AIDS: conspiracy or reality?

[padraig (u.s.)]

how do you account for the huge disparity

mostly that he didn't say what you & lanugo (or other AIDS "skeptics", whatever you'd like to call yourself) say he did. that he talked about decreasing transmission and augmenting the use of drugs with other methods (which,. of course, no one is against). and that the interviewer asked leading questions & interpreted the answers to his own ends. Dr. Montagnier has, himself, directly refuted AIDS denialism, acknowledged the effectiveness of antiretroviral cocktails, etc. here's his Nobel speech from 2008 if you'd like to confirm for yourself. and that even if he had made some earth-shattering revelation I'd still say, where's the proof? he wouldn't be the first lscientist to say some crazy ish sans proof.

also that AIDS denialists - very much like climate change skeptics - are masters of cherrypicking science to create that the illusion that there's a debate about the issue and that people going the grain are being suppressed by the "orthodoxy". it's a beautiful delusion, b/c no matter how much hard evidence you're confronted with you can always claim it's all tainted by the "establishment" or whatever.

also, I like that being clear headed & in possession of one's rational faculties has now become an insult.

also this:

what the fuck are you talking about?

made me laugh. the sheer puzzlement of it.

and this:

*Jews drink the blood of Christian babies and are secretly evil lizard people

Please keep in mind that these aren't MY opinions but some horseshit I found down the back of the internet and thought I'd share with you for some obscure reason.

made me laugh even harder. nice one, swears.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

i am not a doctor. nor am I a medical professional of any kind. I have no medical training, or any experience in treating anyone with HIV or AIDS. nor do I really know anything about HIV beyond this one video clip. please value my opinions accordingly.

fixed that for ya.

Dr. Luc Montagnier, probably the single most reliable source of information and qualified professional expert on this matter in the world

if not for that 4 minute video clip you'd still think he was part of the Babylon medical "establishment".

 

[Dusty]

bone transplant VS. acupuncture

If my illness warranted a bone [marrow] transplant according to the medical establishment, I really don't think I would be contemplating a few needles in my face. In fact I don't think the people who stick needles in other peoples faces for a living would be seriously considering it as a viable alternative option, as the cold sick fear of finding out you have leukemia sets in. I know you weren't directly comparing the two and I'm just being facetious - but you get my point. There was nothing you could have picked to compete there.

From my small-minded and limited experience in this field it seems to me people use alternative healing in two ways, one as a placebo for things they never really had in the first place, or the other end of the scale where modern science has reached its limit and you have no other sensible options. That point where you would try licking the fur off Persian cats if someone suggested it might cure you - because you have fuck all to lose.

 

[nomadthethird]

I dunno anything about vaccines, but I though the idea of the cocktail (HAART) approach was to cast a wide net, i.e. target HIV at as points as possible. one of which is inhibiting the HIV-1 protease - the protease inhibitors that Dr. Ho is famous for. I'm not an expert by any stretch but to elaborate a bit for anyone interested (nomad & anyone else who's studied biology probably knows all this) - replication is normally a very complicated affair that can be regulated at numerous different levels. the cocktail drugs are inhibitors - most of them prevent an enzyme from catalyzing a specific reaction either replication or afterward. some of them alter cell receptors so HIV can't bind them. or whatever. the problem with HIV's mutagenic abilities is that everything with proteins is really specific, so a tiny change in amino acid sequence can mean the inhibitor no longer recognizes the molecule its supposed to inhibit or alter. then its worthless. plus, of course, drug resistance & the side effects. it's really, really tough tho, cause it's all so complicated, so many factors all acting on each other. if you change one thing, it's apt to change all these other things, unintended consequences (hence elderly people on this drug wheel where everything is counteracting the side effect of something else).

there's a lot of this stuff in the loop tho. gene therapy, induced pluripotent stem cells, etc. it's kinda the future of medicine.

Exactly.

Protease inhibitors basically inhibit the cellular production of protease, which is an enzyme that catalyzes the degredation of proteins in the proteasome (after they've been targeted by ubiquitin). This is of course a post-transcriptional and post-translational process-- if you can get an RNA virus to stop translating itself into proteins, you can successfully impede its spread and devastating effects to some extent.

David Ho is indeed interesting because he was the first to discover/develop the protease inhibitor treatment for HIV/AIDS, which has had tremendous success in delaying AIDS in HIV patients. I got to listen to one of his lectures for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation a few years ago, it was pretty fascinating, all about vaccines and the one that was in phase 3 in China.

The next line in prevention according to Ho is antimicrobial gels. They're already being used in Africa because women can use them without their partners knowing, before sex, and at a low cost-- condoms there are taboo and apparently it's easier to get women to comply with HIV prevention than it is men for cultural reasons. Also, male circumcision showed promise as of a few years ago because apparently studies showed that circumsized males were much less likely to contract HIV than circumsized ones. Don't know what the numbers look like on that now though.

 

[lanugo]

I don't have a definite opinion on this matter, either. However, I regard Montagnier's statements in the interview and the information gathered in the report by Terry Michael as plausible and substantial. Some of the points that are brought up in this essay, in my view, should really make anyone with an open and unprejudiced mind wonder about the credibility of everything that he previously believed to know about HIV and AIDS. To me, the single most eye-opening aspect of the report was the critique of the official numbers of HIV infections and/or "AIDS cases". I had no clue just how hypothetical these estimations are - apparently they are pretty much solely based on mathematical models, not on actual counts of blood tests. And can you believe that UNAIDS, the United Nations AIDS division and one of the providers of the global HIV/AIDS statistics, completely confounds the two and is unable to give separate estimates of virus infections and AIDS cases? Further more, when the author of the report asked the UNAIDS senior advisor on demographic and related data to define "AIDS", she replied that UNAIDS has no definition of AIDS. The mind boggles.

Also, the UNAIDS figures for HIV-related deaths are somewhat called into question by its estimation of AIDS deaths in South Africa. The official goverment statistics show less than five percent of the deaths from AIDS that the UNAIDS figures indicate. What does this discrepancy mean? Who is to believe? A dubious goverment agency with possible political motives for fixing stats or an organisation which has no definition of the disease whose total number of victims it allegedly registers? And what the fuck has all this guesswork to do with epidemiologically sound science?!

What astounded me even more is the fact that the US are the only country in the world to acknowledge T-cell counts below 200 without any present "opportunistic" illness as a clinical definition of AIDS. This basically arbitrary introduction of a new symptom has lead to tens of thousands of people being diagnosed with AIDS in the US who are not counted as AIDS patients everywhere else in the world. Because of the varying criteria in the definition of the "HIV disease" there were 1900 % (!) fewer new AIDS cases in Canada in the year 2007 than there were in the US in the year 2006 (228 in Canada with a population of 34 million, 37,852 in the US with a population of 300 million). Considering these numbers I cannot help but wonder: what is AIDS.

Anyway, all this can be read in the report that I linked to on a previous page. As far as I am concerned, anyone who doesn't find these facts deeply unsettling is the true denialist.

 

[nomadthethird]

2. what Dr. Luc Montagnier, probably the single most reliable source of information and qualified professional expert on this matter in the world, is saying about it (which sounds very much similar to what the above people have maintained for a long time.)

so, if tomorrow i find out that i should not have had drunken unprotected sex in the back room of that afterhours club in Budapest 3 years ago, and have contracted the HIV virus -- well i would do a lot more research on it first, but based on what i know today -- i would change my lifestyle completely, become a vegan raw foodist, and eat massive amounts of herbs every day, without prescribed medicine.



this also sounds good. since there is no rush to get to the bottom of it (last check up was 6 months ago and i haven't been messing around), i will be following the story as it develops.

What is it with you and getting fixated on the words of one person (which you misinterpret and misrepresent) and taking those as "proof" of something you only believe for emotional reasons and can't support?

Dr. Montainger is by far NOT the most renowned AIDS researcher in the world.

David Ho is.

And you really should get tested if you're sexually active (especially if you're not using condoms everytime)-- as we all should regularly-- but I know that'll fall on selectively deaf ears. Not holding my breath.

Have fun with that raw food diet when you have chronic thrush, leukemia, chronic MERSA infections of the skin, and an inability to keep down even the smallest amounts of food.

 

[nomadthethird]

I don't have a definite opinion on this matter, either. However, I regard Montagnier's statements in the interview and the information gathered in the report by Terry Michael as plausible and substantial. Some of the points that are brought up in this essay, in my view, should really make anyone with an open and unprejudiced mind wonder about the credibility of everthing that he previously believed to know about HIV and AIDS. To me, the single most eye-opening aspect of the report was the critique of the official numbers of HIV infections and/or "AIDS cases". I had no clue just how hypothetical these estimations are - apparently they are pretty much solely based on mathematical models, not on actual counts of blood tests. And can you believe that UNAIDS, the United Nations AIDS division and one of the providers of the global HIV/AIDS statistics, completely confounds the two and is unable to give separate estimates of virus infections and AIDS cases? Further more, when the author of the report asked the UNAIDS senior advisor on demographic and related data to define "AIDS", she replied that UNAIDS has no definition of AIDS. The mind boggles.

Also, the UNAIDS figures for HIV-related deaths are somewhat called into question by its estimation of AIDS deaths in South Africa. The official goverment statistics show less than five percent of the deaths from AIDS that the UNAIDS figures indicate. What does this discrepancy mean? Who is to believe? A dubious goverment agency with possible political motives for fixing stats or an organisation which has no definition of the disease whose total number of victims it allegedly registers? And what the fuck has all this guesswork to do with epidemiologically sound science?!

What astounded me even more is the fact that the US are the only country in the world to acknowledge T-cell counts below 200 without any present "opportunistic" illness as a clinical definition of AIDS. This basically arbitrary introduction of a new symptom has lead to tens of thousands of people being diagnosed with AIDS in the US who are not counted as AIDS patients everywhere else in the world. Because of the varying criteria in the definition of the "HIV disease" there were 1900 % (!) fewer new AIDS cases in Canada in the year 2007 than there were in the US in the year 2006 (228 in Canada with a population of 34 million, 37,852 in the US with a population of 300 mio). Considering these numbers I cannot help but wonder: what is AIDS.

Anyway, all this can be read in the report that I linked to on a previous page. As far as I am concerned, anyone who doesn't find these facts deeply unsettling is the true denialist.

Apparently Americans aren't the only ones who fall prey to this nonsense.

Haha. Yes, who on earth really believes in mathematical models, rather than honest-to-goodness UNIVERSAL AIDS BLOOD TESTING? That would be absurd, even though we use the same ones to estimate TB infections, malaria, etc.

Oh, and yes, I'm sure it's a huuuge problem, that discrepancy between third-party statistics on AIDS and the "government reports" made by denialists who tell their people that AIDS doesn't exist and that people shouldn't use condoms because God said so. Really, whodathunkit?

On that note, what on earth do you even know about viral load? Do you realize that the U.S. might be the only country that can afford and has the resources to use tests that are able to detect HIV in people who have viral loads at the lower end of the infected spectrum? Did that ever occur to you? I suppose not.

Considering these numbers I cannot help but wonder: what is AIDS.

Priceless. Truly. I got my laugh in for today.

 

[lanugo]

Just one question: How do you account for that huge disproportion in the amount of new AIDS cases between Canada and the US? Do you believe that the US have simply superior means of clinical diagnostics and that, in fact, in Canada there is a huge amount of undiagnosed potential AIDS patients running around?

 

[nomadthethird]

Not even worth it...

no, not entirely. for they bring up things such as perfectly healthy people who have taken no prescription medication, who have been HIV positive for more than a decade. things which can not be easily discounted, rendering the official story problematic.

No, it doesn't render the story problematic in the least.

Number one rule of biology: biodiversity exists. As others have pointed out, people have different immune systems and different genetically-based abilities when it comes to fighting off HIV/AIDS.

In fact, there are even people who inherit a recessive gene that renders thementirely immune to HIV, so they can't be infected under any circumstances. The gene is more common in whites because the black plague in Europe created a "bottleneck" effect, killing off nearly everyone who didn't have this recessive trait and leaving a strong "mark" on the successive generations. Here's more:

A recessive chemokine gene offers the strongest natural protection yet seen against AIDS.

The gene, SDF1-3'UTR-801G-A (SDF1-3'A), encodes for a portion of the chemokine known as stromal-derived factor or SDF-1. It is the principal ligand for CXCR4, the main coreceptor for the T-cell-tropic (T-tropic) HIV-1 strains that predominate within an individual at the time of progression to AIDS.

Unfortunately, very, very few people actually have this gene, so unless you've been tested for it, you should take precautions. Apparently it has been noted in some southeast asians as well.

Think about what you're saying, please. Normally I wouldn't even bother posting about something so stupid, but there are teens and shit who read the internet who may not know better and take your dangerous suggestions seriously. Really, think for a second...even if you don't know molecular biology, it's clear that some people live for 15 years with lung cancer without treatment, but that doesn't mean that lung cancer isn't real. And it doesn't mean that advanced lung cancer doesn't kill most of its sufferers and/or metastasize quickly within a period of a few years. Why couldn't HIV be similar? In fact, no illness affects every single person the same way. Why would HIV/AIDS be different?

 

[nomadthethird]

Just one question: How do you account for that huge disproportion in the amount of new AIDS cases between Canada and the US? Do you believe that the US have simply superior means of clinical diagnostics and that, in fact, in Canada there is a huge amount of undiagnosed potential AIDS patients running around?

Why should HIV infection be "proportionate" in Canada and the U.S.? What law states that every country in the world should be hit by every illness in a "proportionate" manner and at the same time? HIV has hit different countries, different continents, and different population groups in waves. First, homosexual men in the U.S. were affected (the "first wave") and HIV was originally called "GRID" (gay-related immune deficiency). A few years later, it hit heterosexuals in a second "wave". After that, the next marked wave was IV drug users. After that, innercity black females.

There are all kinds of illnesses that affect different populations to different degrees and at different times. Just look at how disproportionately TB and malaria hit third world countries... one of a million examples I can think of...

The U.S. has far more social problems than Canada (many of the type that come with very large urban poor populations and economic inequity). Far more. If the U.S. does indeed have a disproportionately large population of AIDS patients compared to Canada (I'm unfamiliar with those statistics), that's exactly what any virologist would predict/expect. In fact, it's a worldwide trend--countries with large populations of out-of-work, socially oppressed and economically depressed populations tend to have the highest AIDS rates.

Either way, what does that have to do with HIV being real?

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

(for anyone not familiar - replication is the copying of DNA, transcription is the synthesis of RNA from DNA and translation is the synthesis of a protein (i.e. an amino acid sequence) from RNA.)

Protease inhibitors basically inhibit the cellular production of protease, which is an enzyme that catalyzes the degredation of proteins in the proteasome (after they've been targeted by ubiquitin). This is of course a post-transcriptional and post-translational process-- if you can get an RNA virus to stop translating itself into proteins, you can successfully impede its spread and devastating effects to some extent.

in addition to the reverse inscriptase inhibitors, integrase inhibitors, etc. there are also currently in trials some other inhibitors that, like the protease ones, go after post-translational protein modification. which is a a big deal because many proteins need to be modified (add or take away amino acids, add sugars, phosphorylation, a ton of things) after translation to become active, in this case to form mature infectious HIV virons. there's one in particular which is supposed to really do a # on HIV-1 even after it's become resistant to protease inhibitors.

that stuff about the antimicrobial gels sounds pretty interesting.

In fact, there are even people who inherit a recessive gene that renders thementirely immune to HIV

on this point - that's true of pretty much every disease, I believe (one reason it's unlikely a single pandemic could ever wipe out the entire human race. just most of it). also, I believe that study of CCR5 is one of the leading avenues in AIDS research - a class of antiretrovirals, the entry inhibitors (maraviroc is the big one), specifically affect the expression of CCR5 so that HIV can't bind to it. that mimics the effect of the CCR5-Delta 32 mutation (the one which imbues, depending on whether you inherited it from one or both parents, either resistance or immunity to HIV). that mutation, btw, is a great example of the extremely specific nature of gene expression - the deletion of a 32 base pair sequence completely alters CCR5 so as to make it non-functional.

the information gathered in the report by Terry Michael as plausible and substantial.

so that one dude is plausible while the staggering, overwhelming weight of evidence against him is, I guess, inconsequential? right-o. someday I am going to publish an article on the Internet suggesting that the Earth revolves around the Sun and denouncing the astronomy establishment conspiracy and it's going to blow. your. mind.

I don't think you understand what epidemiology is. news flash bro - it isn't an exact science. it makes heavy use of - gasp - models and statistical analysis. there's a whole subbranch of the field devoted to statistical analysis. I don't why you're shocked (well, I do - cos you don't what the f**k you're on about) by different standards for diagnosis. it's hardly unique to HIV. COPD. mental disorders. tons of chronic diseases; MS, fibromyalgia. Crohn's. coronary disease, for crissakes. different methodologies, different approaches. it's just the nature of the game sometimes.

it messes my head up when people without even a basic grasp of a topic start denouncing things they don't even begin or pretend to understand. let's just start burning statistical models at the stake and get it over with.

 

[lanugo]

I am perfectly familiar with the basic microbiological concepts that are relevant to understand the effect a retrovirus has on the genetic information of an organism. I am also aware that epidemiology is an inherently statistical science. What is totally unknown to me, however, is the exact methodology and procedure by which an organisation like UNAIDS produces its estimations of the prevalence of HIV and/or AIDS in Africa. But even for a layman the available information indicates that a health condition like AIDS - which is really just an amorphous cluster of symptoms and no clearly defined disease like the ones you mentioned in your post - obviously can have other causes than the HI-Virus, e.g. immune suppressive diseases like malaria or tuberculosis and immune impairing conditions like malnutrition or poor hygiene. Seeing that UNAIDS is unable to present well-founded data that differentiates HIV infections and AIDS cases I become suspicious and begin to wonder whether the purported HIV/AIDS "epidemic" in Africa does exist at all. I think my conclusion is fair. The question is: how can you know for certain that the alleged millions of AIDS deaths are caused by the HI-virus rather than those other factors I mentioned. I think you can't. You simply believe.

 

[paolo]

Have fun with that raw food diet when you have chronic thrush, leukemia, chronic MERSA infections of the skin, and an inability to keep down even the smallest amounts of food.

Nice

 

[nomadthethird]

on this point - that's true of pretty much every disease, I believe (one reason it's unlikely a single pandemic could ever wipe out the entire human race. just most of it). also, I believe that study of CCR5 is one of the leading avenues in AIDS research - a class of antiretrovirals, the entry inhibitors (maraviroc is the big one), specifically affect the expression of CCR5 so that HIV can't bind to it. that mimics the effect of the CCR5-Delta 32 mutation (the one which imbues, depending on whether you inherited it from one or both parents, either resistance or immunity to HIV).

Awesome, hadn't heard about the ins and outs of CCR5--so it's the homozygous recessive allele combination that confers immunity and the heterozygous dominant that confers resistance, I imagine? Sounds sort of like cystic fibrosis, but in reverse. Good to know!

that mutation, btw, is a great example of the extremely specific nature of gene expression - the deletion of a 32 base pair sequence completely alters CCR5 so as to make it non-functional.

It's so sad how much I love thinking about point mutations and exon shuffling and shit like that. I went to this seminar on RNA as an enzyme and ever since I've been wanting to email him for the jpegs of homologous RNA base pairs he used. He had a bunch of them compairing human and (I think it was) duck RNA sequences and how similar they are... they were so cool looking I'd probably frame them.

(Btw, If you're interested the prof was recruiting and apparently there are some good SURF programs in Syracuse and Rochester that I'm applying to next summer--let me know if you want info...)

 

[nomadthethird]

The question is: how can you know for certain that the alleged millions of AIDS deaths are caused by the HI-virus rather than those other factors I mentioned. I think you can't. You simply believe.

Nobody dies from AIDS, they die from AIDS-related complications, usually an opportunistic infection or cancer.

 

[scottdisco]

Seeing that UNAIDS is unable to present well-founded data that differentiates HIV infections and AIDS cases I become suspicious and begin to wonder whether the purported HIV/AIDS "epidemic" in Africa does exist at all.

haha, man, you're funny.

no, really, you kill me.

 

[zhao]

ok, thanks for the more indepth knowledge about some of this stuff. will certainly take what everyone is saying into consideration.

but even though I don't have degrees in molecular biology or epidemiology, it does not mean my independent critical thinking skills are in any way lacking -- sometimes you don't have to be a weatherman to sense which way the wind is blowing (and further, sometimes lay people can see more clearly than the experts).

and to me it is clear that this whole HIV/AIDS phenomenon is more complex than what anyone previously thought, that there is much more than meets the eye, than what is printed on pamphlets and in brochures, and the emerging story i think will have many more surprises in store for all. many things about this whole thing, what we are told and information from other sources, still doesn't quite make sense for me, and i will continue to learn and research in my off time.

about natural, "alternative", holistic medicine, the western medical mainstream has been slow to recognize the legitimacy of many treatments outside of its own framework, but none the less many practices have become accepted in the recent past, and many more are currently becoming more accepted. and generally speaking, to use more of my beloved corny cliches, i do think paradigms are indeed in the process of merging, and to me that's a positive thing. a few decades ago it was "Western science" vs. "Eastern superstition", and now we have plenty of doctors and professionals using a combination of Western and Eastern methods. and in the next decades we will surely continue to see change. i think some of the ridicule dished out at "alternative" methods in this thread will in the future sound exactly like people who laughed at acupuncture in the 1970s, but that's the way it goes.

 

[mistersloane]

and to me it is clear that this whole HIV/AIDS phenomenon is more complex than what anyone previously thought, that there is much more than meets the eye, than what is printed on pamphlets and in brochures, and the emerging story i think will have many more surprises in store for all. many things about this whole thing, what we are told and information from other sources, still doesn't quite make sense for me, and i will continue to learn and research in my off time.
.

I applaud you for going into the complexities around this; all of these complexities have however been extant since the early days of the discovery of the virus; the dialogues have been around, maybe it's just that you're discovering them for the first time, which is good.

I was a early member of the activist group ACT-UP in the UK, after going to New York and San Francisco and attending meetings there - this was 1987. I've also worked in rural Africa and seen the devastation it has reeked there. It was very hard watching your friends die when you were 17, though I wasn't hit as hard as San Fran. The papers there were one big obituary. It was horrible.

At that point in ACT-UP, the discussion and anger surrounding HIV/AIDS was that people had the right to experiment on their own bodies; that there were preventative medicines available that weren't being tested or released and people involved in ACT-UP were saying 'give them to us, we will test them'. This was in order to circumnavigate an eventual market dominance of AZT - an early prototype of what we get now - which was a Glaxo/Wellcome product. ACT-UP was a radical group protesting alot of issues, but that was one of them. It felt very futuristic protesting against drug companies.

During that time I saw a guy diagnosed with HIV/AIDS who literally died within three days of his diagnosis; I also knew a guy who had tested positive in the early eighties - who lived for 20 years without medication. Everything being discussed in this thread was argued and argued and argued about at these meetings. This really isn't anything new, perhaps the information is more available now.

In alot of ways what you saw on pamphlets etc was essentially watered down information that came from discussions like these, which were goin on daily in the 80s and still are going on daily - how to get over the message that there is something very dangerous out there that was probably going to kill you if you came into contact with it, and how to get over that message fast to as many people as possible. We are dealing with a virus that kills. How would you effectively get that message across? We are also dealing with something that may not kill you immediately (AIDS is not a death sentence), how would you get that message across?

I think the most important thing to remember is that we were dealing - and still are dealing - with a relatively new virus. It is something that attacks the immune system, which means you are then more likely and vulnerable to succumb to what are termed 'opportunistic infections' - these can be TB, cancers of various forms, etc. These are what will kill you in the end, because your body has been weakened.

Even then, certainly in the UK, it was obvious to everyone that a life free-er from stress, with a good diet, would sustain your ability to be able to fight off infections. We knew people then who had reverted their HIV status. No-one knows why this happens. Sometimes people revert their status and then revert back again. It's very complex. It would be dangerous to suggest to anyone that it is possible, willfully. It may be genetic, it may be that there are several forms of the virus, as it is mutating as we speak. We still don't know. There isn't a cure. There is a vaccine which is still yet to be tested effectively. There are drugs which people in the West can take which lessen their chances of opportunistic infection. There are preventative measures you can take in lifestyle which may lessen your chances of contraction. They may not.

All I know is that everyone dies sometime, some people just die quicker than others, and horribly.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'm sure I read somewhere a year or two ago that there is some (early, provisional) evidence that HIV is 'weakening' globally - perhaps because more virulent stains kill their carriers more quickly, so they have less time to infect other people.

Nomad, padraig or mistersloane - you guys heard of this too?

 

[zhao]

thanks Mr. Sloane.

you seem to be agreeing that discussion about the various aspects of the HIV/AIDS phenomenon, on which there is no unanimous agreement, is generally a positive thing, right?

you describe very well the numerous uncertainties we have been, and still are living with...

given these uncertainties, i would think nearly all different perspectives on the subject should be considered, and it is important that no reasonable lines of inquiry is suppressed.