Celia Farber is an American independent journalist and author whose career has centered on investigative reporting that challenges orthodoxies in public health, particularly the attribution of AIDS solely to HIV and the safety profile of antiretroviral therapies.

She began her professional writing in the mid-1980s as a features editor and contributor to Spin magazine, covering rock music and cultural topics before pivoting to health issues amid the emerging AIDS crisis. In 1987, she launched “Words from the Front,” a monthly column which provided on-the-ground accounts of AIDS patients, treatments, and emerging scientific debates, often amplifying perspectives from researchers questioning the viral causation model, such as molecular biologist Peter Duesberg.

Her reporting extended to field investigations in Africa, where she documented discrepancies between predicted HIV prevalence and observed health conditions, contributing to broader discussions on multifactorial explanations for immune deficiency syndromes.

Vera Sharav

Vera Sharav, a Romanian-born American human rights advocate, is the founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), a nonprofit organization dedicated to safeguarding ethical standards, informed consent, and the welfare of human subjects in biomedical research. A Holocaust survivor who endured deportation to a Ukrainian detention camp as a child and lost her father to the atrocities, Sharav’s activism stems from a profound distrust of unchecked authority, reinforced by the 1994 death of her son from adverse effects of antipsychotic medication prescribed without adequate disclosure of risks.

A former legal librarian with a master’s degree in library science, she established AHRP in 2001 to expose ethical lapses in clinical trials, such as undisclosed harms in pharmaceutical testing and violations of post-World War II codes like the Nuremberg Code, which she invokes to underscore the moral imperatives against non-consensual experimentation. Her efforts have included public campaigns against industry-influenced regulations, advocacy for transparency in drug safety data, and critiques of institutional cover-ups in cases involving vulnerable populations.

Mary Holland, Esq.

Mary Holland, Esq. is CEO of Children’s Health Defense, and has been involved in the health freedom movement for over two decades. She previously served as CHD’s general counsel, overseeing its litigation regarding mandates, exemptions, informed consent, free speech and government regulation.

She is the co-author or editor of several books on vaccines, including “Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth” and “The HPV Vaccine on Trial: Seeking Justice for a Generation Betrayed.” Before joining CHD, she taught for many years at NYU School of Law and Columbia Law School.