Ever since I read Dr. Donald Miller’s article on whether HIV is the primary cause of AIDS and regarding the propaganda campaign against any critical discussion in that area, I was wondering if it really was the case that one of my favorite talk radio hosts, David Brudnoy, really had AIDS because of having HIV, or were that and his later cancer and 2004 death brought on by the drug treatments he was given shortly after his 1988 HIV-positive diagnosis.
I first heard David Brudnoy on WRKO in 1984, even before I heard Gene Burns there. Compared to Gene’s left-libertarianism, David was a very conservative right-libertarian, and a friend of William F. Buckley, Jr. David contributed articles to National Review, Reason magazine and the New York Times, and was also a film critic and a college professor. After David moved from WRKO to WBZ in 1986 his evening talk show could be heard well outside of Massachusetts, in 38 states, and he took calls from people from as far away as Texas. In 1990 when an extremely misguided program director fired David, a huge letter-writing campaign brought him back.
I myself had written several letters to David and he actually wrote back several times and I still have those as well as several from Gene Burns. And no, they were not love letters and no, I’m not gay. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as they say on Seinfeld.) In his later years I believe he supported George W. Bush’s war on Iraq in 2003, but that was only one of maybe a just a few disagreements I had with him. So, he wasn’t that libertarian, given that libertarians tend to oppose interventionism, and tend to disbelieve what government bureaucrats such as Dick Cheney tell us.
In late 2003 David took a leave of absence from his radio show because he was diagnosed with Merkel Cell Carcinoma, an aggressive form of cancer. Previous to that, in 1988 he had tested positive for HIV, a.k.a. human immunodeficiency virus, and was put on drug-therapy treatment as a means of “preventative” treatment, as was mentioned in this Boston Globe article.
So, while he didn’t really have any major illnesses in 1988, he did test positive for HIV and was given drug treatments, which apparently he continued having.
In the Fall of 1994 he was seriously ill for months, including having a viral pneumonia, an enlarged heart, shingles, and he was in a coma for several days. There were even further complications including a brain tumor if I’m not mistaken. He recovered from all that and returned to his radio show in early January 1995. During the time that he was in the hospital it was revealed that he was gay (but many people including listeners knew that anyway). When he returned to his show, he detailed his experiences of those previous months.
So several years went by from 1994 until late 2003 when he was diagnosed with cancer, had completed treatments and returned to his show in March 2004 But the cancer returned later that year. He died on December 9, 2004.
In Dr. Donald’s Miller recent article, as I mentioned in my earlier post on that, he discusses the “HIV/AIDS Hypothesis” and the toxic drugs that are used to treat AIDS. Some of those drugs actually cause further diseases and complications and deaths. That’s already been shown empirically. Some drugs are given to patients who test positive for HIV but do not have AIDS or serious medical issues. Dr. Miller notes that a 2003 paper asserted that some more likely causes of AIDS can include “recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy, and malnutrition.”
Now, let’s assume that such conclusions are quite valid, which I believe they are. Could any of those possible causes mentioned there have applied to David Brudnoy? From what I can remember about him, the answer is Yes.
Did he uses recreational drugs? He sure did, in his earlier years, which he had made reference to in his 1997 memoir, Life Is Not a Rehearsal.
Could he have suffered from malnutrition? Now, to some people, such a question might sound absurd, given he was a big-time radio talk host and writer. He wasn’t exactly impoverished. However, he was very skinny — at least, that’s how I remember how he appeared when he was on TV (during the days that I actually still watched TV, that is). But being skinny didn’t particularly mean that he was malnourished. However, according to this article linked above, one of David Brudnoy’s producers noted that David didn’t cook and that “his refrigerator is the 7-Eleven on Dartmouth Street.” Now, as I have mentioned before, those processed foods with their terrible chemicals, the additives and preservatives and so on, tend to have a very negative effect on people’s health, especially the digestive system. The chemicals in the processed foods interfere with the digestion of whatever actual nutritious food you might have, and you end up getting not nearly the amount of actual nutrition that you need. So, in my view I would call that kind of lifestyle not only unhealthy for one’s immune system, but clearly a recipe for “malnutrition.”
And was David given “anti-viral chemotherapy” in the years leading up to his major illness in 1994? Well, starting in 1988 he was given anti-retroviral drugs, which sounds like they would be in the same category as “anti-viral chemotherapy,” even though he didn’t have actual cancer until late 2003. Such treatment was based on the theory that an HIV-positive diagnosis meant a definite future of developing full AIDS, and that these drugs would best prevent such a disease from occurring. And that was only 1988, in which AIDS had not been around for very long, and so certainly not that much was known about it, and there couldn’t have been much testing of those drugs to really know that they could be effective, or that they couldn’t pose any particular harm to the patient.
According to Dr. Miller in his article,
A civic-minded, healthy person volunteers to donate blood but, tested for HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), is found to be HIV-positive. This would-be donor will be put on a treatment regimen that follows the (285-page) Guidelines for the Use of Antiretroviral Agents in HIV-1-Infected Adults and Adolescents [1] and will be thrust into a medical world peppered with acronyms like CD4, ART, HIV RNA, HIV Ag/Ab, NRTI, NNRTI, PI, INSTI, PrEP, and P4P4P.
Adhering to these government-issued guidelines, a “health care provider” will start this healthy blood donor on antiretroviral therapy (ART). For the last two decades the standard for treating HIV infection is a three-drug protocol—“2 nukes and a third drug.” The “2 nukes” are nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTI) and DNA chain terminators, like AZT (azidothymidine – Retrovir, which is also a NRTI). The “third drug” is a non-NRTI (NNRTI), a protease inhibitor (PI) or an integrase strand transfer inhibitor (INSTI). [2]
These drugs are toxic. With prolonged use they can cause cardiovascular disease, liver damage, premature aging (due to damage of mitochondria), lactic acidosis, gallstones (especially with protease inhibitors), cognitive impairment, and cancer. The majority of people who take them experience unpleasant side effects, like nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.
AZT, the most powerful “nuke” in the ART arsenal actually killed some 150,000 “HIV-positive” people when it started being used in 1987 to the mid-1990s, after which, if the drug was used, dosage was lowered. [3] When an HIV-positive person on long-term ART gets cardiovascular disease or cancer, providers blame the virus for helping cause these diseases. Substantial evidence, however, supports the opposite conclusion: it is the antiretroviral treatment itself that causes cancer, liver damage, cardiovascular and other diseases in these patients. [3] They are iatrogenic diseases. [You can refer to Dr. Miller’s article for footnotes, and the rest of the article as well.]
Dr. Miller also discusses the propaganda campaign to suppress particular studies and papers which refute the official narrative that “AIDS is caused by HIV.” It is difficult to find such studies or papers because the mainstream medical journals and mainstream media don’t want to hear refutation of “facts” which they already know (or are made to believe). And we see this in other issues in the medical area, such as vaccines and cancer research, in which much of such research, by the way, is dependent on government grants to be carried out.
For some reason, not just the population in general, but medical doctors also hold various long-held beliefs which might not be true, and believe in various myths as well, especially regarding the “good” results of pharmaceuticals. Rarely do doctors emphasize nutrition as a way to treat conditions or illnesses, even though a main cause of medical issues is lack of proper nutrition. It is my view that the medical profession has just become way too enmeshed with the pharmaceutical industry.
And also, when doctors, researchers and others in the medical community get a little too involved with a particular ideology, such as the theory that “HIV causes AIDS,” I am not surprised that those others whose research findings challenge the official narrative will be suppressed by the guardians of established truths or beliefs.
For example, I have written plenty of times here about Justina Pelletier. She is the teenager who was being treated with Mitochondrial Disease, an actual medical condition, but whose case was taken over by psychiatrists at a Children’s Hospital who then abruptly terminated her medical treatment and placed her in mental health facilities against her will and against her parents’ will. These “doctors” caused her to become much more seriously ill, in which she then had to use a wheelchair and she suffered much more severely physically because of it. As I discussed in this post about her case, the psychiatrists saw in Justina a chance to try to “prove” their ideology that Mitochondrial Disease doesn’t exist and is a psychological disorder, and that she was really suffering from “somatoform disorder.” Yeah, the “20 inches of cartilage wrapped around her colon and appendix” that were found in earlier exploratory surgery was “all in her head,” right.
In fact, it was my listening to David Brudnoy, especially in those earlier years of 1984 to the ’90s in which my thinking became more skeptical of official narratives, and the status quo. He was really encouraging of that in people, as one could hear how he himself wasn’t afraid to challenge various guests on various issues, albeit in his usual polite manner. (He was at times overly polite, such as when he interviewed then-Gov. Mitt “Willard” Romney. Ugh. But I digress.)
So I am thankful to Dr. Miller for his enlightening article, although I have read earlier articles refuting the “HIV causes AIDS” hypothesis. But in his reminding me of that issue, I am now much more skeptical of the story that David Brudnoy’s 1994 illnesses and 2003-04 cancer and subsequent death were really caused by HIV or AIDS, but rather by the drugs that he had been taking since his 1988 HIV-positive diagnosis.