This is how the medical and science pyramids work. Something is announced or assumed and then becomes an everybody-knows-that purely through repetition of the assumption as if it is fact. Complete crap becomes accepted truth with no supporting evidence and only repetition of the crap. This is how a virus that doesnt exist became the virus that changed the world. The HIV-AIDS fairy story became a multibillion pound industry and the media poured out propaganda terrifying the world about the deadly HIV virus that caused the lethal AIDS. By then Mullis was working at a lab in Santa Monica, California, to detect retroviruses with his PCR test in blood donations received by the Red Cross. In doing so he asked a virologist where he could nd a reference for HIV being the cause of AIDS. You dont need a reference, the virologist said Everybody knows it. Mullis said he wanted to quote a reference in the report he was doing and he said

The virologist suggested he cite a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on morbidity and mortality. Mullis read the report, but it only said that an organism had been identied and did not say how. The report did not identify the original scientic work. Physicians, however, assumed (key recurring theme) that if the CDC was convinced that HIV caused AIDS then proof must exist. Mullis continues:

I did computer searches. Neither Montagnier, Gallo, nor anyone else had published papers describing experiments which led to the conclusion that HIV probably caused AIDS. I read the papers in Science for which they had become well known as AIDS doctors, but all they had said there was that they had found evidence of a past infection by something which was probably HIV in some AIDS patients. They found antibodies. Antibodies to viruses had always been considered evidence of past disease, not present disease. Antibodies signaled that the virus had been defeated. The patient had saved himself. There was no indication in these papers that this virus caused a disease. They didnt show that everybody with the antibodies had the disease. In fact they found some healthy people with antibodies.

Mullis asked why their work had been published if Montagnier and Gallo hadnt really found this evidence, and why had they been ghting so hard to get credit for the discovery? He says he was hesitant to write HIV is the probable cause of AIDS until he found published evidence to support that. Tens of thousands of scientists and researchers were spending billions of dollars a year doing research based on this idea, Mullis writes. The reason had to be there somewhere; otherwise these people would not have allowed their research to sele into one narrow channel of investigation. He said he lectured about PCR at numerous meetings where people were always talking about HIV and he asked them how they knew that HIV was the cause of AIDS: Everyone said something. Everyone had the answer at home, in the office, in some drawer. They all knew, and they would send me the papers as soon as they got back. But I never got any papers. Nobody ever sent me the news about how AIDS was caused by HIV.