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Was the COVID-19 pandemic a once-in-a-century event — or did it have parallels in recent history? For filmmaker and former BBC reporter Joan Shenton, the pandemic was “take two” of the AIDS epidemic.
“It was so distressing that we had to go through COVID,” Shenton told Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), during an interview Monday on CHD.TV. “If only we could have won the battle of AIDS, we wouldn’t have had COVID.”
Shenton, producer of the 2011 documentary “Positively False: Birth of a Heresy” and author of the 1998 book “Positively False: Exposing the Myths around HIV and AIDS,” joined Holland to discuss the similarities between the COVID-19 and AIDS outbreaks.
Both outbreaks include the inappropriate use of PCR tests to determine infection, the administration of medical treatments that proved deadly for many recipients, the involvement of figures such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the repercussions faced by scientists who questioned the dominant narrative, Shenton said.
“One of the extraordinary and striking things about this … is how similar so many of the dynamics in the AIDS epidemic are to the COVID epidemic,” Shenton said.
According to Shenton, the responses to AIDS and COVID-19 are examples of “plague terror” — a strategy “used by organizations that gain huge amounts of money through infectious diseases, through calling things infectious.”
Shenton said she thought her documentary would help change the mainstream narrative on AIDS, but it couldn’t overcome the powerful interests that profit from the status quo.
“We often thought we were going to change the world, and we didn’t,” Shenton said.
However, the documentary did result in an archive of 35 years’ worth of scientific studies, video interviews and other documents. Shenton donated the library of information to CHD.
“We will be making available an archive of her thousands and thousands of pages on AIDS,” Holland said. The documents are expected to be accessible in the coming months.
Dissenting views on AIDS ‘skillfully suppressed for decades’
Shenton was a reporter for the BBC — the U.K.’s national public broadcaster — when she developed drug-induced lupus after being overmedicated in Spain during the 1970s.
“They gave me everything in the book,” Shenton said. “Of course, I imploded and I was desperately ill. I was in Westminster Hospital for two months. I nearly died.”
The experience sparked her interest in investigating injuries caused by medical treatments.
She later joined U.K. national broadcaster Channel 4, producing a documentary series, “Kill or Cure.” The series focused on Big Pharma’s reluctance to withdraw dangerous or ineffective treatments. “That really got me going,” Shenton said.
In the early 1980s, Shenton and her producer learned about the research of Peter Duesberg, Ph.D., a German molecular biologist who asserted that HIV did not cause AIDS.
She began questioning the dominant narratives. “We went on to do 13 documentaries about AIDS,” Shenton said.
The documentary “Positively False” focuses on “the manipulation of self-interested pharmaceutical companies and [medical] organizations around the world, manipulating plague terror,” Shenton said.
The film reveals “the flawed science surrounding AIDS and the consequences of following a misguided hypothesis,” Shenton said in the introduction. This includes the beliefs that AIDS is infectious, that it is caused by HIV and that HIV is contagious.
“Many scientists and researchers disagree. These views have been skillfully suppressed for decades by the prevailing scientific orthodoxy and the mainstream media,” Shenton said in the documentary.
The researchers questioning the dominant HIV/AIDS narrative were suppressed and silenced, as were scientists questioning the prevailing COVID-19 narrative, Shenton said.
‘Utterly useless’ PCR tests used for AIDS, COVID
In both outbreaks, PCR tests were used to determine infection, she said.
“The [PCR] test is completely and utterly useless,” Shenton said. The tests cannot “differentiate between infectious and non-infectious particles.”
Shenton said different countries used varying standards for determining a positive diagnosis for HIV.
“You could test in, say, South Africa, for HIV and be positive and fly to Australia and be negative,” Shenton said.
Early in the AIDS outbreak, many scientists believed lifestyle factors — including addiction to recreational drugs and use of nitrites such as “poppers” — led to AIDS because of the damage they caused to the immune system.
At the same time, health officials and the media wrongly attributed widespread illness in Africa to AIDS — when it was really lack of access to clean drinking water that was making people sick, Shenton said
These narratives changed when government health agencies became involved with AIDS research, Shenton said.
“When the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] came pounding in and brought all its representatives to look at this group of young men who were very, very ill … the whole theory that AIDS was caused by your lifestyle or by toxicity disappeared,” Shenton said.
Fauci promoted deadly treatments for AIDS, COVID
Harmful medical treatments were at the center of both the AIDS and COVID-19 outbreaks, Shenton said.
In 1987, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved AZT (azidothymidine) for HIV-positive people. AZT proved dangerous for many AIDS patients. During the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines and remdesivir harmed people.
And in both cases — the AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic — Fauci played a key role.
Shenton said:
“We [were] deeply, deeply critical of Fauci, the way he handled the multicenter trials for the phase two trials of AZT. I mean they were corrupt, and the entire early part was funded by the drug company [Burroughs Wellcome, now GSK], and they had representatives, and this is known through the Freedom of Information documents, who went in there and they took the results of the drug group and the placebo group home and [took] out the side effects in the drug group.”
In the “Positively False” film, several scientists and researchers explained how AZT prevents DNA synthesis, stops cells from replicating and helps generate cancerous cells.
Yet, patients who questioned AZT’s safety and efficacy were stigmatized and their sanity questioned, according to the documentary.
Holland referred to U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” which contains a section on Fauci’s work during the AIDS outbreak.
“It raises all of these questions that really, it seems like the same scam and the same players … it hasn’t really changed,” Holland said.
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‘Plague terror’ existed long before AIDS or COVID
The AIDS and COVID-19 outbreaks are examples of “plague terror,” which has existed throughout history, according to Shenton.
In Appalachia in the early 20th century, an outbreak of pellagra was diagnosed. The condition, which caused widespread death and was said to be infectious, turned out to be a nutritional deficiency.
“In the Appalachians, the very, very poor people there were living on a diet that was just completely lacking in nutrients,” Sheton said. “It was a form of maize, but they cooked all the nutrients out of it and only depended on that.”
People were so afraid of contracting pellagra that those thought to be infected were institutionalized or “thrown off ships,” she said.
An infectious disease doctor from New York, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, determined that pellagra was not contagious but was caused by malnutrition and a lack of niacin (vitamin B), Shenton said. He was shunned for his discoveries.
“He was defrocked, defunded, ridiculed. He died. And five years after he died, they said he was absolutely right — not infectious, it was toxic,” she said.
In Japan from the 1950s to 1970s, subacute myelo-optico-neuropathy (SMON) was common, according to Shenton.
“Hundreds of thousands of Japanese people were getting paralyzed from the waist down and blind, and no one could work out why. And of course they thought, ‘oh, it’s a virus,’” she said.
A Japanese neurologist, Dr. Tadao Tsubaki, studied SMON patients and determined that the condition was not infectious, but was caused by a widely administered antidiarrheal medication, clioquinol.
“It took 30 years and teams of lawyers to dismiss in court the idea that a virus was the cause of SMON,” Shenton said.
Watch CHD.TV’s interview with Joan Shendon here:
- Runaway Bestseller ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ Details How Fauci Bungled AIDS Epidemic
- Does HIV Cause AIDS? New Book Highlights Work of Virologist Whose Research Contradicted Official Narrative
- ‘Remdesivir Papers’ Allege Controversial Drug Used to Treat Service Members Led to 601 Deaths
- Number of Children Who Died After COVID Shots Much Higher Than VAERS Reports Indicate, Analyst Says
- Officials Manipulated COVID Data to Exaggerate Crisis, Mathematician Tells RFK Jr.
