Prosecution Expert Witness David Gordon’s Testimony

David Gordon's testimony can be found here (4.6 MB pdf). Page numbers are 1009-1102.

 Now what is being put is if you fail to purify you automatically fail to characterise the viral antigens and to obtain a gold standard for the antigen antibody reaction, meaning one cannot use anitbody tests to define infection with a retrovirus. That’s it. Do you agree with that proposition?

No.

You do not agree with that?

No; it’s not necessary to purify a virus to characterise its antigens. Antigens nowadays are characterised – as I said before, it’s far easier to characterise them by producing large amounts of virus antigen using molecular cloning and expression, and those antigens then are separate and distinct from any other material that may have been used to grow the virus. [ Purifying the antigens (proteins?) without purifying the infectious particle?]

If you fail to purify doesn’t that mean yo do not have a gold standard for the antibody antigen reaction?

Not at all. You have purified the antigens. You can purify the antigens. The antigens can be purified.

You say you’ve got a gold standard.

What do you understand by ‘gold standard’ firstly?

A gold standard is if you have an existing test for an existing disease, so, say you have an antibody test against chickenpox and then somebody comes along with what they think is a better test, maybe they use a different antigen or something like that. What could usually be done to evaluate how good that test is to compare it with what’s the existing standard at the moment which is accepted as the routine way in which it is done, so you can call that the gold standard if you like. So test A is the existing test, the gold standard test, and test B is your new test. You test, say 100 samples with method A and 100 samples with method B, compare the test results and compare one with the other.

Let’s go back a step. How do you get to test A. Let’s take chickenpox, for example. I presume you find people who are suffering with symptoms of what we now know is chickenpox.

Yes; so, when a disease is first apparent there is obviously no test for it so there can’t be a gold standard, so the stage then involves developing a diagnostic test, evaluating how accurate it is, so, for example, if you’re developing a test for chickenpox you might take people who come in who you suspect have chickenpox, take blood from them and see and grow the virus from that perhaps and work out how many of those people who have unequivocal chickenpox test positvity and that becomes the standard, but that then may be replaced. [Our emphasis. Question: How can that standard, the cultured, identified virus, be subject to replacement?] The gold standard may shift and the gold standard 20 years ago might be a relatively poor test now [Answer: Because Gordon pretends to be talking about the virus, but is really only talking about the test. Coming from an expert, that is either pure senility or wilfully misleading], so the gold standard for HIV antibody detection in 1983 or 1984 is different  [our emphasis] to the gold standard that we have now because the test has improved. The antigens have been purified [Our emphasis. Gordon is still maintaining you can purify the antigens, the ‘HIV’ proteins, without ever purifying the whole viral particle. So when exactly were they purified making the tests reliable?] There have been refinements in the testing so, naturally, what used to be the gold standard is no longer the gold standard [our emphasis]

And there are different tests?

There are. Sometimes the new test you’ve got is actually better than the original test, so you might get more positive results [our emphasis. More positive results equal better test. Although this is hardly correct, it’s revealing of the HIV mindset – something we also saw in the discussion of different PCR kits: the higher the viral load the better the test is considered to be]. So this is the natural evolution of test technology that we would see.

Does it follow from that answer that Montagnier didn’t have a gold standard?

I didn’t say that at all. [huh?]

So what’s the problem why haven’t we in effect been able to cure HIV?

I would say that the progress with HIV has been as fast or faster than any virus in history perhaps with the exception of SARS [Which simply disappeared on its own] which used techniques 20 years later. So, in fact, if you look at that first, say, 5 to 15 years from the initial presentation of patients with the new disease, completely new disease, in a very short period of time the putative virus was isolated, diagnostic tests had been developed, the epidemiology of the disease was determined, drugs were developed. So that is phenomenal progress in medicine [Hmm, no vaccine and 000,000,000 cured, as AmFar likes to say, that's progress?]

I assume there are many diseases medicine hasn’t been able to cure

Absolutely. I mean particularly virus diseases, which are particularly difficult to treat. There is still a relatively limited number of drugs that are active against viruses, against different viruses. So in fact I would say progress with HIV has been extraordinary, extraordinarily fast. I mean how long did it take to determine the cause of cholera? That took thousands of years; the cause of tuberculosis, thousands of years. So we are in a five to 10 year time frame with major advances, 20 years in fact, extraordinary advances.

The only extraordinary thing about this is Prof. Gordon’s unparalleled ability to put a brave face on scientific bankruptcy. It is indeed inescapable that any disease now said to be caused by a microbe would necessarily have to wait for the discovery of microbes no matter how many thousands of years old they are. In an era where the entire medical industry is tripping over itself to attribute just about every new phenomenon from cancer to reverse transcription to a virus, it’s hardly an ‘extraordinary advance’ to attribute AIDS to a virus as well and still be unable to come up with a cure. Neither does it make the advances any more extraordinary that medical science has a hard time curing other ‘virus diseases’ despite the intense focus and billions of dollars poured into this one-sided research.

David Gordon was recalled for further questioning at the end of the trial.