Dr Matt’s Newsletter July 25th - Fatima, the Music of Portugal, and the Prequel to covid-19: HIV and AIDS.

Supporting healthy social interactions and a diversity of health choices

Today’s newsletter features a sampling of the music of Portugal, the first section from a book by one of the three shepherd children from Fatima, Sister Lúcia, and a rather deep dive into large gaps in HIV beliefs, such as the largest study published on sexual transmission actually finding zero transmissions despite 282 “couple years” of follow-up. There are significant parallels between covid-19 and HIV and I provide a number of details, videos and podcasts. It may take a few sessions to get through them all, but learning about HIV will help us care for people with fragile health instead of quarantining them, regardless what “superbug” is in the news, something Mother Teresa understood extremely well. 

Here are the topics in today’s newsletter:

 1: Politics Not As Usual – Russell Brand interviews RFK Jr.

At the very end of the newsletter are links to two videos of RFK Jr being interviewed by Russell Brand which are entertaining and informative at the same time. As I have said many times, I do not agree with all of RFK’s stances, but his policies are head and shoulders above the other two candidates and would move our country toward healing ourselves and the people around us.

 2: Music of the Week – Portugal’s “Queen of Fado”, Amália Rodrigues, and jazz pianist João Paulo Esteves Da Silva.

I lived in Portugal in the 90’s for three years, and have visited over ten times since then to visit my wife’s family, so I have a friendly bias towards Portugal and the Portuguese people.  I also played in the jazz scene which has depth and beauty, and I am happy to share this with all of you. 

3: Inspiration of the week – Sister Lúcia of Fatima tells the story of her childhood village living off the land on their family farms, tending goats and sheep in the hills, which is similar to the childhood of Amália Rodrigues and my wife’s parents and grandparents.

  4: Research of the week –HIV was very much a “prequel” to covid-19. 

We can learn a lot about compassion from people who resisted fears of the  “supervirus” of the 1980’s, such as British nurse Kevin Corbett, Canadian David Crowe, and retrovirologist Peter Duesberg.  These fears were the reason for the founding of Mother Teresa’s “Gift of Peace” home in Washington DC, and I described my first visit there in my newsletter on April 15th.  People diagnosed with AIDS often had multiple serious health challenges, and unfortunately being diagnosed “HIV positive” made it harder for them to recover and interfered with normal high quality healthcare and caregiving. Sound familiar?

Family Run Business of the Week – Air purifiers with Norman Long, the grandpa of an extremely cute patient in my practice. 

Norman’s company is called BRIO, an innovative air purifier. It is local (based in Silver Spring, Maryland) and their website is https://brioairpurifier.com

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Yours truly, one moment at a time.

Matt Irwin

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  Music of the Week – Portuguese musicians, old and new: Fadista Amália Rodrigues, and jazz pianist João Paulo Esteves da Silva.

1: Uma Casa Portuguesa: Amália Rodrigues

    You can listen as you read below about sister Lucia, one of the three children of Fatima who had spiritually transformative experiences in 1917, and the intro to problems with HIV “science”.

Amália was born poor, and sold fruit on the streets of Lisbon as a little girl to help her family survive.  Like Sister Lúcia, her family relied on their fruit trees, sheep, and goats for sustenance.  Although the lives of Amália and Lúcia took different paths later in life, this song by Amália shows their common roots.  It is called, “A Portuguese House”.  Here are some of the lyrics, translated into English, and they remind me very much of the childhoods of my wife’s parents who grew up on farms in the north of Portugal:

In a Portuguese home we fit so well,

  Sharing bread and wine at the table

And if someone comes knocking

  They come in and join the family

We fit together with honest talk

  And will never speak in circles

And the joy in poverty

  Is in the richness of giving and receiving

Four walls painted white

  And the smells of kitchen herbs

Vines with ripening grapes

  With two roses in the garden

A promise of kisses when I arrive

  And two arms to embrace me

   Inspiration of the Week – Sister Lúcia of Fatima, describes her “Casa Portuguesa” in the village of Fatima before 1917.

  Sister Lúcia’s book, Calls from the Message of Fatima, is an attempt to reply to the thousands of letters she received over the years.  What does she choose as her first chapter?  Is it a description of her and her two younger cousins’ spiritual visions and messages culminating in the apparition they saw as Jesus’s mother, Mary in 1917?  No.  In a refreshing change of pace, it is the spirituality of everyday life that starts her story.

  Chapter One is called “The Three Little Shepherd Children and their Families”, and in it she replies to questions about their lives living off the land with fruits from the orchards, sheep and goat cheese, and the love of their families.  She also has extensive quotes from the Bible to emphasize her points as she does throughout her book. 

  An example is a story about her sister who loved fresh fruit.  One summer she watched their fruit trees every day, waiting for the first figs to ripen.  When one was finally ready she picked it, but instead of eating it herself she brought it home to give to their mother.  Their mother, who had seen her daughter patiently checking the tree, was moved to tears, and she “took the gift in her hands, kissed her daughter, and told her to keep the fig until the evening so it could be shared with their father and the rest of the family.  …  The love that accompanied each person’s little piece from the first fig, which had ripened on their own family tree,…  spread happiness and joy” more than words ever could.

   I suspect that one reason she recalls these times with such reverence is that the fame of being one of the “three little shepherds” of Fatima changed their lives forever.  She does not tell of the hard times, but they all spent long hours in the fields, and weather events such as droughts, fires, and downpours could cause them to go hungry.  Many children died young in those days in Portugal, and the other two shepherd children, Francisco and Jacinta, did not survive beyond their tenth birthday.

  This was true in every country before modernized food distribution and refrigeration allowed foods to be easily stored and transported vast distances. That said, there is still an unacceptable amount of hunger and malnutrition in the world, and I pray that the World Health Organization will re-emphasize this and drop their obsession with isolating and quarantining nations to “stop the spread”, which drives more people into malnutrition and poverty.

  Next week we will learn some of Sister Lucia’s spiritual lessons in Chapter Two, which is titled “The Guardian Angel”. 

   Research of the Week:   HIV: The third rail of infectious fears - a prequel to covid-19.

  I have spent the past two weeks going back and forth about how to re-introduce HIV cognitive dissonance. My first effort was in my newsletter on October 26, 2022, where I described the largest study on sexual transmission of HIV, which found exactly zero transmissions despite 282 “couple years” of follow-up over the course of the ten-year study (Padian et al, 1997,: Reference at the end). I revisit this study below, along with direct quotes and a video compilation describing its implications.

 Understanding the exaggerated fears of HIV is actually priceless; an opportunity to live more compassionately and embrace life more fully. However, it is also true that many people have a deep commitment to the harmful beliefs.  People who counter these beliefs by bringing to light the paradoxes and inconsistencies in “HIV science” are commonly attacked and slandered.

These types of attacks and slander have been directed at RFK Jr, including during his recent testimony before congress, linked below. There is an incredible silence in the world of covidology about RFK Jr’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, including an especially deafening silence about his chapters on HIV. However, he has come under attacks very similar to what people who questioned HIV orthodoxy experienced in the 1990’s. Amplified falsehoods and half-truths are used to forcefully divert people’s attention away from what he actually says.

  RFK Jr was testifying before a congressional subcommittee about censorship, and, ironically, attempts were made to silence him and prevent his testimony.  Surprisingly, these attacks came from committee members and others in his own party. He has been a Democrat his whole life, and so is particularly upset to see them supporting censorship, forever wars, and the shutdown of basic rights such as freedom of assembly, religion, and speech (leading to his declaration of independence in October 2023).

He was attacked by Democrats with epithets such as “racist”, “antisemite”, and “hate speech”. Motions were made by Democratic committee members to stop his testimony before it even started.

As he pointed out in his testimony, it was a bit shocking to see such harsh censorship attempts during a hearing specifically about censorship! 

  Amazingly, RFK Jr. used the opportunity to call for being “kind to one another “, “having empathy and compassion for one another”, and, simply “talking to each other”, which sounds pretty much like the opposite of “hate speech”.  Below is the link to his testimony in response to the mud-slinging he experienced, and at 14:30 congresswoman Wasserman-Schultz tries to stop the session and move it to an “executive session”.

https://rumble.com/v316gds-robert-f.-kennedy-jr.-opening-statement-hearing-on-the-weaponization-of-the.html

  RFK Jr wrote about HIV in several chapters of his book on Anthony Fauci, and below are links two extended interviews of researchers who questioned the beliefs about HIV, and to a video compilation of people speaking about the Padian et al study that failed to find sexual transmission. For those that “have ears to hear” these will be eye-opening.  There is a video interview of Peter Duesberg describing how he was “cancelled” in the 1990’s despite being one of the top retrovirologists in the world.  The second is a Podcast with David Crowe interviewing his long-time friend, nurse Kevin Corbett, wjo worked in the very first AIDS ward in Britain in the early 1980’s. 

  Kevin Corbett immediately saw what Mother Teresa saw: people diagnosed “HIV positive” were shunned and received minimal or no medical care. He saw this when he worked in the AIDS ward in Britain in the 1980’s, and learned about the inaccuracy of “HIV tests” first hand as they started to be used on a wide scale, especially in the gay community.

  As a gay man, himself, Kevin was acutely aware of the challenges faced by people in the gay community. He saw how the infectious fears made their isolation worse and impacted their health more powerfully. In those days many gay men had been rejected by their own families.  Although I have never met Kevin in person, I have spoken with him and traded emails off and on over the past thirty years. We communicated a lot starting in March 2020, and I consider him a close friend.  Despite his gentle and compassionate nature, or perhaps because of it, he at times becomes angry about the isolation and fear-based response to “super-viruses”, calling it “Nazi-like”.

   David Crowe was a Canadian chemical engineer who I knew quite well.  We were friends for nearly thirty years, including several lunches in Alexandria when he was in town for conferences.  I felt his loss deeply when he died 3 years ago of colon cancer, but I also know his spirit carries on, perhaps stronger and more influential today than while he was alive. 

   David was a gentle spirit with an extremely keen mind, able to see the “big picture”, but also able to sift through a myriad of details to separate the wheat from the chaff. Here is an article about David, written in memorium on the one year anniversary of his passing.  

  How does RFK Jr’s treatment relate to what happened with HIV in the 80’s and 90’s? Many of these questioners had extensive clinical experience and some were top scientists in their fields, including two Nobel Prize winners.  All of them cited research that showed gaping holes in HIV and AIDS beliefs, and yet a knew epithet was invented for them in an attempt to shut down any discussion or debate: “AIDS deniers”. Sound familiar?

  One area usually ignored by both the pro-hiv and anti-hiv camps is that “hiv-tests” tend to be positive in people with inflammation in their bodies whether or not they have any special virus present. This includes people with autoimmune conditions, allergic reactions, exaggerated reactions to vaccines, and life-threatening conditions like lymphoma and severe inflammatory bowel disease.

There are also many people who live for decades with no illness despite being HIV-positive, such as described those in an eye-opening documentary made in Galicia, Spain. In this documentary you will meet several “long-term survivors” who lived more than twenty years, perfectly healthy. These people learned first-hand how harmful the negative beliefs were, and they describe how they finally overcame them and helped their families and spouses to do the same.

  Unfortunately, instead of trying to learn from long-term survivors, they are completely ignored or simply called “false positives”. People who did have serious underlying conditions when they tested positive on the “hiv-tests” were initially left isolated and abandoned, then starting around 1989 they were treated with high doses of AZT, both of which tended to make them sicker instead of healthier.

  The harms of AZT have been discussed in detail by many people, including Peter Duesberg and RFK Jr in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci. However, it is just one of many factors, including the conditions described above, the social isolation, and the intense negative beliefs. 

  Someone with active lymphoma or severe inflammatory bowel disease has a significant risk of deterioration and death even without adverse effects that come with an HIV diagnosis such as long-term medications, failure to receive more appropriate treatments, and the negative effects of virus-fears and social isolation. Unfortunately, being diagnosed “HIV-positive” makes recovery much harder and tends to make healthy people become ill. Mother Teresa understood this all too well, as did nurse Kevin Corbett.

   Revisiting the Padian et al study on sexual transmission of HIV, published in 1997 in the American Journal of Epidemiology, which found zero transmissions of HIV after ten years and 282 “couple years” of follow-up.

   I plan to offer at least one more major study in a future newsletter that found a similar lack of transmission, this time from IV drug use. This study finding the opposite of what is expected from sharing IV needles was also published in 1997 in the American Journal of Epidemiology. However, it is the failure of sexual transmission that rings loudest, because Fauci and other “AIDS scientists” laid the fear of sexual activity on rather thickly, to put it mildly.

The landmark study of sexual transmission is the same one that I described in my newsletter on October 26th, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 1997.  This study found that HIV could not be transmitted sexually, despite 282 “couple-years” of follow up.  Even if they had found a positive test in one or two of the partners who had previously tested negative, this does not prove that one partner passed it to the other one. There are other more likely reasons why someone can change from “negative” to “positive” on “hiv-tests” besides a viral infection.

  Below is a video compilation of people speaking about the study, including Nancy Padian, herself.  Although some of them face the negative findings quite squarely, many of them minimize them by saying that HIV is “difficult to transmit”. It is difficult to accept the study’s actual finding: Zero transmissions, suggesting that is actually impossible to transmit through sexual activity. 

  This lack of sexual transmission is an incredible blow to HIV beliefs about infectiousness, and to the industry that surrounds it.  The study has been intensely ignored since 1997, partly because it could end countless careers and force people to change their beliefs about infection, not only in HIV but also in other areas.  The main way people try to counter its findings is with scary anecdotes, such as “I know someone who got it from a sexual partner”, often followed by personal angry attacks.  When asked for details about such anecdotes, one sees that the facts are impossible to verify or turn out to be different from what was presented. For example, instead of knowing who they got it from, they just made an assumption, such as “I had several sexual contacts in college and I am confident that this one was the one where I got the virus”.

  This study of sexual transmission does not stand alone in questioning the infectiousness of HIV, and I mentioned above the study of IV drug users. This one showed that people who exclusively used clean needles had an increased risk of testing positive on the “HIV tests”.  People never used “clean needles”, had a dramatically reduced chance: needless to say, this is the complete opposite of what would be expected if IV drug use caused people to share viruses. However, continuous infection of foreign materials in the blood, as well as cleaning agents in “clean needles”, could trigger people’s immune systems to test positive on the “hiv tests”, which is a much more common-sense explanation.

  These two studies are the largest and best controlled studies I could find, despite hundreds of hours of research, and they both showed that HIV could not be transmitted from one person to another by sharing bodily fluids, let alone from more casual contacts. However, if any of you has a well controlled study countering these findings, please send it to me in an email.

  As mentioned above, people who have strong beliefs in the power of “HIV” often try to counter research studies using frightening anecdotes.  However, I can offer some chilling “counter anecdotes” such as a close friend of mine from high school who committed suicide shortly after learning of his HIV-positive diagnosis.  This happened in 1987, when HIV fears were still extremely intense, and social isolation was extreme.  The exaggerated fear of infection is exactly why Mother Teresa opened AIDS homes in the USA, including right here in Washington DC, as described in my newsletter on April 15^th.  This newsletter also had a beautiful lesson called “the Music of Mindful Breathing” by Thich Nhat Hanh whose teachings are quite a bit more likely to reduce suffering than anything else in this newsletter :-).

  Sometimes people trying to defend the HIV beliefs will offer more than anecdotes, such as statistics or scientific studies.  However, when these studies and statistics are examined, it turns out they are unrelated, extremely weak, or even support the opposite of what is claimed.  This is why RFK Jr is so confident about debating “top scientists” such as Peter Hotez about the “covid vaccine”.  You may recall that Hotez has been a great spreader of misinformation and disinformation on major networks, all the while accusing everyone else of doing exactly what he is doing.  His flip-flopping statements have been compiled into a satirical video that is rather entertaining, but also a bit frightening.  In case you are wondering, this kid of flip-flopping is exactly what has happened over and over in “HIV science”. 

  People like Hotez cannot counter actual research.  For example, as my readers know well, there are many studies which found that people who get the “covid vaccine” actually have a dramatically increased chance of testing positive on the “covid tests”, as reviewed in multiple prior newsletters including on May 6th.   

  I was involved in such a debate when I was in medical school in the late 90’s. I had only spent a few dozen hours scouring medical journals at that time, but had repeatedly uncovered obvious red flags in HIV beliefs.  We traded very civil email exchanges, and my opponent ended up not having a single peer reviewed study to support his claims.  This was finally revealed when I asked him to provide four “key studies” to support his assertions, rather long lists of study titles which he had been sending up until then.  When he sent this short list, to my surprise, none of the studies actually defended his arguments, and it appeared he had not even read them. At that point he left the debate. 

 Given the lack of infectiousness in controlled research, other reasons for testing positive are best examined when anecdotes are provided.  Did the person have an inflammatory condition that can cause a positive “HIV test”? Did they have a recent vaccine?

People who are ill and diagnosed with AIDS, just as in covid-19, means other potential illnesses and health challenges are completely ignored. The most tragic challenges to me are the lack of tender loving care and the power of negative beliefs. these negative beliefs are also called the “nocebo effect”, and it can be quite powerful.  These are always key factors that hep create self-fulfilling prophecies when people are diagnosed with the latest “super-bug”.

Music of the week 2: João Paulo Esteves da Silva – Jazz Piano

Unlike Amália, who died many years ago, João Paulo is still playing in Lisbon today.  The first selection is a jazz duet with bassist, Zé Eduardo, recorded live in the “Hot Club” in downtown Lisbon. The second piece is a Keith Jarrett-style solo piano performance. 

  João Paulo Esteves da Silva and Zé Eduardo: Summer Nights. Recorded live at the Hot Club in October 2019. 

If you visit the Hot Club you will see that the clientele actually listens to the music, and will “shush” you if you strike up a conversation during the music.  I enjoyed this quite a bit when I played there in the 90’s :-)

  And, finally, here are the interviews I promised about HIV “Science”:

 1} Interview with Peter Duesberg, whose career was abruptly cancelled despite being a world leader in retrovirology.

And a bonus: a program with one of my favorite people, Tony Brown, a brilliant journalist who also saw clearly that people need tender loving care. This interview focuses on AZT toxicity as a cause of AIDS.

  David Crowe and Kevin Corbett:  A conversation in the first month of covid lockdowns comparing covid-19 and AIDS.

Both David and Kevin see clearly how the powerful fear-based beliefs tend to create a self-fulfilling prophecy in both AIDS and covid-19.  They bring to light the harms of social isolation, the harms of harsh treatment regimens such as early intubation, and the harm of disrupted medical care.  As you will see, they are not “AIDS deniers”.  Kevin nursed hundreds of people diagnosed with AIDS back to health, and learned valuable lessons from them that he shares in this interview. Instead of “denying” AIDS, they see clearly that there are a number of different probable causes of AIDS.

https://infectiousmyth.podbean.com/e/the-infectious-myth-nurse-kevin-corbett-on-hiv-aids-and-coronavirus/

Music of the week 3: João Paulo Esteves da Silva – solo piano, “Durme”

Last but not Least:  Politics Not As Usual – Two excellent sections from interviews of RFK Jr by Russell Brand.

The two videos below are fun and entertaining, but also have some very in depth information. The first interview segment discusses many topics: heal the cultural divide, bring the troops home, re-orient FDA, CDC, the CIA, and the EPA towards health and healing and have the CIA work for true security for our nation by cooperating and understanding the interests of other nations.

https://rumble.com/v2q4vom-rfk-jr.-reveals-how-he-will-restore-america.html

  Second segment covering censorship and insights from RFK Jr’s wife, Cheryl Hines, about the value of subjective experience in helping people heal.

https://rumble.com/v2yavea-this-is-anti-democratic-rfk-jr.-reveals-shocking-censorship-laws.html

Reference: Padian N, Shiboski S, Glass S, Vittinghoff E (1997). Heterosexual Transmission of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in Northern California: Results from a Ten-year Study, American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 146, Issue 4, 15 August 1997, Pages 350-357  https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.aje.a009276:

If you made it this far, I owe you yet another box of chocolates, even if you earned one from prior newsletters. Just promise you will share them, like Sister Lucia’s sister with the first fig of the summer :-).