What Really Happened in Geneva
Physician Robert Giraldo and Journalist John Lauritsen
at the 1998 AIDS Conference in Geneva
"A trade show for the commodities of the AIDS industry"
DISSIDENTS MANAGE SESSION ON OFFICIAL PROGRAM
& STAGE ALTERNATIVE CONFERENCE BLOCKS AWAY
An Interview by Mark Gabrish Conlan
The official reports on the international AIDS conference in Geneva, Switzerland June
28 - July 3 told of a "new mood of realism" at the conference. In the opening session,
Dr. Peter Piot, head of the United Nations AIDS program, tried to fan the dying embers of AIDS hysteria with
apocalyptic rhetoric and wild claims that 31 million people
throughout the world are "infected" with the so-called AIDS virus, HIV. Mainstream
news reports suggested that putting pregnant women on the cell-killing, carcinogenic
cancer chemotherapy AZT, and mandating that their babies be delivered by caesarean section,
would virtually eliminate HIV "transmission" from mother to child at birth -- ignoring
the toxic effects of administering AZT in utero.
The "cocktails" -- combinations of AZT-style drugs and highly toxic protease inhibitors,
now routinely recommended to virtually all Americans who test HIV-positive whether
or not they are actually sick -- were hailed as a "miracle" at the last international AIDS conference, in Vancouver in
1996. But this year, the reports that dominated
the news were of the grotesque "side effects" of these treatments -- ranging from
swollen bellies and necks to kidney and liver failures, diabetes and other life-threatening
changes in blood chemistry. Claims were also made that "resistant strains" of the virus
had evolved and were being "transmitted" between people through sex, and therefore
people should stop hoping for a chemical cure to the AIDS problem and fall back on
"prevention" -- which, in this context, means condom use or abstinence.
Despite the AIDS industry's seemingly inexhaustible capacity for spin control, however,
many positive developments occurred at Geneva, though the mainstream press ignored
them. For the first time, a conference of advocates for alternative or "dissident"
views of AIDS was held in the same city and at the same time as the mainstream international
AIDS conference.
Even more remarkable, dissidents for the first time ever got a mainstream conference
to include a session devoted to an alternative perspective. Through a video hookup,
Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, leader of a dissident AIDS research team in Perth, Australia, told the conference the
message she's been putting forward in the scientific
press for six years: that the HIV tests are useless in diagnosing HIV infections.
Two long-time AIDS dissidents, physician Roberto Giraldo and journalist John Lauritsen,
attended the Geneva conference.
Giraldo is an infectious disease expert and former department chairman at a large
medical school in his native Medellin, Colombia. He has extensive experience treating
infectious diseases in Colombia, and today works in a New York City lab performing
the various HIV tests, including the ELISA, Western blot, and "viral load." In 1997 he
published a book, AIDS and Stressors, detailing his deconstruction of the HIV-AIDS
model, and presenting his alternate explanation of what does cause AIDS: various
stressors, including the factors proposed by UC-Berkley virologist Peter Duesberg.
Lauritsen is a former executive market researcher and analyst who has covered AIDS
since 1985 as a journalist in the gay press. He was the first person to formally
propose that party drugs rather than HIV explain AIDS among gays. His three books
on the subject of AIDS include: Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story (1990), The AIDS War
(1993) and The AIDS Cult (with Ian Young; 1997).
Conlan: What happened at the Geneva AIDS conference?
Lauritsen:
It was a step forward, because, for the first time, there were AIDS dissident ideas
as part of the official program. Continuum
had a booth with the other AIDS groups. So it was very different from Berlin in 1993,
where Dutch AIDS dissident Robert Laarhoven was kicked out of the country for putting
copies of Rethinking AIDS
[the original incarnation of RA
] on the literature table, where many other groups had done exactly the same. The
general impression I had of the people there in Geneva was that it was sort of a
lighthearted and amiable conference, sort of like a carnival. Basically, the people
were friendly to dissidents. Not too many of them came to the satellite programs, but there
were only a couple of occasions of real hostility.
Of course, nothing came of the mainstream conference. The P.R. slogan that they had,
"Bridging the Gap," fell completely flat. What "Bridging the Gap" meant was that
with all of the wonderful AIDS treatments -- the protease inhibitor "cocktails" and
so on -- it would be unfortunate if Third World countries or some people might not be able
to get these commodities. But during the course of the conference, there were so
many reports on the hideous side effects of the protease inhibitors that by the end
of the conference, it looked as though the Third World would be better off with the widest
possible gap between itself and the AIDS commodities.
Conlan:
What kinds of side effects were reported for the drugs?
Lauritsen:
There were dozens of them. One of the plenaries dealt largely with a report by a
man named David Cooper. There was also a community forum sponsored by ACT UP Golden
Gate and ACT UP Paris, to deal with "buffalo humps" and "Crix bellies." That was
by far the best-attended of any community event. It was filled to overflowing. At that event,
person after person testified that there were whole practices or support groups where
the large majority, or even all
of them, were experiencing these severe metabolic disturbances.
The terms "buffalo hump" and "Crix belly" are themselves part of a public-relations
spin. They sound almost cute, but what they reflect is very severe disturbances in metabolism, with life-threatening
consequences: everything
from very, very
high cholesterol counts and fatal heart attacks to diabetes and organ failure. They
also include extremely dry lips and skin, and the grotesque redistribution of fat,
either in the belly and/or the back of the neck, at the same time that the limbs
-- the arms and legs -- atrophy, so they become virtually toothpicks.
Pharmaceutical Trade Show
Conlan:
The mainstream reporting of the conference focused largely on the idea that because of problems with protease inhibitor
"cocktails,"
we need to fall back on HIV prevention programs -- in other words, telling people
not to have sex, or not to have it in certain ways.
Lauritsen:
The "prevention" emphasis was largely put forward through the London International
Group. They are the manufacturers of Durex, which was the official condom of the
AIDS conference. And it was everywhere. There was a statue, at least 15 feet tall,
of an illuminated Durex condom. They had a machine that blew up Durex condoms until they exploded.
At that time they'd be about the size of a watermelon. And people were running around
in condom suits, as Durex condoms, all over the exhibition area. It was very big on condoms. There was also a minor
company that had a highly expensive, multicolored,
scented latex product designed for those who are into such things as cunnilingus.
They were giving them away free, and so we were playing with them -- you know, blowing
them up and popping them on the table.
Their point was that rather than research, treatment or all these other things, that
the most important thing to do is to focus on prevention. But to them, that means
using condoms. To me, that's absurd because I don't see that anyone has ever made
a case even once that so-called AIDS has been transmitted sexually. Realistic AIDS prevention
would have to tell people not to do things that are seriously harmful to their health.
It would tell people to stop using recreational drugs, to stop drinking if they're alcoholic, to stop smoking and to take
care of themselves in general. All these
are far more important than using condoms.
The bottom line is that these conferences are trade shows. A lot of people don't realize
that, and there are a lot of concerned physicians and people with AIDS and AIDS activists
and people with genuine concerns and good intentions who go to them. But the bottom line is that they're trade shows
for the commodities of the AIDS industry.
With the protease inhibitors, there's now a new market for products that are used
for incontinence, because people on the protease inhibitor cocktails, every time
they leave their house they have to calculate how far they are from the nearest toilet. So this
is a new market for products to help with incontinence, and they were there.
Dr. Giraldo:
I was in shock. I knew that the pharmaceutical companies have power in AIDS science,
but I never thought it was as big as it is. I have been to many, many medical meetings
over 30 years, and I have never seen the power of the pharmaceutical companies demonstrated the way it was in the
AIDS conference. Everything was organized by the pharmaceutical
companies. Once you are there, you see that the main thing is not the lectures, not
the papers the doctors or researchers are presenting. The main things are the exhibits of the pharmaceutical companies.
There were about 60 to 70 exhibits, all
giving out gifts and information.
For instance, Glaxo Wellcome had an enormous exhibit, and they were giving out all
kinds of propaganda about all their protease inhibitors. They try to take people
in their hands by giving them a lot of pens, books -- all kinds of books -- videotapes,
cassettes, CD records and big yellow bags to carry things. You could see 12,000 people
in uniform, carrying the bag from Glaxo Wellcome. Merck, Sharp, Dohme, and Roche
also had big exhibits. Roche was giving away ice cream and chocolates.
Conlan:
So, the entire anti-AIDS effort sounds like an incredible multinational welfare program
for not just the pharmaceutical industry, but the medical industry in general. Is
that right?
Lauritsen:
Well, yes. I still think that the AIDS thing is very simple, once you get rid of
all the lies and the rest of it. But it is welfare in a sense, and I object to it.
And taxpayers should object to it. Virtually nobody on these horrible AIDS drugs
pays for them. Almost nobody could afford to. They're paid for through disability, welfare benefits,
Medicaid, or health insurance. If it's paid for by welfare, it comes out of our tax
money. And if it's paid for by medical insurance, this means that we all pay through higher insurance rates.
It may be trivial compared with things like the defense budget, but nevertheless on
principle it's wrong and it shouldn't happen. If the drugs were beneficial, perhaps
you could make a case for them. But I object to my tax money, and my higher premiums,
being used to buy drugs for people when the drugs are doing nothing but poisoning them.
I support the right of people to commit suicide, and if they want to jump off a bridge,
in some cases maybe they shouldn't, but ultimately that's their privilege. But if they want to commit suicide slowly, at a
cost of $10,000, to $80,000 a year, I'm
sorry, but I don't want to pay for it. Not even a tiny portion of it.
Third World Suspicions
Conlan:
What do you think is the most important development from the mainstream conference?
Dr. Giraldo:
The main development is to see that they are in a big mess. There was a big change
from Vancouver two years ago to this conference. In Vancouver there were smiling
faces all the time, and good news. The newspapers were talking about how good things
were going on in AIDS, with the protease inhibitors, all these new drugs that were going
to be the salvation from AIDS. In Geneva, what you saw was completely different.
People were not smiling. They were very frustrated to see that the drugs that they
expected to be the salvation were not. So they decided in Geneva that HIV is mutating and is
becoming resistant to everything.
I think that people are starting to be suspicious that something is wrong. For instance,
the doctors from Africa and Asia I spoke to are very open to our ideas because they
are starting to be suspicious. I had an opportunity to tour the city with a doctor from Uganda. We were talking about
this, and she never knew anything about the dissidents.
So, now that she knows, she said, "It makes so much sense, what you say."
She said that for many years, she was thinking about this, because to doctors there
was something very strange about AIDS. It is well known in medicine that there are
no specific treatments for any viral diseases. There is no specific treatment for
the common cold. There is no specific treatment for measles, for poliomyelitis, for hepatitis,
for mumps, for any real viral disease.
So she said, "But it's very funny that now, for AIDS, every day there are new drugs."
She has asked many doctors from Africa, "What is so unique to HIV, that we can treat
HIV with so many medicines? Why can we not treat any other virus with medicines in
the same way?" So she was starting to be suspicious, and she said that many other people
in Africa are very suspicious that something is really wrong with AIDS science.
I think that a lot of these people from developing countries will be on our side before
many doctors in Europe and the United States, because they are suffering more. They
can see the real facts of what causes AIDS, or what causes these types of immune
deficiency in their countries. It is poverty and malnutrition, and the unsanitary conditions.
It's quite easy for them to figure it out. And once you explain our views to them,
they start to see.
There was a journalist from India, from New Delhi, who is following the "epidemic
of AIDS" in India. He spoke to Joan Shenton [British TV producer of alternative AIDS
documentaries] and said, "Joan, what you are saying about the developing countries,
it makes sense, because there are a lot of people in India who have a lot of questions.
Why are there people with AIDS who are HIV-negative? Why do some people who are HIV-positive
never get AIDS?" He said that after he listened to us, he thought our explanation was full of common sense, and was so
rational, he doesn't understand why most people
don't think the same way.
Questioning the Tests
Lauritsen:
The testing panel was held on June 28, as part of the official conference. It was
held in one of the large halls, and there was a video conference where Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos
and the Australians appeared. The format was somewhat awkward, and so I won't even attempt to relate what they
said, which was as often as not more technical
than it should have been. But the one point that comes across clear and strong from
the critique of PhD virologist Stefan Lanka and the Australians that nobody has ever seen HIV.
Nobody has ever seen HIV. There have been a few things that have been claimed to be
HIV, but in no case did they correspond either in size, morphology or -- most important
-- in numbers to what HIV would have to be to cause a disease.
But instead of all of the controversy over whether or not HIV has been isolated, and
whether or not it exists, we should be concentrating on the fact that if there ever
were a true HIV infection -- and this is a point Peter Duesberg made back in 1987,
when I interviewed him -- there would be viremia.
The blood plasma would be teeming with whole cell-free infectious viruses. There
would be millions to billions of whole viruses in every milliliter of plasma. This
has never been observed with HIV.
True "HIV infection," in the ordinary sense of the word, would mean a great abundance
of the microbe in question, and also pathogenesis [disease progression] that was
related to it. For example, I wouldn't regard my finger as infected just because
it had a few germs under the fingernail. That doesn't count. There would have to be a huge
amount of them and there would have to be some sort of pathogenesis that was related
to it. Nobody, even once, has actually demonstrated HIV infection.
The antibody tests have no specificity whatever. They have never been validated, which
is to say that nobody has ever answered the question what exactly they do
measure. It's alleged that they respond to antibodies to HIV, but this has never
been demonstrated. It has been shown that they respond to antigens reflecting at
least 60 different conditions. And so therefore, on this basis alone, one can say
that the tests have no specificity. They're absolutely useless.
There was discussion of the other tests. The viral load tests have been criticized
very sharply by mathematician Mark Craddock; by molecular biologists Peter Duesberg
and Harvey Bialy; and, again, they are totally worthless. Kary Mullis, who invented
the technique they're based on, has repudiated them and said that "quantitative PCR is
an oxymoron." So they're useless. In fact, all of these tests are not only useless, but they're deadly
because they're leading people to take harmful drugs of no benefit whatever, which
in the long run will end up killing people. All of these tests are indirect markers. They are all based on chemical reactions
to what are regarded as
viral components.
Dr. Giraldo:
It was great for us to be visible inside the main conference. People in Perth talking
to us in Geneva. And this was part of the orthodox conference! Not too many people
attended, but anyway, it happened and that was great.
There was also an official press conference for our group within the orthodox conference,
and it was great. It took place on Monday [the day after the conference officially
ended] and lasted two hours. There were several journalists from different countries. There were a lot of questions about
our groups, Continuum
in England,
HEAL in the US, COBRA in Spain, IFAS in Switzerland, REGIM in Germany -- that is the
Lanka organization. People were very impressed.
At the same time that this was going on, some people from the dissident movement --
from COBRA and another organization in France -- held a hunger strike in front of
the main conference, with a big sign asking for the proof that HIV exists. For the
five days of the conference, they sat at the entrance of the main conference. Journalists
from all over the world spoke with them, asked them who they were and why they thought
no evidence demonstrated the existence of HIV.
Also, we attended several other meetings and lectures. We attended two press conferences,
including one given by David Ho and Anthony Fauci, and we went and asked a lot of
questions. And they got furious and desperate. They called us "Duesberg people" --
"You, the Duesberg people, you are disturbing this. You are very dangerous. You are
causing a lot of trouble here." That press conference was moderated by Bernard Herschel,
the president of the Geneva conference. He also got desperate.
Lauritsen:
About 18 of us were journalists, who had press passes. We went to the major press
conferences, which were only for media people, and we asked critical questions of
people like Robert Gallo and David Ho. A couple of the establishment media people
got quite upset by this. They wanted nothing but the usual obsequious and meaningless questions.
But when David Ho was there, I pushed it to the limit. I said I wanted to discuss
the viral load tests. I said they've been severely criticized by mathematicians as
not only being wrong, but disgracefully wrong in the mathematics; that molecular
biologists criticized them, saying that viral load counts allegedly in the tens or hundreds
of thousands corresponded to no whole, infectious virus; and the test had been repudiated
by the man who got the Nobel Prize for inventing the technique they were based on.
Then I said, "Therefore, is there any reason we should not regard the 'viral load'
tests as junk science?"
David Ho waited a couple of seconds and said, "Oh, no. I don't think so. There are
other tests that back them up." And that was it. It was a non-answer, but so what,
he said something.
Then Huw Christie, editor of Continuum,
asked David Ho why no electron microscope photograph had ever been done of HIV. Ho
responded that he didn't think that would be practical on a day-to-day basis, to
do that in managing a patient -- which was a grotesquely unresponsive answer. Huw
Christie followed up and said, "Well, don't you think this should be done, even just once?"
And that was an embarrassing thing.
The moderator had let the exchange go on, so all of a sudden Mark Harrington of TAG
[the New York-based Treatment Action Group, a spinoff of ACT UP New York], even though
he wasn't moderating, interrupted so this exchange wouldn't continue. He angrily
attacked Huw Christie and the rest of us. He said, "I don't know why you people keep
coming to these conferences," and so on. So Mark Harrington, acting as an AIDS activist/censor,
prevented that particular exchange from going on any longer.
On another day, when Robert Gallo was there, Stefan Lanka put a number of questions
to him, which were highly technical and embarrassing. Gallo was in a very relaxed
mood and had no problem just giving non-answers to them. The moderator there, Bernard
Herschel, who was also the head of the conference, just told Stefan Lanka that his question
would be answered, but if he persisted his microphone would be turned off.
Joan Shenton made a statement about how Gallo, in previous conferences, had put forth
various ideas which totally fell by the wayside. She recounted a few things of his
rather checkered history, and asked him if he could think of any reason why he should
continue to get funding. Gallo just sort of laughed and said, "Well, unfortunately
for you, I will continue to get funded forevermore."
On the whole, I think they learned their lesson. At the 1993 conference in Berlin,
for example, Robert Gallo was extremely tense. He went around everywhere with three
armed bodyguards, and he lost his temper a couple of times. In this conference there
were no bodyguards, and he was smiling and completely relaxed, no matter what questions
were asked of him. So, if nothing else, I think they've had some grooming by the
public-relations firms they undoubtedly work with.
Dr. Giraldo:
When we asked questions in the press conferences for Anthony Fauci and David Ho,
they got furious. They got violent. They wanted to kill us, or at least to hit us.
They started to insult us. We would speak with scientific facts and arguments, and
they would answer us with adjectives. For instance, Tom DiFerdinando of HEAL-New York asked
Fauci about a paper Fauci wrote 15 years ago showing that stress, any kind of stress,
causes CD4 T-cell counts to go down. DiFerdinando said, "Doctor, it's like you forgot
that you wrote that paper. And now, you can imagine, all the people testing 'positive,'
that's enough stress for the T-cells to be absorbed in the tissues."
Fauci became furious, and he said, "Well, that isn't -- there is an overwhelming amount
of evidence that HIV is the cause of AIDS, and that's it, and you are a bunch of
lunatics." I don't remember his exact words, but he was desperate. You could see
it in his face. It was good because many journalists who didn't even know we existed became
aware of the dissident movement.
Long-Term Survivors
Dr. Giraldo:
We also went into a meeting during the official conference about long-term survivors,
and that one was great. Most of the long-term survivors who are still alive are the ones
who are not taking the protease inhibitors or AZT or anything like that. And the
other great thing is that at Geneva they were told the whole truth about the protease
inhibitors: that they are just garbage, that they are just more stressors, more toxins.
Lauritsen:
There were two long-term survivors' meetings, one in the official conference and
one in our alternative conference. By now I've been going to such things for well
over a decade, and there's a certain similarity to them. It was agreed in the alternative
meeting that among all of the people they knew -- not just the ones who were there --
the one common denominator was that the long-term survivors had rejected the AIDS
treatments.
Until the late 1980s, when you said "long-term survivor," you meant someone diagnosed
as having AIDS, who had been very close to death, and who had managed to recover
and had gotten over it. Then they started redefining a long-term survivor as somebody
who had a diagnosis of being HIV-positive, based on these junk antibody tests. From
my standpoint, there's no reason at all why somebody with a positive result on that
shouldn't live as long as anybody else, as long as he gets rid of any serious risk
factors in his life. But, on the other hand, the psychological effects of getting an HIV-positive
test result can be devastating, and the people at our meeting described what this
had done to them. Some of them went briefly on drugs, and they didn't tolerate them or they found out the truth about
things, and then they stopped.
A lot of the people who rejected the drugs, the long-term survivors, were rather ordinary
people. In many cases they just hesitated,
and the longer they hesitated, the better they felt. They got over whatever illnesses
they may have had. A British guy put it very succinctly. He said his "mate" took
the pills and died, and he didn't and he's still here. This is 10 years after his
HIV-positive diagnosis, and he's in actually really good health.
Some of these people are actually in good health -- certainly as good as the average
person -- and they said one strategy for long-term survival is just to reject everything,
to completely walk away from the whole idea of AIDS, from the long-term survivor
label and all the rest of it. They said, "Even the word 'survivor' is something that
draws you back, psychologically, into the 'AIDS Zone.'" At least some of them simply
walk away from it, and these people would be hard to find, because they would stay as
far as possible away from anything related to AIDS. Other long-term survivors became
activists, and they are trying to help other people do the things that will permit
them to stay healthy -- which essentially means not taking drugs.
In the official session on long-term survivors, a few of those people were on the
cocktails. However, they had received nothing but an HIV-positive diagnosis, and
so the real issue there is how long can somebody survive taking these poisons. Several
people there made the point during the discussion period that they thought the most important
thing was that doctors, friends, peers, counselors, AIDS organizations and all of
these should support people if they make the decision not to take any drugs at all.
And this has not been the case. People have been really bullied into taking these when
they didn't want to. And there was general agreement with that.
One woman said that she thought it was important that patients be given all the information on drugs, including the full
range of toxicities; and that this
had not been done. So I spoke in the discussion period. I said that I agreed with
what she had said, and that I thought that any doctor should tell patients that they should know that AZT is a carcinogen;
they
should know AZT was approved on the basis of fraudulent research; and they should
know that AZT is a random terminator of DNA synthesis, that this is its primary biochemical action.
The guy moderating the meeting completely freaked out. It turned out he was on AZT. He became terribly angry. He
tried to silence me, and made a fool of himself.
Afterwards a lot of people came up to me and said it was outrageous that he tried
to prevent me from talking, and it really backfired on him. But it was one example
where I would say there was a great deal more free speech at this than at any previous
AIDS conference, even though there's still a long way to go.
Conlan:
Please comment on the heavy push from the conference for pregnant women who test HIV-positive not only to take
AZT but also to have their babies delivered by caesarean.
Lauritsen:
I read the news report. I didn't go to that session, but I think it's monstrous.
The tiny little studies that this is based on are completely junk. The samples are
too small. I don't believe that they would have been sufficiently independent from
either the manufacturers of the drug or complicitous members of the public health service.
There's a lot of other evidence that women who are HIV-positive and not
on drugs -- and I would include heroin and crack as among the drugs -- have healthy
babies. There's no reason why they shouldn't have healthy babies; and furthermore,
there's no reason why they shouldn't breast-feed. The whole idea of caesareans on
top of it is simply monstrous.
It's monstrous to give a carcinogenic drug to a pregnant woman. It's monstrous to
give a drug which terminates DNA synthesis to a pregnant woman, because fetuses don't
develop into babies, and babies don't develop into children, without DNA synthesis.
This terrible drug should never have been prescribed at all. It was approved only on
the basis of fraudulent research. There is no justification for prescribing the drug
to even one person.
The Alternative Conference
Dr. Giraldo:
The people of IFAS, our group in Switzerland, organized our alternative conference.
It was a few blocks from the main conference, in a very nice place they rented, the
Swissair guest house, sort of a hotel for the Swissair plane crews.
Lauritsen:
A satellite -- an alternative conference -- was held throughout the whole thing at
the Swissair guest house. Several dozen of us showed up, and it was very productive.
There was a sense of camaraderie. There was a panel on testing. There was a panel
on the media, which I took part in, where we discussed all the various types of censorship
in the media and the dirty tricks that have been played on us.
Dr. Giraldo:
There were about 60 people from our side, from Continuum,
from Meditel Productions [Joan Shenton's company], from Germany, from Austria, Russia,
Spain, Mexico, Switzerland and the United States. It was great.
Lauritsen:
We managed to keep a sense of humor, but actually AIDS dissidents have been treated
very brutally. Some of us have been driven into bankruptcy. I haven't myself, but
I've certainly taken hard knocks that way. But we've all come out of it, so I guess
you'd say we're bloodied but unbowed.
Almost all the AIDS dissidents in Geneva stayed in an underground bunker. Most of
the large buildings in Geneva have these bunkers, designed for protection against
nuclear attack. Psychologically, it was pretty awful. You entered through what looked
like the door of a huge bank vault, with thick concrete walls. Once inside, it was all
very clean. There was a men's dorm and a women's dorm. Needless to say, there was
no contact with the outside except for air which was ventilated in there.
But it was nice, in a way. It was very cheap. We only paid $7 a night, which was a
great deal less than a hotel room would be. And it was an experience. It was "roughing
it," in a way, but it was good because we were all together. And we were able to
communicate in a way that we would not have if we had all been staying in private houses
or hotels.
Dr. Giraldo:
Our people in Geneva knew that none of us had money. No pharmaceutical company or
foundation is going to pay for us to be there. So they rented a bunker, and we were
sleeping in three-deck bunk beds. It was a lot of fun, just being like that. We were
in a small room, sleeping about 25 people, 25 men. In the evening it was nice because
we had an opportunity to talk. Everybody was interviewing each other, to use for
Continuum,
for one thing or another one, and it was all very nice.
This article originally appeared in Zenger's Newsmagazine, and is copyright 1998. Zenger's Newsmagazine deals with alternative lifestyles and regularly publishes material challenging the
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