A Dive Into Darkness - The Story Behind The Story

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In Episode Thirty-Three of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will tell you about how I was influenced by the American writer, Dan Harmon.By October 2022, I had re-plotted ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ into what I felt was a compact, 5 day, ‘all-thriller, no filler’, novel. I had watched dozens of Reedsy advice videos and many other novel-writing videos as well.Still, I wasn’t happy. There are many different forms of novel structure, some of them such as the ‘3-Act Structure’ being incredibly simplistic. The three-act structure is a model used in narrative fiction that divides a story into three parts (or acts), often called the Setup, the Confrontation, and the Resolution. Basically, a beginning, middle and end – that to me wasn’t going to help me write a densely plotted thriller. It was then I discovered Dan Harmon and his ‘Story Circle.’Harmon’s ‘Story Circle’ has 8 elements:1) A character is in a zone of comfort,2) But they want something.3) They enter an unfamiliar situation,4) Adapt to it,5) Get what they wanted,6) Pay a heavy price for it,7) Then return to their familiar situation,8) Having changedI found when I applied these elements to Anne-Sophie in ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ it worked beautifully.So, from Dan Harmon, I got the knowledge of how to plan a more detailed plot and also to produce a ‘character arc’. The protagonist had to be a different person by the end of the novel. Anne-Sophie is certainly that! In addition, Dan Harmon gave me the title ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’ In his fantastic ‘Story Structure 102: Pure, Boring Theory’, he says:‘Whereas the health of an individual depends on the ego's regular descent and return to and from the unconscious, a society's longevity depends on actual people journeying into the unknown and returning with ideas. In their most dramatic, revolutionary form, these people are called heroes, but every day, society is replenished by millions of people diving into darkness and emerging with something new (or forgotten): scientists, painters, teachers, dancers, actors, priests, athletes, architects and most importantly, me, Dan Harmon.’I’d been unhappy with ‘The Red Book’ as a title for a while. I wanted something that captured the book’s genre and theme: ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ was perfect as Anne-Sophie finds herself presented with a live or die, sink or swim, scenario.If you’re interested in how to write a story, or just want to read some very funny articles, please read the Dan Harmon links I’ve included below. Thank you, Dan.And, thank you for listening to Episode Thirty-Three of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Thirty-Four of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘John Truby’, I will tell you about another writing guru’s influence on ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.A reminder that ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon and all the references/links connected with this podcast can be found at my ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ Substack page.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97Shttps://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_104:_The_Juicy_Details Dan Harmon’s Story Circlehttps://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_102:_Pure,_Boring_Theory Dan Harmon Story Circle: 8 Proven Steps to Better Stories This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In Episode Thirty-Two of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘Carlos Alcaraz and The Lightbulb Moment’, I will tell you how I began turning ‘The Red Book’ into ‘A Dive Into Darkness’.I can tell you precisely when ‘The Red Book’ began to morph into ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ – the evening of September 11th, 2022. I was in Alderney, in bed, nursing a very sore torn calf muscle and listening to the Men’s US Open tennis final, hoping the ‘future of tennis’, Alcaraz, would win his first Grand Slam title. I was pondering ‘The Red Book.’ It had many flaws, the main ones being too much medical-science and a meandering, weeks long, plot. As I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep, I remembered what Dan Brown had said about the ticking clock. I decided there and then to compress the novel’s action to seven days. The next day I would compress it even further, to five.I had reached this stage of writing novels without actually doing much research into the writing process. Way back in June 2020, when I was planning out ‘Race’, I knew I wanted chapters to be short as I wanted to write a book with chapters that people could read on short Tube journeys, or on the toilet! In September 2022, I knew short, sharp chapters were perfect for a ‘page-turning’, hard-to-stop reading, thriller and a ticking clock was another way of building tension and as ‘Reedsy’ put it, raising the stakes.Next day, 12th September (or, as I call it, Kevin Pietersen day), I found the Reedsy video, ‘8 Ways to Raise Your Story's Stakes’. These were: Create goals; Add a ticking clock; Raise the emotional stakes; Raise the external consequences; Create a sacrifice; Avoid plot armour; Create stakes in each scene; Create moral no-win situations. I looked at the plot for ‘The Red Book’ and realized I had most of those elements already. Shortening the action to five days meant that I could cram a gallon into a pint pot – the novel would definitely be ‘All thriller, no filler’!I was filled with excitement and on my way to devouring every Reedsy creative writing video on Youtube. By the time of the Queen’s funeral, a week later, I had re-plotted ‘The Red Book.’ It wasn’t the finished article, but it was already a hell of a lot better.Thank you for listening to Episode Thirty-Two of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Thirty-Three of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will tell you about Dan Harmon and how he inspired the title, ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.A reminder that ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon and all the references/links connected with this podcast can be found at my ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ Substack page.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S Dan Brown - Masterclass live Reedsy, ‘8 Ways to Raise Your Story's Stakes’ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In Episode Thirty-One of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘The Road to A Dive Into Darkness’, I will tell you how I went from my first attempt at writing a novel, ‘Race’, in 2020, to my, at least, fourth attempt, ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, in November 2022.As I said previously, ‘Race’ was based upon my research into what I termed the rabbit-hole of Edward Hooper’s ‘AIDS caused by HIV caused by contaminated polio vaccines in the late 1950s’ hypothesis. By Easter 2021, my following of the evidence had led me to conclude that the American, UK and French medical-science establishment had become obsessed with an unicorn – that AIDS had been caused by a new retrovirus, and this had led to the ‘discovery’ in 1983 (Paris) and 1984 (Washington) of a ‘deadly’ pathogen, and the naming of that pathogen as HIV in 1986. My research had uncovered the simple, basic scientific reality, that the ‘deadly’ pathogen was a double-contaminant, found only in ‘HIV’ labs around the planet, nowhere in nature. I had established that the official ‘Cut hunter / soldier’ theory of the origins of HIV was another nonsense, but unfortunately another nonsense that was swallowed hook, line and sinker by a gullible public and a rapacious ‘Medical-Science-Big Pharma-Media’ complex, blinded by riches, rewards, research grants, fame and prizes.I had discovered a much simpler, less glamourous, or rewarding, truth, that ‘fast-lane’ bath-house-attending gay males, shooting-gallery frequenting IVDUs and Factor VIII ingesting hemophiliacs, had, as a result of too many infections entering their bodies on a too regular basis, simply burned out their immune systems, leaving them defenceless to ward off usually harmless ‘invaders’. No new pathogen required.By Easter 2021, my job was to transfer hundreds of hours of research into a readable book and my first attempt at doing this was ‘The Fast lane Experiment.’ Looking back at the ‘Chapter By Chapter’ plan, I can see that this wasA) An ambitious work, starting with the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, and concluding round about 1992.B) Not much good!In the summer of 2021, I read Montagnier’s autobiography, ‘Virus’, which I read as almost a confessional. There are enough nuggets in there to take down the official ‘HIV causes AIDS’ narrative from the horse’s mouth. I also learned that he kept a record of his experiments in a red book, a piece of information which would very quickly come in very useful. By late October 2021, I was struggling to put down on paper my desire to write a commercial novel based upon my HIV/AIDS research. It was only then, the day before I went off to France for a week’s holiday, that I had an epiphany. I loved murder mysteries, thrillers, especially Dan Brown-esque conspiracy thrillers like ‘The Da Vinci Code’ – why not write a conspiracy thriller? I began to watch as many Dan Brown interviews as existed on Youtube, to listen to any conspiracy-related podcasts and to read conspiracy-novel guides. Dan Brown’s major legacies were thorough planning, chapter by chapter, time pressure (ticking clock), the inclusion of a crucible – the physical point of no return and, seemingly, no escape, and lastly the contract – by the end of the book there should be no loose ends or unanswered questions. By the time I stepped off the ferry in Dunkirk, I had planned out ‘The Red Book’- my third attempt at an HIV/AIDS novel. This was a hybrid of ‘The Fast-Lane Experiment’ and a couple of other ‘novels’ that never got beyond the title and planning stages. By the autumn of 2022, it had become a tale of two narratives. First, Jean-Marie Montreau’s adventures in America in 1976, where he learned of the incoming AIDS storm in New York and San Francisco, and helped deal with the Legionnaire’s outbreak in Philadelphia. Second, his Parisian daughter, Anne-Marie Montreau’s, discovery that what she had been told about his death was not the truth. The conspiracy element was the propagation and protection of the fake ‘HIV causes AIDS’ narrative, the truth of which is contained in the eponymous red book.So, ‘The Red Book’ was the forerunner to ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’ I spent a year planning and writing it, as well as carrying out plenty more research into AIDS – none of which swayed me from my conviction that there had been a 40-year global conspiracy and cover up.However, by September 2022, I was still unhappy about my work-in-progress novel. It most definitely wasn’t the next ‘Da Vinci Code.’ Tom Hanks had no need to hold his breath.Thank you for listening to Episode Thirty-One of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Thirty-Two of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will tell you about my how The Red Book became ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.A reminder that ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon and all the references/links connected with this podcast can be found at my ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ Substack page.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S Dan Brown - Masterclass live This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In Episode Thirty of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘KS, Poppers and the Malpractice of Dr James Curran’, I will focus on the event which convinced me that the CDC’s James Curran was guilty of serious malpractice.On p133 of ‘And The Band Played On’, Shilts describes how IVDUs, although suffering from the same T4 cell deficiency as gay men, they suffered from PCP pneumonia but not Kaposi’s sarcoma, KS. ‘Only gay men seemed to be getting the skin cancer.’ The gay men were obviously doing something different to the IVDUs. Let Harry Haverkos take up the story: ‘I worked with Dennis Bregman and his co-worker Dr Paul Pinsky. Paul, I think, did a lot of the work, but anyway, they came out with a single variable that separated the gay men with Kaposi's from the gay men with pneumocystis. It was nitrite inhalants (poppers), which was a startling discovery, I thought, and it made a lot of sense to me. It [nitrite] causes blood vessels to dilate, and it [Kaposi's sarcoma] is a blood vessel tumor. Kaposi's is predominantly in gay men, and nitrites are used more by gay men than heterosexuals. It turns out if you reviewed the cancer studies, the research studies that had been done on poppers, it caused cancer in the Ames Test. This made just total sense to me. It was like a eureka moment. But the problem was-- I got these results, so we stopped in September-October of '82. We stopped enrollment, and we finally got the data analyzed. I came back from a meeting in Italy in June of '83, and Paul Pinsky told me what the answer was. Nitrite inhalants. This is now June, July of '83, and I am excited. This is like "hot stuff." Anyway, I presented to the Task Force, and the Task Force was --unimpressed. Jim Curran sent me back to re-analyze, break it out by groups, male interviewers, female interviewers, length of interview. Anyway, it turned out, in the secondary analysis, every analysis was higher [for] Kaposi's, whether you split it up by any of these groups. These results were incredibly robust.CDC was under the gun from PHS [Public Health Service] because we hadn't found the virus yet. When they put in their budget request--I think [Dr. Walter] Walt Dowdle told me this later, in August or September of '83--it turns out CDC listed their number one accomplishment in their fiscal year 1984 budget request, their major accomplishment was ruling out a role of nitrites as the cause of AIDS. So, I presented this to the Task Force. I couldn't present this. I had a big lecture in San Francisco at the end of August, and Curran made it perfectly clear if I said a word about this study, he'd can me. Emotions were high. There was a lot of tension going on.’ In a research paper Haverkos reported that ‘Multivariate analysis showed that the variable most strongly associated with Kaposi's sarcoma was the use of large quantities of nitrite inhalants.’On 1 April 1983, a press release was issued by Joseph F. Miller, 'president of Great Lakes Products, Inc., the nation's largest manufacturer of nitrite-based odorants'. It was entitled, 'U.S. Government Studies Now Indicate that Nitrite-Odorants Not Related to AIDS!' According to Miller, 'the assistant director of the Center for Infectious Diseases (a part of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta), Dr. James Curran, invited him to Atlanta in late November of last year to discuss the work being done by CDC relative to its AIDS investigations'. (If true, this meeting would be avery serious indiscretion on Curran's part, raising the possibility of collusion between the poppers industry and CDC officials.) According to Miller's press release, the CDC assured him that 'no association exists between nitrite-based odorants and AIDS'.This for me is a shocking episode. Let me reiterate: James Curran, the Chair of the CDC’s KSOI Task Force, the man with overall responsibility for the collation and publication of the Case-Control Study, the most important research of early GRID/AIDS amongst gay men, effectively blocked the dissemination of one of the Case-Control Study’s most important findings, that poppers was key contributor to ‘gay cancer’. This is on top of the mysterious 20 month delay in the publication of the report itself which stated clearly that ‘The occurrence of these diseases (KS/PCP pneumonia/Opportunistic infections) was found to be associated with certain aspects of lifestyle, including a greater number of male sex partners per year, exposure to feces during sex, history of syphilis, non-B hepatitis, EBV and CMV, treatment for enteric parasites, use of various illicit substances.’Just as occurred with 9/11 and the FBI and the CIA, this was clear evidence of conspiracy and malpractice by a US government organization, clear evidence of putting the preservation of an institution, before the preservation of human life.Thank you for listening to Episode Thirty of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Thirty-One of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will tell you about my second attempt at a novel, The Fast Lane Experiment.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.A reminder that ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon and all the references/links connected with this podcast can be found at my ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ Substack page.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97Shttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/0285640194 ‘And The Band Played On’ Harry Haverkos interviewhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3878602/ Disease manifestation among homosexual men with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome: a possible role of nitrites in Kaposi's sarcoma, Haverkoshttps://cascades.substack.com/publish/posts My Substack site, ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ Hank Wilson interview – Gay guys, poppers and KS.https://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/POPBOOK.PDF POPPERS & AIDS. Wilson and Lauritsen This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In Episode Twenty-Nine of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘The CDC’s Response To AIDS – Part Three, I will focus on the official explanations provided as to why publication of the most important report into GRID / AIDS thus far, the ‘KSOI Task Force’s Case-Control Study’, was delayed for twenty months, by which time it had become almost an irrelevance as the ‘retroviral cause of AIDS’ snowball got bigger and bigger, and the AIDS net had widened to include hemophiliacs, Haitians, heroin addicts, transfusion cases and victims in Europe and Africa.In ‘And The Band Played On’, Randy Shilts says that the raw data compiled between October and December 1981 had to be ‘neatly analyzed, with all the scientific ratios that the general public doesn’t understand,’ or else the ‘conclusions would never stand up in a court of science. To utter them publicly would threaten the CDC’s credibility.’ On p119, Shilts writes the ‘case-control study was hopelessly mired because they didn’t have the staff and money to tabulate the questionnaires.’Harold Jaffe, the CDC’s lead on the report stated that ‘It took a long time to analyze the case control study, partly because we didn't have a full-time statistician working with us. We had to borrow one from the epidemiology program office, who is, I think, a very bright statistician, but a bit difficult to work with. So he basically said, Well, give us the data and I'll give you the answer, but leave me alone. So that was kind of the way it worked. He was doing what at the time were fairly sophisticated multivariable analyses.’ He also said ‘that really the differences between the cases and the controls involved lifestyle. The cases were much more sexually active, they were much more sort of out there, they were going to bathhouses all the time, they were using a lot more drugs. Men who were very sexually active were using a lot of drugs.’Harry Haverkos had his say on the delay in 2016: ‘The problem was, yes, I was very interested in the analysis, and so were Harold and a guy named [Dr.] Keewhan Choi, the statistician who was assigned to work with us. I worked with them for several months, but they did not agree on so many things, and I just saw myself as getting in the way. Harold, I think, argued as a biologist. He was saying, all these variables are confounded with each other; numbers of partners, rates of STDs, drug use. We need to group these variables to lead us to an infectious agent. Is it a toxin? Keewhan Choi was kind of rigid--I see him as a statistician, and so I described them as two artists. Harold's an impressionist, and Keewhan Choi is a photographer. Choi basically was going to look at the data, and let the numbers speak. They couldn't agree, and so they grouped them different ways. The analysis took forever because they couldn't agree on how to do it. We didn't publish that work until October of '83 (actually August). We had preliminary data by December of '81. By December we had the first printouts, percentages that did this or that. But I don't think the results--I don't think we announced the results to the general public because Harold and Keewhan couldn't agree on the results. I don't know what happened.’Despite being one of the most eagerly awaited reports in the CDC’s history, with 1,000s pf lives depending upon it, the KSOI task force’s case study report really died a death. Shilts doesn’t mention it much after the early part of 1982. This reflects the fact that ‘lifestyle as the cause’ was replaced by ‘virus as the cause’ from the middle of 1982 onwards. The kicking of the report into the long grass cost 1,000s of lives. If CMV infection had been given the prominence it deserved, hundreds of thousands of gay men would have been told that even kissing was a risk because one of the most effective means of CMV transmission is saliva exchange.Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-Nine of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Thirty of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will look at the event which convinced me that the CDC’s James Curran was guilty of serious malpractice.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.A reminder that ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon and all the references/links connected with this podcast can be found at my ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ Substack page.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97Shttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/0285640194 ‘And The Band Played On’ Harry Haverkos interviewhttps://cascades.substack.com/publish/posts My Substack site, ‘A Dive Into Darkness’https://globalhealthchronicles.org/items/show/5385 Harold Jaffe This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In Episode Twenty-Eight of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘The CDC’s Response To AIDS – Part Two’, I will continue examining one of the key areas of my HIV/AIDS research, the area which led me eventually to write the conspiracy-thriller ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, the CDC’s response to the new immunodeficiency epidemic, especially its ‘KSOI Task Force’s Case-Control Study’.Once Harry Haverkos established the first case definition in July 1981, over a year before KSOI / GRID became AIDS, according to Shilts in ‘And The Band Played On’ p81, the members of the Task Force agreed that what they needed was a Case-Control Study. They would match up the cases of KS and PCP pneumonia with controls who did not have the ‘disease’. ‘The differences between the cases and the controls would point the way toward what was causing the epidemic.’ What actually happened was that one of the main differences, that of the levels of CMV in cases and controls, was ignored. As the Case-Control study was going to take weeks to set up, the questionnaire totaled twenty-two pages and contained sixty-two questions, two investigators went out into the field. Their initial data was analyzed at the end of July by the only sociologist in the Task Force and expert in gay STIs Bill Darrow. He said that the ‘only thing that seemed to matter in these cases was the number of sexual partners.’ Some cases had 2,000 lifetime sexual partners. Michael Callen had had 3,000 sexual partners by the age of 26 in 1980, when he gave up sex because ‘every time he had sex he caught something’. As I said in previous episodes the best analogy to make is that of lung cancer and cigarette smoking. GRID was the product of a lifestyle. On p96, Shilts writes that by October 1981, ‘the only factors that seemed to distinguish cases from controls was the number of sexual partners, the incidence of venereal disease, and attendance at gay bath-houses.’ It took nearly two years from this date for the final report to come out, a report which confirmed these findings. What is astonishing is that Shilts states that ‘the evidence for a new and deadly (infectious) viral disease was becoming incontrovertible.’ Absolute codswallop! What was clear was that GRID patients suffered from KS but IVDU patients did not. I have discussed the reason for this before, fast-lane gays were addicted to poppers, IVDUs weren’t. The CDC’s conspiracy to cover up ‘poppers as a cause of KS’ will be explored in future episodes. By the beginning of December the data from the Case-Control study was in, but media interest, and therefore political interest, in GRID was negligible. James Curran, the head of the Task Force, was scrabbling around for funds and ever-fearful of the organization’s closure. Shilts writes that in December 1981 ‘thousands of lives depended’ upon the ‘newly completed’ Case-Control Study, those thousands would have to wait 20 months for the report to be published. However, ‘a preliminary review of the untabulated data showed one difference between the gay plague cases and the control cases - sexual activity. There was also a tendency amongst cases to use poppers and street-drugs.’ Shilts does not mention another clear difference - patients were also found to have significantly higher titers of antibody to cytomegalovirus and a higher frequency (3 times higher) of isolation of cytomegalovirus. Don’t forget I have already told you that by 1981 it was known that CMV was closely associated with PCP pneumonia, KS and toxoplasmosis, and was known to be a killer in an immunosuppressed demographic, renal transplant patients. The CDC knew all this by December 1981 but did not release the information fully to the public until August 1983.Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-Eight of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Twenty-Nine of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will look at the excuses given to explain the delay in the publication of the Case-Control study.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.A reminder that ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon and all the references/links connected with this podcast can be found at my ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ Substack page.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97Shttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/0285640194 ‘And The Band Played On’ Harry Haverkos interviewhttps://cascades.substack.com/publish/posts My Substack site, ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.Before I begin Episode Twenty-Seven properly, I wish to point out that last week in the USA, the Republican-led House select subcommittee released its final report on the government's COVID-19 response. Scripps reported that ‘Republicans on the committee insisted that former government infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci pushed a false narrative about the virus' origins.’ The report states: “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” Was “Prompted” by Dr. Anthony Fauci to “Disprove” the Lab Leak Theory.’ According to the report, Fauci stated ‘he may not have ever actually read Proximal Origin. This raises questions of why he would cite a paper, he did not even read, from the White House podium as proof COVID-19 was not the result of a lab leak.’ Yes, this is the very same Anthony Fauci who was America’s AIDS czar for decades and who pushed a similarly false narrative about the origins of AIDS for 40 years, that AIDS was a single disease, caused by a single virus called HIV!Not coincidentally, in the same COVID-19 report, Fauci’s assistant David Morens is said to have ‘Likely Destroyed Evidence, Used Personal Email to Hide from Accountability, and Acted Unbecoming of a Federal Employee; Used Personal E-Mail Accounts to Avoid the Freedom of Information Act and Accountability; Deleted Federal Records illegally; Likely Provided False Statements to Congress; his actions violated NIH policy’. This was the same David Morens who in 1983 was a co-author of the CDC’s ‘National Case-Control Study of Kaposi's Sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia in Homosexual Men: Part 2 - Laboratory Results’.That leads me nicely onto Episode Twenty-Seven of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘The CDC’s Response To AIDS – Part One’, where I will cover one of the key areas of my HIV/AIDS research, the area which led me eventually to write the conspiracy-thriller ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, the CDC’s response to the new immunodeficiency epidemic, especially its ‘KSOI Task Force’s Case-Control Study’.As I’ve stated in previous episodes, in 1981 the CDC was fearing extinction courtesy of the new Reagan administration and was desperate to find a new epidemic that could keep it going. Accordingly, the new cases of immune deficiency in gay men was greeted like manna from heaven in CDC’s Atlanta HQ. Almost from the get-go the CDC’s James Curran manipulated the epidemic for political purposes. The original title of the 5th June 1981 MMWR was ‘PCP pneumonia in homosexual men – Los Angeles.’ The reference to ‘homosexual men’ was removed. As Shilts commented in ‘And The Band Played On’ p69, ‘Don’t offend the gays and don’t inflame the homophobes. These were the twin horns on which the handling of this epidemic would be torn from the first day of the epidemic.’ Shilts says in his introduction: ‘People died whilst public health authorities and the political leaders who guided them, refused to take the tough measures necessary to curb the epidemic’s spread, (ie shutting down the bath-houses) opting for political expediency over the public health.’The CDC’s handling of the epidemic is chronicled in some detail by Shilts, who knew ‘everything’ about the response courtesy of Don Francis. The Monday after the MMWR was published, 8th June, saw the first meeting of an ‘ad hoc Task Force’ hurriedly put together to investigate the outbreaks of PCP pneumonia and KS. This quickly became the ‘Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections Task Force’ with Curran as its Chair.The CDC’s tactics were clear from the start: first, drag out its investigation for as long as possible, and then drag it out some more; second, make the AIDS ‘net’ as wide as possible. The bigger the epidemic, the better its chances were of survival. On p170 Shilts tells us that many FDA officials ‘thought the CDC had taken a bunch of unrelated illnesses and lumped them into some made-up phenomenon as a brazen ruse to get publicity and funding for their threatened agency. Bureaucrats had been known to undertake more questionable methods to protect their budgets.’Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-Seven of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Twenty-Eight of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will continue my deep dive into the CDC’s KSOI Task Force Case-Control study and uncover further clear evidence of conspiracy and cover up. Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.A reminder that ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon and all the references/links connected with this podcast can be found at my ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ Substack page.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97Shttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/0285640194 ‘And The Band Played On’https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2024.12.04-SSCP-FINAL-REPORT-ANS.pdf House select subcommittee final report on the government's COVID-19 response James Curran interviewhttps://cascades.substack.com/publish/posts My Substack site, ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.Before I analyze the CDC’s KSOI Task Force’s Case-Control Study, in Episode Twenty-Six of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘Arguments Against CMV Being The Cause Of AIDS’ I will focus on the arguments put forward by opponents of my ‘CMV causes AIDS’ hypothesis, or, more accurately, my ‘CMV helps cause, and exploits, AIDS.’ All the way through my investigation into AIDS I kept looking for any piece of evidence that would derail my hypothesis. That never happened, in fact, the more I researched CMV the more I became convinced I was right. However, there were several explanations mooted as to why CMV could not cause AIDS. I recently found a paper from November 1982, ‘The Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome: Current Status’, which at first states many of the reasons why CMV could be the cause of AIDS, reasons I’ve explored in previous episodes:- Previous or current CMV infection is a unifying presence in all the CDC case reports- Homosexual males are at greater risk for developing CMV infections than heterosexual males due to exposure to infected semen in which CMV persists for up to 18 months- Acute CMV infection has been shown to be associated with a similar pattern of T-cell imbalance as seen in patients with AIDS, this T-cell imbalance has been documented to last for up to ten months- CMV has been shown in clinical studies of renal transplant recipients to be associated with a high rate of superinfection, especially PCP pneumonia- CMV may predispose at a local level, along with systemic T-cell imbalance, to superinfecting pneumonia- Increasing evidence has supported the association of CMV and Kaposi's sarcoma, an association proposed by Giraldo in 1972 when a CMV strain was isolated from a KS tissue biopsy in cultureThe author’s counter arguments were as follows- the CMV isolated by the CDC does not appear to represent a new, more virulent strain. To which I would respond that there did not have to be a new, more virulent strain to cause this damage. According to ‘And The Band Played On’ p132/133, blood sampling of IVDUs by the CDC revealed that although many were infected with CMV (87%), the viral strains were all different. Shilts, who was the CDC’s mouthpiece, states that the lack of a new virulent strain lent weight to the Don Francis ‘new pathogen’ hypothesis and that the CMV causes AIDS hypothesis was now eliminated. This was total moonshine, and shows a lack of knowledge about, and an underestimation of, CMV.- Patients who are immunosuppressed for other reasons (e.g., steroids) also have a high incidence of CMV infection; thus the immunosuppression seen in these patients may have another etiology which secondarily allows for CMV reactivation. My response to this is that it is a nonsensical argument. AIDS is a syndrome caused by immunosuppression, hence the name. CMV can cause immunosuppression and exploit it too.- CMV is not a new infectious agent and homosexuality as a lifestyle has been around for centuries, so this hypothesis does not explain why AIDS is apparently new. This was the worst argument of all, to which I respond with the tobacco/lung cancer analogy. The Spanish introduced tobacco to Europeans in about 1528 and for 400 years lung cancer was still rare. Once industrial-scale production and consumption of cigarettes occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century, lung cancer cases rose exponentially around the planet. Michael Callen, an honest, heroic and realistic sexually active gay male, who was right about what was causing AIDS from day one, stated he ‘felt part of the most extraordinary sexual experiment in human history. Never before in human history had so many men had so much sex with so many other men who were having sex.’ Just like lung cancer and cigarettes, AIDS, as Callen knew very well, was the result of a changed lifestyle, not the product of a new infectious agent. The clustering of early AIDS cases in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, was no coincidence, it was due to the fact that Manhattan and the Castro were gay ghettoes where large numbers of homosexuals moved into or visited each year, and the bathhouses found in these areas were amplification systems for the immunodeficiency syndrome. As JR Thompson, a mathematical modeler and someone whose work I will study in depth in a future episode, stated in the 1980s:‘An argument is made that, so far from being a disease which is unstoppable in its epidemic consequences, AIDS has produced an epidemic, which owes its present virulence to sociological configurations of rather recent existence. Instead of a vigorous attack on the transmission chain of the epidemic, the emphasis of public health policy has been on finding a vaccine and/or a cure of the disease which produces the epidemic. By means of a simple model, it is argued that by simply closing businesses catering to high contact rate anal sex, e.g sexually oriented bathhouses, the American public health establishment might have avoided most of the tragic consequences of the present epidemic.’Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-Six of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Twenty-Seven of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will do a deep dive into the CDC’s KSOI Task Force Case-Control study and uncover clear evidence of conspiracy and cover up. Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.A reminder that ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon, and all the references/links connected with this podcast can be found at my ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ Substack page.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97Shttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/0285640194 ‘And The Band Played On’https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2596573/pdf/yjbm00111-0058.pdf ‘The Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome: Current Status’https://cascades.substack.com/publish/posts My Substack site, ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ Michael Callen 4 mins 20 – 4 mins 40.https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82150696.pdf AIDS: THE MISMANAGEMENT OF AN EPIDEMIC, JR Thompson This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.By April 2021, I was convinced that CMV ticked all the boxes as far as being a cause of AIDS was concerned. I was puzzled that no-one else seemed to have reached the same conclusion. In fact, one person had, and in Episode Twenty-Five of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘Gottlieb’, I will tell you about the paper which confirmed my hypothesis that CMV could be the cause of AIDS and about the person who wrote it. It was the very same person credited with breaking the AIDS story to the world on 5th June, 1981. Although Dr Michael Gottlieb is most famous for the 5th June, 1981, MMWR, ‘Pneumocystis Pneumonia --- Los Angeles’, more accurately ‘Pneumocystis Pneumonia and CMV --- Los Angeles’, it is actually a paper he published in December 1981, ‘Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and mucosal candidiasis in previously healthy homosexual men: evidence of a new acquired cellular immunodeficiency’, that is worthy of greater fame. The absence of CMV from the title is even more inexcusable this time as Gottlieb clearly states that CMV is one of the root causes of this ‘new acquired cellular immunodeficiency’. Despite his later protestations that he had ‘rushed to judgement’ about CMV’s role in AIDS, stating that ‘because (CMV) was cultured from multiple sites, I proposed that it might be causal. This proved to be an error. CMV had been reactivated because of the immune deficiency,’ Randy Shilts wrote in ‘And The Band Played On’p94/95 that Gottlieb spent much of the summer of 1981 ‘methodically putting together a paper on cases of PCP pneumonia for the New England Journal of Medicine. Of course it is true that CMV reactivates but it also causes immunosuppression. The article, the lfirst full treatment of gay pneumonia in a scientific journal’, was published in December 1981 and is one of the most accurate explanations of the cause of AIDS ever written.This is the summary of the abstract:‘Four previously healthy - not really - homosexual men contracted Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, extensive mucosal candidiasis, and multiple viral infections. In three of the patients these infections followed prolonged fevers of unknown origin. In all four cytomegalovirus was recovered from secretions. Kaposi's sarcoma developed in one patient eight months after he presented with esophageal candidiasis. The inversion of the T/ helper to suppressor/cytotoxic ratio suggested that cytomegalovirus infection was an important factor in the pathogenesis of the immunodeficient state. A high level of exposure of sexually active male homosexuals to cytomegalovirus-infected secretions may account for the occurrence of this immune deficiency.’Later in the paper Gottlieb states that these patients’ clinical courses resembled those of the renal-transplant patients I looked at in Episodes Twenty-One-Twenty-Three. He cites the paper which showed that 90%+ of sexually active gay males were CMV-positive and the Carney paper of June 1st 1981 which detailed CMV’s impact on T-cells and T-cell ratios. ‘It is likely that sexually active, young homosexual men, are frequently reinfected (by CMV) through frequent exposure to semen and urine of sexual partners.’ Such frequent reinfection before recovery from previous infections, could conceivably lead to overwhelming chronic infection and KS. ‘CMV is highly suspect.’Unfortunately, Gottlieb, his career having stalled, was swayed by the snowball effect generated by Don Francis and his retrovirus cause of AIDS hypothesis. Gottlieb gained fame, or notoriety, as Rock Hudson’s doctor and also as the escort to Elizabeth Taylor at many AIDS fund raising events. His cameo for the House of Numbers documentary is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen.Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-Five of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Twenty-Six of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will do a deep dive into the CDC’s KSOI Task Force Case-Control study and uncover clear evidence of conspiracy and cover up.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.A reminder that ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97Shttps://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/june_5.htm Pneumocystis Pneumonia --- Los Angeleshttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/0285640194 ‘And The Band Played On’ House of Numbers – Gottlieb 5-6 mins. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.At the end of the previous episode, I said I would examine the paper which confirmed my hypothesis that CMV could be the cause of AIDS. A paper written by the very same person credited with breaking the AIDS story to the world on 5th June, 1981. I will come to that paper but, in Episode Twenty-Four of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘SCID’, I wish to examine a paper published in 1979 which again exposes the CDC’s big lie, that AIDS was a total mystery which appeared out of a clear blue sky in the summer of 1981. The big lie which motivated me to write the book which eventually became ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ in 2022.This British paper, ‘Combined immunodeficiency and thymic abnormalities’, examines ‘Severe combined immunodeficiency’, (SCID). It is very technical but there are some nuggets in there. For example, ‘The characteristic clinical features are failure to thrive with severe bacterial, viral, fungal, and protozoal infections. Death is often due to Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia.’ Remarkable isn’t it that the CDC told everyone point blank that the combination of symptoms seen in early AIDS cases had never been seen before. Yet here is a paper published just two years before the first MMWR bulletin, outlining the exact same combination of symptoms. AIDS wasn’t new, but the affected demographics were. ‘Almost all patients have a severely depleted relative number of circulating T lymphocytes which, in absolute terms, may be exacerbated by a lymphopenia. The relative percentage of B lymphocytes is often expanded, and many patients produce immunoglobulins. In keeping with the virtual absence of T lymphocytes delayed hypersensitivity skin tests are negative.’Next comes another big departure from the CDC’s closed-mind view of AIDS as ‘a single disease, with a single cause.’ ‘SCID is clearly a heterogeneous disease with more than one cause. Some patients have virtually no T or B lymphocytes and die within a few months, while others live up to 5 years and may even make some functional antibody. It is not known whether these two polar groups represent different diseases or reflect a spectrum of severity.’A condition known as ‘PURINE NUCLEOSIDE PHOSPHORYLASE (PNP) DEFICIENCY is examined. ‘Nine infants and children from five families have suffered from recurrent upper and lower respiratory tract infections and some have had severe infections with varicella, vaccinia, and cytomegalovirus. All the patients have very low numbers of circulating T lymphocytes with consequent severe impairment of T cell function.’The author also considers Thymic Aplasia, a condition with ‘a wide spectrum of severity with some infants developing recurrent bacterial, fungal, and viral infections while others remain healthy. The diagnosis is confirmed by finding severely depleted or absent circulating T lymphocytes, often with a relative expansion of the B cell population.’For the CDC to present AIDS as a unique, unheard of, syndrome was absolutely false. The reason why it did this is simple. It had nothing to do with medical-science or public health, presenting AIDS as something new would, it hoped, buy the CDC time to fend off Reagan’s evil henchmen, determined to get rid of any unnecessary public health institutions.Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-Four of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Twenty-Five of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I promise to explore the paper which confirmed my hypothesis that CMV could be the cause of AIDS. A paper written by the very same person credited with breaking the AIDS story to the world on 5th June, 1981.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading. ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97Shttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1521582/pdf/jcpsupproyal00011-0015.pdf ‘Combined immunodeficiency and thymic abnormalities’, Webster. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.I realize that the previous two episodes have contained a lot of medical-science information but when you are challenging a 40 year old narrative which has established a vice like grip over the consciousness of an entire planet, that ‘HIV is the cause of AIDS’, with everything that has resulted from that, then you have to have firm medical-science foundations from which to expound your alternative hypothesis. The three papers combined are absolute proof that AIDS was no mystery, did not appear out of a clear blue sky, and that the CDC and NIH, and every other individual and institution connected to, and with, the ‘HIV causes AIDS’ conspiracy, deliberately ignored this evidence in pursuit of their own ends. Just as Dan Brown’s desire to expose the conspiracy surrounding the actual life of Jesus led to ‘The Da Vinci Code’, so my desire to expose the existence of an ‘HIV network’ and its conspiracy and cover up surrounding the fake ‘HIV causes AIDS’ narrative, led me eventually to writing the conspiracy-thriller, ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’In previous episodes I have already shown that CMV had the opportunity and the means to be a major cause of the AIDS epidemic. In Episode Twenty-Three, ‘1970s Transplant AIDS - Part Three’, I will examine the third of three papers published in the 1970s which prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that AIDS was no mystery. Never mind the content, just the title of Paper Three stunned me: ‘INFECTIOUS DISEASE SYNDROMES ATTRIBUTABLE TO CYTOMEGALOVIRUS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE AMONG RENAL TRANSPLANT RECIPIENTS’. I saw that this title, if amended slightly, could just as easily fit those early AIDS cases: ‘Infectious disease syndromes attributable to cytomegalovirus and their significance among ‘Fast Lane’ homosexuals / IVDUS frequenting shooting galleries / hemophiliacs using Factor 8.’Just like Papers One and Two, Paper Three is too detailed to explore totally in a single episode, and I shall stick to a big picture overview. The abstract begins: ‘Because of the ubiquity of cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection among renal transplant patients, the correlation between CMV isolation and clinical events is often difficult.’Exactly the same argument was put forward about CMV and AIDS cases in the early 1980s by the CDC’s James Curran and others and used as an excuse to look for alternative explanations for the syndrome.‘In this prospective study, clinical CMV disease was diagnosed in 26 of 68 patients (38%) that received transplants between 1974 and 1976. All CMV syndromes began 1 to 4 months post-transplant, persisting up to 23 weeks thereafter (mean duration of symptoms was 19 days). Although CMV was observed in some instances to cause only prolonged fever (10 patients) or hepatitis (4 patients), its most important effects were pneumonia (9 patients) and profound leukopenia (8 patients). Three patterns of pneumonia were observed: bilateral interstitial pneumonia (3 patients), unilateral focal consolidation (1 patient) (both attributable to CMV alone), and diffuse bilateral pneumonia attributable to CMV and superinfecting microorganisms (5 patients). These last patients had CMV-induced leukopenia of >1 week's duration at onset of superinfection, and all died. The 4 patients without leukopenia did not develop superinfection, and all survived. Two other renal transplant recipients died of infection during this period, both with CMV, leukopenia, and Listeria monocytogenes sepsis. The major infectious disease importance of CMV appears to be its effects on the respiratory tract and systemic host defense in predisposing to fatal superinfection. This last sentence confirms what Papers One and Two said, and the abstract exactly describes what happened to AIDS patients in the early 1980s. Immunosuppression, CMV infection, prolonged fever, very low white blood cell counts, CMV disease, overwhelming superinfecting pathogens, pneumonia, death. One of the 5 patients had PCP pneumonia, another had Candida Albicans, a marker disease of early AIDS cases. The symptoms of these patients mirrored those outlined in the San Francisco AIDS documentary referenced below. The author notes that there is a synergistic effect of CMV combined with other pathogens including Candida Albicans. In previous episodes I noted the close association between CMV and: PCP pneumonia, KS and toxoplasmosis. The author also states that the leukopenia induced by CMV infection is a red flag for physicians and an indication to begin anti-immunosuppressive treatment immediately. He concludes that ‘future progress in limiting the infectious disease complications will require the prevention of this form of CMV infection and earlier identification and better protection of those patients afflicted by it.’The CDC knew by Christmas 1981 that cases had significantly higher titers of antibody to CMV, had a higher frequency of isolation of cytomegalovirus (3 times more than ‘controls’) and were more likely to be infected with multiple strains of CMV. It knew that the occurrence of GRID/AIDS was found to be associated with certain aspects of lifestyle, including a greater number of male sex partners per year, exposure to feces during sex, history of syphilis and non-B hepatitis, treatment for enteric parasites, and use of various illicit substances. Shamefully, it sat on its data for 20 months when the report was finally published, by which time the early conviction of Don Francis that a retrovirus was the cause of AIDS had become the orthodox view.Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-Two of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Twenty-Four of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will explore the paper which confirmed my hypothesis that CMV could be the cause of AIDS. A paper written by the very same person credited with breaking the AIDS story to the world on 5th June, 1981.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading. ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97Sfile:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/infectious_disease_syndromes_attributable_to.10%20(11).pdf ‘Infectious disease syndromes attributable to cytomegalovirus and their significance among renal transplant recipients’ 1985 "AIDS: An Incredible Epidemic" by San Francisco General Hospitalhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6309049/ National Case-Control Study of Kaposi's Sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia in Homosexual Men: Part 2: Laboratory Results This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In Episode Twenty-One, I examined a paper published in 1974 that contained great detail confirming that CMV had the means to be the cause of AIDS. I have already explained in previous episodes that CMV also had the opportunity to be the cause of AIDS as 90%+ of sexually active gay males were infected with the virus, which is a member of the herpes family of viruses and consequently never expelled from the body.In Episode Twenty-Two ‘1970 Transplant AIDS - Part Two’, I will examine the second of three papers published in the 1970s, which prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that AIDS was no mystery and no ‘out of the blue’ occurrence.Like Paper One, Paper Two, ‘Cytomegalovirus: Clinical Virological Correlations in Renal Transplant Recipients’ was also published in 1974. The author states in the abstract that: ‘One-hundred thirty-two renal transplant recipients were systematically screened for viral infections, one-hundred ten patients showed evidence of infection with herpesviruses, and 89 patients showed laboratory evidence of infection with cytomegalovirus (CMV), uncomplicated by bacterial infections or technical complications. Six of the 89 patients with CMV infections died within a month of viral isolation. Two paradoxical responses to CMV infections are seen in transplant patients: In the relatively immunocompetent patient, the infection is associated with a prompt antibody response to the virus, and recovery. The severely immunosuppressed patient cannot make an antibody response, may be further immunosuppressed by the viral infection, and is susceptible to sequential opportunistic infections leading to death.’So, exactly the same as in Paper One, severely immunosuppressed patients, further immunosuppressed by the viral infection, are susceptible to sequential opportunistic infections leading to death. Exactly the same as AIDS patients in the early 1980s. The abstract cleared up one mystery. Why did the first UK ‘AIDS’ patient test negative for CMV antibodies when the autopsy revealed extensive evidence of CMV infection? The author tells us that the severely ill patient is unable to make an antibody response. This tells us that autopsy evidence is the gold standard, a subject I will return to in a later episode.The paper is 10 pages long and far too detailed to describe in full here but what is incredibly important is the section when the author describes ‘the course of a typical lethal CMV infection’. (Don’t forget the CDC’s Don Francis said that CMV could not be the cause of AIDS as it had never killed anybody.) Notice how the symptoms mirror those of the AIDS patients mentioned in ‘And The Band Played On’ and the San Francisco AIDS documentary I referenced in the previous episode.‘This lethal viral infection characteristically begins with spiking fever associated with mild generalized malaise. Lymphopenia, thrombocytopenia are present.In the second week of the syndrome, new symptoms such as anorexia, nausea, vomiting, constipation, and abdominal pains appear. During this period, severe muscle wasting, peripheral edema, and lethargy are characteristic. Characteristically, it is during this period that the majority of the patients (75%) presents evidence of CMV infection in cultures of sputum, urine, bone marrow and kidney biopsy; bacterial cultures negative until the third week now become positive for members of the intestinal flora.’The reference to bone marrow CMV infection is hugely significant – bone marrow is where the immune system’s vital T-cells are produced.‘In the terminal phase, lasting usually 5-8 days, there is further progression of the symptomatology. The patient is now semi comatose, with rapid progression to deep coma. High fever, arterial hypotention, labored respiration, disproportionately increased heart rate, emaciation, are present. The severe leukopenia, low white blood cell count, still associated with lymphopenia, contributes to the terminal bacterial and fungal invasion. Irreversible pulmonary fluid retention represents the terminal event.At autopsy, severe malnutrition, edema, petichiae and loss of subcutaneous fat are always present. Pneumonitis and pulmonary fluid retention are universally present, along with CMV inclusion bodies in the lungs.In the ‘Discussion’ section, the author tells us that ‘CMV infections occur in 70-90% of renal transplant patients. The difference in immunologic responsiveness between patients who recover and those who die when infected with CMV is in harmony with findings that CMV itself is a profoundly immunosuppressive virus. The already immunosuppressed patient appears to be even more profoundly depressed by CMV infections. Such patients appear susceptible to superinfection with gram negative bacteria and other opportunistic organisms which sequentially infect and ultimately kill the patient. At autopsy a "mixed" infection is frequently found but evidence of organisms other than CMV is usually lacking until the preterminal phase of illness when blood and sputum cultures finally became positive for bacteria.’ The author reiterates that ‘the immuno-incompetent patient may be further immunosuppressed by the virus and develop sequential opportunistic infections and die.’What can one say except that if members of the CDC’s Task Force had read this paper and Paper One in 1981, there surely would have been no mystery about the early AIDS cases. All these men were immunodeficient, all had CMV infections and all followed similar paths to those trod by the ‘Transplant AIDS’ patients in the 1970s. The KS suffered in addition by early gay male AIDS patients in the 1980s was a result of the excessive use of Poppers at that time by a subset of male homosexuals, the highly sexually active, ‘fast lane’, gay males.When I contacted the author to ask him if he ever connected his work with the AIDS epidemic, he replied that he knew nothing about AIDS, which tells you something of the compartmentalization afflicting medical science then, and probably now.Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-Two of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Twenty-Three of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will conclude my examination of ‘Transplant AIDS’ cases from the 1970s.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading. ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97Shttps://www.penroseinquiry.org.uk/finalreport/pdf/LIT0010399.PDF First UK AIDS patient paper. ‘Solved: The 40-year mystery of the first man to die of AIDS in Britain | ITV News’ (the homosexual Paul Brand ignores the CMV aspect of the death, as he has ignored all my correspondence, but he talks about HIV testing and also interviews the charlatan Jonathan Weber)https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1344157/pdf/annsurg00296-0257.pdf ‘Cytomegalovirus: Clinical Virological Correlations in Renal Transplant Recipients’ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In Episode Twenty, I outlined how CMV wears down the immune system using guerilla warfare tactics that leave the immune system too preoccupied and, eventually, too exhausted, to deal with both CMV and other pathogens, the so-called opportunistic infections. This immune system overload and burnout is a totally rational, evidence-driven explanation of the development and progression of AIDS, requiring no third-party intervention by a ‘virus’ called ‘HIV.’In Episode Twenty-One, ‘1970s Transplant AIDS - Part One’, I will begin an examination of three papers published in the 1970s which prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that AIDS was no mystery and no ‘out of the blue’ occurrence. If you wish to find out more about the symptoms of AIDS, then, as well as the Fauci lecture cited in the previous episode, I suggest you watch the San Francisco programme listed at the bottom of this post. This will show you how the symptoms and clinical timeline suffered by transplant patients in the 1970s were almost identical to those suffered by ‘AIDS’ patients in the early 1980s, and will tell you that AIDS, whatever the CDC said, was no inexplicable mystery requiring months and years to unravel.The first paper ‘FORTY-DAY FEVER - An Epidemic of Cytomegalovirus Disease in a Renal Transplant Population’, was published in 1974 but was based upon events which occurred at Stanford University Hospital, California, between 1 April 1970 and 30 September 1971.The very first sentence uncannily echoes the name given to the original CDC KSOI task force set up in June 1981: ‘A disturbing consequence of immunosuppressive therapy is the appearance of opportunistic infection in the compromised hosts.’ If people’s immune systems are damaged, then they will suffer from opportunistic infections. The next sentence gives the lie to the Task Force’s belief, led by Don Francis, that CMV hadn’t killed anybody: ‘As early as 1964 cytomegalovirus (CMV) was recognized as a contributory cause of the pneumonic disease observed in 47 percent of a group of 32 organ transplant recipients who died after immunosuppressive therapy. In four of these cases CMV was the only agent detected in the lungs.’ So, we have immunosuppression, CMV, pneumonic disease and death. What did the June 5 MMWR state about the first five GRID patients? All had PCP pneumonia, all had CMV infections, all were immunosuppressed.The whole paper is incredibly instructive and another standout sentence comes a few paragraphs later: ‘All patients were ill with a clinically unique syndrome, manifested by the occurrence of fever 40 days after transplant, persistence of fever for four to six weeks, the development of interstitial pneumonitis, and varying degrees of hepatic and renal involvement.’ The words ‘syndrome’, ‘persistence of fever’and ‘pneumonitis’ stand out.The paper analyses a ‘Clinical Syndrome of Disseminated CMV Disease’; if you watch the San Francisco video, you’ll see how closely the symptoms match those of the early AIDS cases. The paper states that ‘The patients who were victims of the current CMV epidemic presented with a virtually diagnostic symptom complex. The first clinical sign was a rise in temperature, which ran as high as 41 C. The febrile episodes recurred daily and were not sustained. A non-productive cough was a very early symptom. The clinical picture was complicated to a greater or lesser degree by involvement of other organ systems.’The next sentence is stunning: ‘Respiratory failure was the final common pathway for the five patients who died, superinfection with pathogenic organisms leading to overwhelming pneumonia.’ So, just like AIDS, we have immune deficiency, CMV, super / opportunistic infections, other pathogens, deadly pneumonia, death.‘Four of the five patients who died showed histologic changes characteristic of viral encephalitis, and two of these had demonstrable CMV. One patient with established CMV encephalitis exhibited paranoid ideation and perseveration, with intermittent disorientation. She had alternating postural tremor in all limbs, tongue and mouth during voluntary movement which disappeared at rest. She also had muscle wasting and diffuse motor weakness.’ All these were symptoms of AIDS patients. ‘Another patient with CMV encephalitis became psychotic and in her case also loss of muscle bulk was associated with generalized weakness.’ AIDS patients all around the globe wasted away. ‘Low white blood cell numbers developed in more than half the patients during the febrile period.’ The paper concludes: ‘Cytomegalovirus infection is one of the numerous possible infective complications of immunosuppression. Of all the aspects of CMV infection in the outbreak, interstitial pneumonitis was the most feared complication, not only because of its direct effect in decreasing oxygenation, but also because it predisposes the patient to superinfection with pathogenic organisms. CMV infections have been described previously in immunosuppressed patients, but the degree of virulence we encountered was unusual. Asymptomatic CMV carriers may have high levels of antibody and excrete virus in the urine or throat secretions. We would like to suggest that a latent form of infection stemming from a common source is established and it persists in a fashion readily activated by immunosuppression. Infection may occur as a result of aspiration of airborne droplets from secretions, but transfer by blood transfusions has not been excluded. We have documented a virulent form of CMV whose hallmark is a particularly debilitating and injurious pneumonitis. Evidence has been presented to suggest that the infection may be acquired initially in the hemodialysis phase of the patient's course, and that the full devastating impact of the disease is then seen during the subsequent transplant phase.’So, to conclude, this 1974 paper, based upon an epidemic which occurred in 1970/71, shows: immunodeficiency; acquired CMV infection; disseminated CMV disease; a unique clinical syndrome including fever; non-productive cough; muscle wasting; mental and physical disablement; overwhelming superinfection / opportunistic infections; pneumonia; death. In short, ‘Transplant AIDS’. Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty-One of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Twenty-Two of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will continue with my examination of ‘ Transplant AIDS’ cases from the 1970s.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading. ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S 1985 "AIDS: An Incredible Epidemic" by San Francisco General Hospitalhttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1129295/pdf/westjmed00305-0023.pdf This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In the previous episodes I outlined some of the reasons why I believe CMV played an important role in the complete breakdown of the immune system known as ‘AIDS’. In Episode Twenty, ‘Explaining AIDS’, I will explore in detail the mechanisms by which CMV wears down the immune system.In his 1984 lecture, Fauci (as well as promoting a virus which turned out to be the IDAV / LAI double contaminant sent by the French to the Americans in September 1983) outlines the mistaken belief that a new virus – the virus that became known as HIV but which was called HTLV-IIIB by the Americans – was selectively infecting and damaging T4-helper cells, the conductors of the immune system orchestra. Incidentally, Fauci says they are called T-cells because they are derived from the thymus gland, but actually they originate in bone marrow and mature in the thymus. Fauci is correct when he says that in AIDS, the number of T4 helper cells goes down and the T4/T8 ratio is inverted. I already explained in a previous episode that CMV has the same impact on T4 / T8 cells when a person gets infected. Fauci, and the other proponents of the ‘HIV causes AIDS’ orthodoxy, says that the infection of one type of cell, the T4 helper cell, has a domino effect in terms of wiping out the entire immune system.As I did not believe the ‘HIV causes AIDS’ orthodoxy, I had to find evidence which supported an alternative explanation as to how the immune system collapses in AIDS patients. I discovered it in Chapter Twelve of ‘The Stealth Virus’, specifically at the end of the chapter, with the story of ‘Edith’. In Chapter Twelve, Paul Griffiths describes how CMV establishes sanctuary sites within the body where it can replicate free from immunological attack. He also states that because CMV is always at work in a body, even if sometimes only at a low level, the immune system never switches off.Griffiths explores these concepts in more detail in his imaginary ‘Edith’ case study at the end of the chapter. CMV hides in sanctuaries in the body that are protected against immune system attack by a series of genes encoded within the virus. Every time the herpes virus CMV reactivates, or a person becomes infected by a different CMV strain, the immune system responds but always seems to be one step behind the virus. The immune system becomes more and more angry that it cannot evict CMV from its sanctuaries like it does with other invaders like measles. Over time the immune system commits more and more resources to attacking CMV so that eventually most of a person’s T8-suppressor cells are actively searching for the sanctuaries where the CMV is hiding. Eventually, a person’s immune system commits more resources to chasing after CMV, than it does to all the other invaders combined. This can take place over decades, or in seriously ill AIDS patients, over a matter of months.This has two effects: first, the T8-suppressor cells are angry and inflamed because they cannot kill CMV virus and end up attacking other tissues instead, leading to chronic problems in organs such as the heart. Second, because the T8-suppressor cells focus more and more on CMV, other pathogens (other viruses, bacteria, even vaccines) have, literally, licence to kill.In early AIDS, people were being killed by CMV and opportunistic infections. CMV’s guerilla tactics do not kill T-cells directly; they distract and wear down an increasingly frustrated immune system, leaving the door wide open for other pathogens such as PCP pneumonia, toxoplasmosis, KS et al to strike. This is, in other words, the immune system overload and burnout explanation of AIDS.Thank you for listening to Episode Twenty of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Twenty-One of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will examine ‘Transplant AIDS’ cases from the 1970s.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S Fauci lecture 44 mins – 50 mins.https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stealth-Virus-Prof-Paul-Griffiths/dp/1477566791 The Stealth Virus This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In the previous episodes I outlined some of the reasons why I believe CMV played an important part of the AIDS narrative. In Episode Nineteen I examine the consequences of an event which occurred just as word was beginning to spread in Atlanta about a mysterious epidemic amongst gay males in California and New York. On May 13th, 1981, Pope John Paul II was badly injured by gunshots during an attempted assassination in St Peter’s Square. On June 30th, the New York Times reported the following:‘THE viral illness that the Vatican says has complicated the recovery of Pope John Paul II from an assassination attempt is one of the most common and baffling of human infections. The Pontiff's doctors presume the infection was introduced into the Pope's body with one of the 10 blood transfusions he received during and immediately after emergency surgery on May 13. It is an infection for which no specific therapy exists, and recovery is up to the healing powers of nature.The illness is called cytomegalovirus infection, or CMV, and it infects the overwhelming majority of people at one time or another. Yet a medical mystery is why the virus infects so many people but makes so few sick. This characteristic distinguishes CMV from other common viral diseases, such as measles, which causes symptoms in almost every person it infects. Epidemiological studies have shown that at least 1 percent of newborns enter the world with an active cytomegalovirus infection. The incidence rises thereafter, with a peak occurring between the ages of 15 and 30. Although the incidence of CMV varies widely throughout the world, cytomegalovirus has left its ''fingerprints'' in the blood of about 80 percent of the people 40 years or older in most populations.The symptoms and damage produced by CMV vary widely and depend on the age at which an individual is infected. Pediatricians commonly detect the virus in the urine of apparently healthy babies. However, CMV infections can cause abortion, stillbirth or death in the early days after birth from bleeding, anemia, hepatitis or brain damage. The infection can also damage the body in more subtle ways. CMV is considered an important cause of mental retardation. It can also lead to hearing and visual loss, as well as other central nervous system and developmental abnormalities that impair learning ability. Damage caused by the virus may not be detected until a child is several years old. Though most adults, as well as most infants, may become infected but escape symptoms, many infected individuals develop fever, fatigue, liver and spleen enlargement and lung inflammation. The Pope had all these symptoms, according to one of his doctors. The doctor also said that the medical team was uncertain whether the lung infection was caused by CMV because the type of inflammation seen on his chest X-rays differed from the usual pattern of a CMV pulmonary infection.The virus is often diagnosed in patients whose immunological system has been compromised either from chronic diseases or from drugs aimed at helping to prevent rejection of transplanted kidneys and other organs. Some such patients die from CMV. The virus probably has caused infections for centuries, but the disease was recognized only in recent decades. In the late 19th century, doctors began to notice peculiar cells in the urine and organs of some children. Observed through an ordinary microscope, the cells appeared enlarged and contained dense particles called inclusion bodies. For a long time, the cell damage was attributed to a parasite. It was only in 1956, with the aid of new virological techniques, that scientists discovered that a virus, not a parasite, produced the cell changes and was responsible for the wide variety of symptoms and damage. Accordingly, it was named cytomegalovirus, from the Greek words cyto, for cell, and megalo, for large. CMV belongs to the herpes family of viruses, and when examined through an electron microsocope, it cannot be distinguished from other members of the family, such as those that cause herpes infections, chickenpox and shingles. The distinction is made by other laboratory tests.Diagnosing the virus can be difficult because individuals who have had a ''silent'' CMV infection can pass the virus in the urine for years. Since isolation of the virus alone does not conclusively link a patient's current medical problem to CMV, the diagnosis reflects a judgmental decision based on a combination of blood, urine and other tests, as well as an evaluation of the patient's clinical history.Doctors have yet to fully determine how the infection spreads. The virus can pass from a mother's blood through the placenta to a fetus, and it occurs frequently in the cervix portion of the womb and breast milk. Still, doctors are uncertain when and how some fetuses and newborns acquire the infection. Among adults, close contact is apparently needed to spread the infection. Sometimes, CMV is spread by blood transfusions, producing an illness that resembles infectious mononucleosis. The virus can begin two to four weeks after transfusion and last a month or more. There are no tests to screen blood contaminated with CMV. The risk of acquiring CMV from blood transfusions varies geographically and is considered very low in the United States. Some American experts said privately that they were surprised by the diagnosis of CMV in the Pope because of the small probability that a healthy 61-year-old man had never had a CMV infection in the past. However, CMV was isolated from the Pope's urine, and increasing amounts of protective antibodies were detected in samples of his blood taken over several weeks, according to one of the Pontiff's doctors.’Thank you for listening to Episode Nineteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Twenty of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will return to the book, ‘The Stealth Virus’, and tell you about what I believe to be a perfect description of how CMV acts in AIDS patients. Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S Pope John Paul II shot in St Peter's Square (13 May 1981)https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/25/world/tests-show-pope-now-has-virus-lung-gets-better.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/30/science/the-doctor-world.html This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.Before I begin this episode, I wish to mark the fact that yesterday was ‘World AIDS Day’ and I did post on ‘The Real AIDS Epidemic’ Substack page as follows:‘It is important to say today of all days that the 'HIV causes AIDS' narrative was and remains a massive 40 year conspiracy and scam involving: the CDC; NIH; NIAID; ACTUP; Chester Beatty Laboratories in the UK; the Institut Pasteur in Paris; the WHO; UNAIDS; many governments, public heath bodies, medical / science institutions, Big Pharma, and media organizations around the planet.’In previous episodes I have outlined the close relationship/association between CMV and 3 of the main marker diseases of early AIDS: PCP pneumonia; KS; Toxoplasmosis. Today, in Episode Eighteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘The Stealth Virus’, I will begin to outline my research into CMV. By March 2021, having read ‘And The Band Played On’ and come to the conclusion thata) the HIV causes AIDS narrative was falseb) that CMV could have played an important part of the AIDS narrativeI began to examine CMV in great detail. After a couple of weeks research, I knew for certain that CMV had played an important part. One of the explanations of this certainty was the book ‘The Stealth Virus’ by Professor Paul Griffiths. This book told me that CMV could be transmitted by every body fluid, could be passed from mother to child in the womb, and via breast milk, infected a person for life, like the flu virus, was multi-strain so a person could be infected with different strains of the virus, and was a cause of immunodeficiency, as well as an exploiter of immunodeficiency.There were two more aspects of CMV that really stood out for me: first, the reason why some people suffered more than others when infected by CMV was, like the flu or Covid virus, down to the amount of viral load – the ones who suffered the most were the ones who had the highest viral load. Combine a high viral load with a weakened and weakening immune system then the effect was sometimes very bad indeed. So, for gay males even kissing was bad news because CMV is passed very readily in saliva. One of the arguments from the anti-‘CMV as a cause of AIDS’ lobby was that why, if 90%+ of sexually active gay males were infected with CMV, didn’t they all get AIDS? One of the papers I read showed that 10% of sexually active gay males were having 90% of the sex, and 10% of IVDUs were sharing 90% of the needles. The most active in those demographics had the highest viral loads, the weakest immune systems, and, therefore, the most disease. This fantastic paper (partly produced by the CDC) contains a diagram showing that ‘HIV’ incidence declined sharply after 1982.Back to Griffiths and the second key concept following on from ‘viral load’, is the ‘tipping point’ or ‘threshold value’. Once the viral load passes a certain point the risk of disease shoots up rapidly. If we look at AIDS patients, the syndrome would first show itself with permanently swollen lymph glands, then gradually the symptoms get worse as the immune system weakens, the T4-helper cell count declines, the T8-suppressor cells increase in numbers, and the various infections and pathogens, including CMV, take over the body in full-blown AIDS, from which there was no recovery.Thank you for listening to Episode Eighteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Nineteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will tell you more about what I learned from ‘The Stealth Virus’, including what I believe to be a perfect description of how CMV acts in AIDS patients. Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97Shttps://rebeccaculshawsmith.substack.com/p/world-aids-day-now-with-a-side-of/comments?utm_source=substack%2Csubstack&publication_id=702441&post_id=152413283&utm_medium=email%2Cemail&isFreemail=true&comments=true&utm_campaign=email-half-magic-comments&action=post-commenthttps://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cphl/Models/aids/chapter8.pdf WEAK LINKAGE BETWEEN HIV EPIDEMICS IN HOMOSEXUAL MEN AND INTRAVENOUS DRUG USERS IN NEW YORK CITYhttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Stealth-Virus-Prof-Paul-Griffiths/dp/1477566791 The Stealth Virus This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the story behind the story, the four-year research and writing process from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In previous episodes I have stated that the CDC regarded AIDS / GRID as a complete mystery. In future episodes, I’ll explore the extraordinary lengths they went to ‘discover’ the source of AIDS. In my opinion the CDC’s AIDS Task Force, led by James Curran and Don Francis, deceived the public, because they were desperate to find some kind of widespread medical problem that would preserve the organization and their jobs. As James Curran stated in his Global Chronicles interview: ‘The political background, at least as I remember it, was that Ronald Reagan had just been elected President to replace Jimmy Carter. The main thing was the concern about a decrease in domestic spending. There was a hiring freeze at the CDC and a freeze on a lot of budgetary aspects of CDC, as well as a commitment to close the Public Health Service hospitals and to cut back on domestic spending.’ There must have been a real concern that the CDC might be closed too, especially on the back of the 1976 Swine Flu fiasco, and the six months it took to get to the bottom of the Legionnaire’s disease outbreak the same year. So, to be saved from the chop, as Kary Mullis said, ‘The CDC needed a good plague.’In Episodes Fifteen and Sixteen, I outlined the clear links between CMV and PCP pneumonia and CMV and KS. Today, in Episode Seventeen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘CMV and Toxoplasmosis’, I will explore in more detail the close association between CMV and another marker disease of ‘early’ AIDS, Toxoplasmosis. Toxoplasmosis is a common infection that you can catch from the poo of infected cats, or infected meat. It's usually harmless but if you have a weakened immune system toxoplasmosis may cause problems with your eyes, brain, heart or lungs. In ‘And The Band Played On,’ Nick Rock’s toxoplasmosis is finally diagnosed in November 1980 after the top of his skull had been removed (p45). As I said previously, two months later CMV was running rampant through Rock’s body as he approached death.As I’ve also said previously and as I’ll repeat ad nauseum the CDC were desperate to propagate the idea that AIDS/GRID was a complete mystery. However, in 1979, a paper was published titled ‘Pneumocystis carinii, Toxoplasma gondii, Cytomegalovirus and the Compromised Host’. It states, ‘Pneumocystis carinii and Toxoplasma gondii are the two major parasitic protozoan pathogens in the immunocompromised host, both parasites are associated with cytomegalovirus infection in immunosuppressed hosts. Although Pneumocystis and Toxoplasma will be the major focus of this paper, infection with these two organisms cannot be discussed without reference to cytomegalovirus. Infection with one of these organisms, especially cytomegalovirus, may facilitate secondary infection by Pneumocystis carinii or Toxoplasma gondii. There has been ample documentation of concomitant infection with Toxoplasma and cytomegalovirus in the compromised host. In 1956, simultaneous disseminated cytomegalic inclusion disease and toxoplasmosis in an adult with myeloid metaplasia was described. In 1968 the National Cancer Institute was the first to call attention to the striking concurrence of disseminated cytomegalovirus and Toxoplasma infection in patients with altered host defenses. They suggested that this association might be more than a fortuitous occurrence and that there might be a symbiotic relationship. Individual human cells infected with both organisms also have been observed.’The paper also confirms that ‘dual infections with cytomegalovirus were noted in the earliest clinical series of immunosuppressed patients with P. carinii pneumonitis. In a recent electron microscopic study of P.carinii, structures were found within the cytoplasm of this parasite that resemble cytomegalovirus.’The summary is clear, ‘Toxoplasma and Pneumocystis are important opportunistic pathogens that account for significant morbidity and mortality in the compromised host. There is obviously a need to understand the pathogenic mechanisms responsible for disease production by these organisms. The occurrence of concomitant infection of these parasites with Cytomegalovirus suggests more than a fortuitous relationship.’When the first AIDS, or GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) cases were reported, gay males afflicted with PCP and KS, the CDC declared it was all a huge mystery and we were ‘all doomed.’ However, the medical literature pre-1981 contained extensive evidence that PCP and KS were both closely associated with a virus carried by 90%+ of sexually active gay males, CMV, and that these combinations could have fatal consequences. It was clear that Toxoplasmosis and CMV were also close bedfellows. Perhaps AIDS/GRID wasn’t such a huge mystery after all….Thank you for listening to Episode Seventeen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Eighteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will tell you more about CMV and the many reasons why I believe it should, by itself, be considered to be one of the causes of AIDS. Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S James Curran interviewhttps://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/aids CDC’s fantastic AIDS resourcehttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1238480/pdf/westjmed00245-0044.pdf ‘Pneumocystis carinii, Toxoplasma gondii, Cytomegalovirus and the Compromised Host’ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.I suspect those of you who have listened to the previous episodes will be asking, when is Paul going to tell us about the book? Well, I did tell you this show will look at all aspects of the book, from inspiration to publication. I was inspired to write a book because of HIV/AIDS and as time went on I became more and more interested in researching the syndrome. During the spring of 2021 I started work on my second ‘AIDS’ book, ‘The Fast Lane Experiment’ which I will tell you more about in a later episode but all the time my research continued, and all the time I became evermore convinced that the official ‘HIV causes AIDS’ narrative was a lie. It was this realization that would ultimately lead to ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, but there would be at least one more book title before that happened…..So, today, in Episode Sixteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘CMV and PCP pneumonia’, I will explore in more detail the close association between CMV and the second main marker disease of ‘early’ AIDS, PCP pneumonia. Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) is a rare, serious lung infection most common in people with weakened immune systems, such as those with AIDS, chronic lung disease, cancer, or who are taking certain post-transplant medications.As I have stated in previous episodes, the very first ‘AIDS’ paper published in the CDC’s MMWR bulletin on 5th June 1981, ‘Pneumocystis Pneumonia -- Los Angeles’, described how ‘in the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died. All 5 patients had laboratory-confirmed previous or current cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection and candidal mucosal infection.’ Even though the Editorial Note said that ‘the role of CMV infection in the pathogenesis of pneumocystosis remains unknown’, once I typed CMV/PCP into google I soon discovered that the two were often described as a double act, partners in crime. The first UK ‘AIDS’ case, was reported in the Lancet in December 1981 under the headline ‘PRIMARY PNEUMOCYSTIS CARINII AND CYTOMEGALOVIRUS INFECTIONS’. This a very important, as well as historic, paper and I will return to it in future episodes.Spookily, 21 years earlier the same journal included this paper: ‘CYTOMEGALIC INCLUSION DISEASE AND PNEUMOCYSTIS CARINII INFECTION IN AN ADULT’. This paper is I believe one of the most important papers of the 20th century, or at least it should be. It contains the story of the so-called Manchester Sailor, David Carr, an individual that Edward Hooper devotes two chapters to in his book ‘The River’. Again, this is such an important part of the AIDS jigsaw puzzle, I will return to it in future episodes. For now, I will focus on the Discussion part of the paper. The authors state in an almost Nostradamus-like manner: ‘The association (of CMV) with Pneumocystis carinii infection was of further interest. Simultaneous Pneumocystis and cytomegalic inclusion infections have also been described in an infant. The association of these two apparently separate and normally saprophytic infections is interesting, and perhaps not entirely fortuitous, especially since the nature of the Pneumocystis organism has not yet been determined. In due course a closer relationship may be established. It is important to recognise their potential pathogenicity and their ability to produce, either alone or in combination, fatal infections in man. There is some evidence that this danger is increased by prolonged treatment with steroids and antibiotics. Possibly more cases will occur because of the increasing use of these drugs. At present, there is no effective treatment.’Hooper notes that David Carr’s health problems had begun in February 1956 and he had received ‘massive penicillin injections.’ He attended Christies Radium Hospital in Manchester on a monthly basis from the start of 1958, to get radiotherapy and steroid treatment for rashes on his back and shoulders.’By the late 1970s a subset of sexually active, ‘fast-lane’ gay males were taking antibiotics and steroids in massive amounts.When the first AIDS, or GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) cases were reported, gay males afflicted with PCP and KS, the CDC declared it was all a huge mystery and we were ‘all doomed.’ However, the medical literature pre-1981 contained extensive evidence that PCP and KS were both closely associated with a virus carried by 90%+ of sexually active gay males, CMV, and that these combinations could have fatal consequences. Perhaps AIDS/GRID wasn’t a mystery at all….Thank you for listening to Episode Sixteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Seventeen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will tell you about yet another association between CMV and another key ‘early’ AIDS marker disease, Toxoplasmosis. Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97Shttps://www.infectedbloodinquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/Sub%20Docs%201001%20-%201300%20/Sub%20Docs%201001%20-%201300%20/%201001%20-%201300%20%28ZY%29/PRSE0000426%20-%20Primary%20Pneumocystis%20Carinii%20and%20Cytomegalovirus%20Infections%20-%2012%20Dec%201981.pdfhttps://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/lmrk077.htm#:~:text=In%20the%20period%20October%201980,Two%20of%20the%20patients%20died. MMWR.https://www.penroseinquiry.org.uk/finalreport/pdf/LIT0013977.PDF ‘CYTOMEGALIC INCLUSION DISEASE AND PNEUMOCYSTIS CARINII INFECTION IN AN ADULT’.http://www.aidsorigins.com/wp-content/uploads/The-River-by-Edward-Hooper-2021-edition.pdf The River, Edward Hooper This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In Episode Fifteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘CMV and Kaposi’s Sarcoma’, I will explore in more detail the close association between CMV and one of the two main marker diseases of ‘early’ AIDS, Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS). KS is a type of cancer that forms in the lining of blood vessels and lymph vessels. The cancer forms growths of cells, called lesions, on the skin. The lesions often form on the face, arms and legs. The lesions may look pink, red, purple or brown. It was generally found in old men of mediterranean origin, often taking benign form. It’s appearance in gay males in virulent form was one of the mysteries of ‘early’ AIDS. It rarely appeared in IVDU’s or hemophiliacs. Why did KS affect gay males and not the other two main affected demographics? I’ll give you a member of the CDC’s Task Force’s answer in a future episode.On p65 of ‘And The Band Played On’, it states that ‘African KS had been linked to a herpes virus, CMV’. I googled KS/CMV to see what I could find and I discovered there were half a dozen papers from Gaetano Giraldo dating back to the early 1970s exploring the connection. In his 1978 paper, ‘Antibody patterns to herpesviruses in Kaposi's sarcoma. II. Serological association of American Kaposi's sarcoma with cytomegalovirus’ he writes, the prominent finding of this extended serologic analysis on American and African Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) patients and appropriately matched control groups is the detection of a specific serologic association of cytomegalovirus (CMV) with American KS patients. All American KS sera contained CMV antibodies and the result is strongly reminiscent of the data obtained previously for European KS’.One of the paper’s co-authors is Bijan Safai, described by the head of the CDC’s AIDS Task Force, James Curran, as ‘an outstanding expert in Kaposi's sarcoma at Memorial-Sloan Kettering’. In 1980, Safai published this paper, ‘Association of Kaposi's Sarcoma with Second Primary Malignancies’, in which he stated, ‘The initial search for virus particles resulted in the isolation of a cytomegalovirus (CMV) in a KS tissue culture cell line. Subsequent analyses have revealed a specific serologic association with KS and CMV.’ Presciently as far as AIDS was concerned, Safai goes further and outlines in a diagram how CMV might produce cancers. Persistent heavy infection, combined with persistent heterogenic stimulation, would produce increased synthesis of defective virus particles, leading to multiple cell tropism, resulting in multiple cancers. In the late 1970s / early 1980s, gay males were taking lots of drugs, drinking alcohol, and sniffing amyl nitrites, ‘poppers’, on an industrial scale. Poppers cause vasodilation, widening of blood vessels, and, as I explained earlier, KS is a type of cancer that forms in the lining of blood vessels and lymph vessels. It seemed obvious to me that KS and Poppers, like lung cancer and cigarettes, were connected and I wasn’t the only one, as I was to find out.Safai’s paper concluded, ‘Our study has confirmed a significant association between KS and second primary malignancies of the lymphoreticular system, in which CMV frequently remains in a latent form. This would seem to strengthen the probability of related etiopathogenic mechanisms between the two neoplasms.’Safai was a co-author of the ‘National Case-Control Study of Kaposi's Sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia in Homosexual Men: Part 1, Epidemiologic Results’, in which CMV appears a grand total of zero times. In ‘How To Survive A Plague’, p26, gay Greenwich Village medical scientist, infectious diseases expert, and a doctor with over a 1,000 gay male patients, Joseph Sonneband recalls how there was ‘an overwhelming epidemic of CMV in his gay patients in the late 1970s/ and early 1980s and he wrote several papers outlining why he believed CMV was a likely cause of AIDS. However, he could not answer the question, ‘what might KS and CMV have in common?’ If only he’d read the Giraldo/ Safai papers. If only Safai had told him. According to France on p43, Sonneband’s business partner, Mathilde Krim, mystified by the KS cases, called Safai who told her about the AIDS cases on his ward but failed to mention the ‘specific serologic association with KS and CMV’. Why not?Thank you for listening to Episode Fifteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. In Episode Sixteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I will tell you about another close association, that between CMV and the other main marker disease of ‘early’ AIDS, PCP pneumonia.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S James Curran interviewhttps://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/1097-0142%2819800315%2945%3A6%3C1472%3A%3AAID-CNCR2820450629%3E3.0.CO%3B2-A Safai paperhttps://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Survive-Plague-Activists-Scientists/dp/1509839402 ‘How To Survive A Plague’, David Francehttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/0312374631 ‘And The Band Played On’, Randy Shilts. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In Episode Fourteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘CMV and AIDS’, I will reveal a series of ‘firsts’, and other details, which should have made CMV a prime suspect in the search for the cause of AIDS. Perhaps would have done if it had not been for the conviction of Don Francis, formulated in July 1981, that AIDS was caused by a new pathogen, most likely a retrovirus.In February 1981, a paper revealed that CMV had been found in 94% of homosexual patients attending a San Francisco VD clinic, as opposed to 54% of heterosexual men and 43% of male volunteer male blood donors. The authors of the paper featured in the 1983 BBC documentary about AIDS, ‘Killer In The Village.’ A similar percentage – 92% - was discovered at a London hospital’s STD clinic in 1982.In June 1981, a paper stated that ‘Acute CMV infection is associated with a reversal in the normal ratio of helper to suppressor T lymphocytes with relative and absolute decreases in T helper cells and corresponding increases in T suppressor cells.’ Exactly what happened with AIDS patients. The paper also noted that ‘During convalescence, helper T lymphocytes increase, suppressor T lymphocytes decrease.’  What if there was no convalescence?Four days later, the CDC’s MMWR bulletin included the first national / international report of the new immune deficiency epidemic in male homosexuals. ‘In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed PCP pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died. All 5 patients had laboratory-confirmed previous or current cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection and candidal mucosal infection.’A month later another MMWR carried a report on the new Kaposi’s Sarcoma / PCP pneumonia epidemic in gay males. The results of tests for cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection were available for 12 patients. All 12 had serological evidence of past or present CMV infection. In 3 patients for whom culture results were available, CMV was isolated from blood, urine and/or lung of all 3.’ Even more revealing was the sentence: ‘A specific serologic association with CMV infection has been demonstrated among American and European patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma.’ Of which more in the next episode.The CDC’s Task Force National Case-Control Study of Kaposi's Sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia in Homosexual Men: Part 2 Laboratory Results, which was buried for eighteen months, showed that evidence of CMV infection had been found in 165/167 subjects, Cultures of patients' urine and throat swab specimens yielded cytomegalovirus more frequently than those of the combined controls, 13 (25%) of 52 patients having an isolation made from one or more sites, versus 9 (7%) of 124 combined controls. Analysis was done on CMV isolates obtained from ten patients and ten controls. Results suggested that each isolate represented a different strain of CMV.A paper reporting on the first blood transfusion AIDS case, that of a baby, states that at the time of death the donor was suffering from ‘disseminated cytomegalovirus infection’. The baby itself tested positive for CMV, although this fact was hidden from the American public.The first Hemophilia-associated AIDS case in the USA, an elderly man in Denver, was also suffering from a CMV infection.During the interval between October 1981 and June 1983, 10 autopsies of patients with AIDS were studied in the Laboratory of Pathology, NIH. There were CMV inclusions in the autopsy lungs of all but I patient.Thank you for listening to Episode Fourteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. I will tell you more about the association between CMV and Kaposi’s sarcoma in Episode Fifteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’  Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6260871/  ‘Prevalence of cytomegalovirus infection in homosexual men’https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01z2lbp/horizon-19821983-killer-in-the-village  BBC documentaryhttps://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC1046298&blobtype=pdf  ‘Antibodies to CMV in homosexual and heterosexual men attending an STD clinic.’https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6262407/ ‘Analysis of T lymphocyte subsets in cytomegalovirus mononucleosis’https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/june_5.htm  ‘Pneumocystis Pneumonia --- Los Angeles’https://cssh.northeastern.edu/pandemic-teaching-initiative/wp-content/uploads/sites/43/2020/09/1981.07.03.Morbidity_Mortality.pdf https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6309049/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1916399/pdf/amjpathol00192-0119.pdf Autopsy Pathology in the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In Episode Thirteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘Occam’s Razor’, before I begin telling you about my research into cytomegalovirus, CMV, I will explain how Occam’s Razor works and how I think it applies to theories about the cause (s) of AIDS.Occam’s Razor states that, suppose there are two explanations for an occurrence, the one that requires the smallest number of assumptions is usually correct. Or, the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation is. Or, the simplest explanation is often closer to the truth than a complicated one. Or, the more complicated and absurd a story is, the less likely it is to be true.In terms of the cause of AIDS, the official narrative is that at some point in the first half of the 20th century, a hunter/soldier was infected by a chimpanzee virus in Cameroon, which, despite this probably happening 1000s of times previously, this time then morphed into ‘HIV.’ Without infecting anyone in Cameroon, the hunter/soldier travelled hundreds of miles to the Belgian Congo city of Leopoldville (Kinshasha), infected someone else and, hey presto, some twenty / thirty years later, ‘African AIDS’ began in Kinshasa, with the virus affecting mainly heterosexuals. Meanwhile in the late 1960s, the virus was carried across the Atlantic by Haitian professionals, who then passed it onto gay male Americans in the early 1970s and this led to the gay male AIDS epidemic, followed by the IVDU and hemophiliac epidemics. Despite this complicated scenario, Gallo still titled one of his chapters in his AIDS book, ‘Virus Hunting: Cancer, AIDS, and the Human Retrovirus: a Story of Scientific Discovery’, ‘A Single Disease With A Single Cause.’ Apparently the ‘Syndrome’ part of the AIDS acronym didn’t register with the esteemed Professor Gallo aka ‘The Charlatan’.The alternative narrative in terms of the cause of AIDS doesn’t involve any of the following: hard to find African chimpanzees, zoonotic transfers, Haitians, gay male exceptionalism, decades where nothing happens until miraculously, simultaneously, on either side of the Atlantic two epidemics occur, or a 40 year global conspiracy to cover up the truth. The immune system overload explanation simply states that small subsets of gay males, IVDUs and hemophiliacs, due to the amplification systems provided by the 1970s bath-houses and shooting galleries, and the arrival, also in the 1970s, of Factor 8, which overloaded, burnt out and collapsed their immune systems, and left them powerless to resist the rather characteristic and relatively uniform patterns of infectious diseases collectively known as ‘AIDS’.  Of course, the gay male sex and poppers industries and the Factor 8 manufacturers, denied the links but don’t forget, ‘lung cancer was once a very rare disease, so rare that doctors took special notice when confronted with a case, thinking it a once-in-a-lifetime oddity. Mechanisation and mass marketing towards the end of the 19th century popularised the cigarette habit (the amplification system), causing a global lung cancer epidemic. Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of the epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics. Naturally, cigarette manufacturers disputed this evidence, as part of an orchestrated conspiracy to salvage cigarette sales. Propagandising the public proved successful, judging from secret tobacco industry measurements of the impact of denialist propaganda. As late as 1960 only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established. Part of the ease of cigarette manufacturing stems from the ubiquity of high-speed cigarette making machines, which crank out 20 000 cigarettes per min.’ Now, that’s what I call an amplification system!So, which of those two explanations of the inception of AIDS best satisfies Occam’s Razor? I’ll leave that to you to decide.Thank you for listening to Episode Thirteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. I will begin telling you about my research into CMV and AIDS and an amazing series of ‘firsts’ in Episode Fourteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’  Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1916399/pdf/amjpathol00192-0119.pdf ‘Autopsy Pathology in the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87  ‘The history of the discovery of the cigarette–lung cancer link: evidentiary traditions, corporate denial, global toll’   https://www.amazon.co.uk/Virus-Hunting-Retrovirus-Scientific-Discovery/dp/0465098061  Gallo’s book This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In Episode Twelve of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘A big clue’, I will tell you how my search for the true cause of AIDS began to focus on one particular pathogen.In Episode Eleven of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, I told you that in February / March 2021, I had read and re-read ‘And The Band Played On’. It hit me very clearly in the first 125 pages that the CDC propaganda / mantra about people with AIDS, that they had previously been ‘healthy’, was to say the least a bit of a stretch. In fact, it was completely far-fetched. Or, to put it absolutely bluntly, it was a lie. To take the very first case seen by Michael Gottlieb. On p43 it is revealed that, apparently, prior to becoming ill, the young gay man had suffered a ‘cornucopia of venereal diseases’. According to Collins Dictionary, cornucopia means ‘a great abundance; overflowing supply’.I said in Episode Eleven, it was apparent from reading ‘ATBPO’ that a very small subset of the US gay male population, the Fast-Lane, sex drugs and rock n roll gay males, who were burning the candle at both ends, and in the centre too, were becoming increasingly unhealthy as the 1970s progressed. In my opinion their immune systems burnt out and collapsed due to overload. The body can only take so many STIs, viral, fungal and bacterial infections. Taking a ton of antibiotics and steroids doesn’t help either.On page 73 of ‘ATBPO’, the person I call the ‘HIV causes AIDS’ ‘Early Decider’, Don Francis, declared that cytomegalovirus (CMV) could not be the cause of AIDS because it ‘had been around for years and hadn’t killed anyone.’ That was surprising to me as, in the first 125 pages, there are described half-a-dozen deaths where CMV was heavily involved.The very first American case Shilts discusses in depth, that of Nick Rock, tells us on p53 that, at his end, ‘a herpes virus, cytomegalovirus, was running wild in his body, inundating every organ’, including the brain which was atrophied.  On p50 in New York, a 33 year old homosexual German chef’s death had been ‘particularly grisly’, ‘Plagued by the cytomegalovirus that had spread its virulent virus throughout his body.’  Just three weeks later at the same hospital, a homosexual nurse died and his autopsy revealed ‘widespread infection with cytomegalovirus.’On p62, the CDC’s Wayne Shandera was told there was a ‘report of a CMV death sitting’ on his desk. That was a 29 year old attorney.On p100, Ken Horne, as he approaches death, is described as ‘blind now too, from the CMV herpes infections that had wasted his nervous system’.On p36, in 1977 a lady from Zaire ‘was suffering a severe infection of cytomegalovirus…waves of infection washed over’ her body.  Thank you for listening to Episode Twelve of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. I will begin telling you about my research into CMV in Episode Thirteen of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’  Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S    Very revealing Fauci lecture in so many ways,1984. CMV is ‘not the cause of AIDS’. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between.In Episode Eleven of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘And The Band Played On’, I will tell you how I began my search for the true cause of AIDS. Before I do I just want to take you back to Luc Montagnier and his book ‘Virus’, the paperback version of which was published in 1994. On p180 he writes: ‘Our immune system is built for short battles, blitzes of a sort. It is less prepared for the guerilla or trench warfare.’  I find this comment interesting in terms of thinking about the immune system overload, burnout and collapse theory of the cause of AIDS. On p183 he states: ‘According to the hard-core virologist, the virus (HIV) kills the T4-cells it infects, and the whole disease springs from that. This is a naïve and simplistic conception that betrays a certain intellectual rigidity or quite simply an ignorance of everything that happens to fall outside one’s narrow area of specialization.’This actually leads me quite nicely onto the book I have read at least five times between the middle of February 2021 and today, November 25th 2024, ‘And The Band Played On’, written by the male homosexual journalist Randy Shilts. Published In 1987, according to Amazon, ‘And The Band Played On’ was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting. An international bestseller, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed movie (which I watched on Youtube in November 2020), Shilts' expose revealed why AIDS was allowed to spread unchecked during the early 80's while the most trusted institutions ignored or denied the threat. One of the few true modern classics, it changed and framed how AIDS was discussed in the following years.’ So, it’s a seminal, hugely influential work; a foundation stone, a gospel, of the official ‘HIV causes AIDS’ narrative. According to Bill Darrow, a key figure in the original CDC AIDS Task Force, Randy Shilts ‘knew everything, and I mean everything.’When I originally started reading the book in February, 2021 I was still pursuing Hooper’s polio vaccine HIV origin hypothesis, so this first reading was coloured by that perspective. The second time around, in March 2021, I was looking for an alternative explanation for the cause of AIDS and the first 124 pages were very instructive. Going back to the Montagnier quote earlier, ‘the naïve and simplistic conception’ that the ‘virus (HIV) kills the T4-cells it infects’, on p43 of ‘ATBPO’ Michael Gottlieb exclaims ‘Hot damn. What kind of disease tracked down and killed such specific (T-4) blood cells?’ I believe this is one of the most misleading and damaging sentences ever written in the AIDS canon.Elsewhere in the first 124 pages, Shilts spends pages telling the reader about the self-inflicted damage some promiscuous gay males were causing their own bodies and immune systems. The sex, drugs and rock’n’roll life style, practiced in the decade after the 1969 Stonewall Riots, of this subset of the gay male community, focused around the bath-houses in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. This lifestyle involved lots of unrestrained, unprotected sex, washed down with copious amounts of street drugs and ‘poppers’, alkyl nitrite inhalants, as well as a huge volume of antibiotics and steroids. By 1979, the number of cases of STIs, hepatitis, bowel diseases, a by-product of fecal ingestion, and cytomegalovirus in this community were off the charts.I learned that, just like WW1 did not just happen in July 1914, or 9/11 came out of nowhere, so ‘AIDS’ did not appear out of a clear blue sky in the late 70s/early 80s. In 1976, a condition known as Gay Bowel Syndrome (mentioned on p18-19 ‘ATBPO’) was officially recognized. That year a paper called ‘The Gay Bowel Syndrome: clinico-pathologic correlation in 260 cases’ was published. This is the introduction to the abstract:‘The clinical and pathological findings in a group of 260 homosexual men comprising 10% of a private proctologic practice (in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York) are reviewed. A clinical pattern of anorectal and colon diseases encountered with unusual frequency in these homosexual patients is termed the gay bowel syndrome. Concurrent infections with two or more pathogens should be anticipated.’Shilts wrote that cases of GBS in San Francisco increased 8,000% after 1973 and even gay physicians like David Ostrow and Dan William voiced their concerns about the public health implications of the commercialization of boundary-free sex, whose only limit was the stamina of the involved individuals.Thank you for listening to Episode Eleven of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it. I will continue telling you about my search for the cause of AIDS in Episode Twelve of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/0312374631  Shiltshttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Virus-Co-discoverer-Tracks-Rampage-Charts/dp/0393337030  Montagnierhttp://www.annclinlabsci.org/content/6/2/184.full.pdf  Gay Bowel Syndrome, 1976 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between. In Episode Ten of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘HIV denialists’ I will focus on some of the very many scientists who disagree with the official ‘HIV causes AIDS’ narrative. A narrative which I believe should have been declared null and void in 2002, when Montagnier admitted in a self-penned article that the only ‘AIDS virus’ he grew in his lab, from Patient LAI, a Kaposi’s sarcoma suffering male homosexual called Christope Lailler, was contaminated. I studied the HIV denier scientists because, although I am led by evidence and data, I am no scientist and no medic, and I wanted to know whether or not I had completely got hold of the wrong end of the wrong stick.The first group of HIV denialists I looked at was the ‘Perth Group’. The Perth Group was formed in 1981 in Perth, Western Australia and consists of a biophysicist, an emergency physician, a Professor of Pathology John Papadimitriou, and several other scientists. The view of The Perth Group is that the HIV/AIDS experts have not proven the following: the existence of a unique, exogenously acquired retrovirus, HIV; that "HIV" antibody tests are specific for "HIV" infection; the HIV theory of AIDS, that is, that HIV causes acquired immune deficiency or that it leads to the development of AIDS; that the "HIV genome", (RNA or DNA) originates in a unique, exogenously acquired infectious retroviral particle; that HIV or AIDS are infectious, either by blood, blood products or sexual intercourse; the mother to child transmission of a retrovirus HIV or its inhibition with AZT. Another pair of HIV deniers are Peter Duesberg and Kary Mullis. Both deserve their own episodes but I’ll briefly touch on Kary Mullis today. In his 1996 interview with Garry Null, Mullis awarded ‘The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1993 for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method’, expounds on all things HIV/AIDS, including his belief that America’s AIDS czar Anthony Fauci, knows nothing about anything. He calls the official  ‘HIV causes AIDS’ narrative ‘dumb’ and ‘crazy’. ‘Every single thing’ about it was wrong, ‘there’s no evidence’. ‘Every bit of the data is wacky, and all of the conclusions are wrong.’ ‘The entire AIDS establishment is absolutely guilty of some hideous sins and everybody’s been fooled. Everybody on the planet has been fooled by a handful of greedy people without any scruples’. He told his mother ‘the entire medical establishment’ was wrong, that he had studied this really well and concluded ‘there wasn’t anything out there that was causing people to die that is called HIV.’An emeritus professor of pathology and decades long retroviral researcher, Etienne de Harvan, wrote in 2010 that, Human Endogenous Retroviruses (HERVs) are confounding factors in HIV/AIDS research that cannot be ignored. Evidence suggests that “viral load” may actually be measuring retroviral nucleoside sequences associated with HERVs. HERVs also provide a valid explanation for the presence of retroviruses recognizable by electron microscopy (EM) in the original 1983 publication from the Institut Pasteur, and may account for claims of innumerable “mutations” of the putative HIV pathogen. The interference of HERVs in AIDS research brings into question the subject of study in so-called “AIDS Research,” and the very existence of an exogenous HIV pathogen itself.  The retroviral hypothesis linking HIV to AIDS received a precipitous acceptance, not on the basis of scientifically verifiable data, but based on a so-called “consensus”—a consensus enthusiastically supported by the pharmaceutical industry.’As I said in the previous episode, once I had determined that the official HIV causes AIDS narrative was bogus, I then turned all my research energy into trying to discover the actual cause of AIDS. I will, I promise, begin telling you about that search in Episode Eleven of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’Thank you for listening to Episode Ten of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it and give the podcast a rating and a like. Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S  https://www.theperthgroup.com/   Kary Mullis interview. Whole interview excellent but particularly focus on 1 hour 43 – 1 hour 46.https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1993/mullis/facts/ https://www.jpands.org/vol15no3/deharven.pdf ‘Human Endogenous Retroviruses and AIDS Research: Confusion, Consensus, or Science?’ Etienne de Harvan. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between. In Episode Nine of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘The Charlatan’, I will focus on the American scientist, Robert Gallo and his ‘AIDS virus’, HTLV-IIIB.In Episodes Seven and Eight, I told you about the moment I discovered that the ‘HIV causes AIDS’ narrative was a house built on sand. In 2002, Luc Montagnier, awarded ‘The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008’ for his ‘discovery of human immunodeficiency virus’, admitted the only productive ‘HIV’ his laboratory had produced was a double contamination in the summer of 1983. This should have rendered all research post this date null and void.However, it wasn’t the French who originally claimed the discovery of the AIDS virus – that dishonour lay with the Americans. How did it happen? Let me tell you. In July 1981, when the first cases of PCP pneumonia /  Kaposi’s sarcoma and CMV infections were being brought to the medical world’s attention, one man already believed he knew what was the cause. Don Francis of the CDC said this was a cross between Feline Leukemia Virus and Hepatitis B. He quickly got the head of the CDC’s newly formed Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections Task Force, James Curran, on board his theory, that this was a single new disease, with a single new cause, an, as yet, undiscovered retrovirus. Francis convinced his PHD mentor, Max Essex and all three of them badgered Essex’s old friend, Robert Gallo to look for this retrovirus. It was a Gallo lecture that set the Paris scientists to begin looking for the retrovirus in late 1982.Gallo’s team struggled to find the retrovirus until the autumn of 1982, when things suddenly began happening, coincidentally just after his laboratory received the doubly contaminated French virus LAV/LAI. By April 1984, Reagan’s government in an election year was looking for any good news it could get its hands on and even before Gallo published his findings in a science magazine, the Health Secretary announced that the ‘probable cause of AIDS has been found’, HTLV-IIIB.  The real story behind Gallo’s ‘triumph’ was revealed in the John Crewdson 2002 epic expose, ‘Science Fictions’. Every single one of Gallo’s claims about finding the AIDS virus, such as having one hundred isolations, as well as dozens of photos, turned out to be false. In 1993, an investigation of the LAV/LAI/HTLV-IIIB ‘virus’ which was named HIV-1 in 1986, concluded that the origin of the HTLV-IIIB was patient LAI, a product of a pooled culture, a witches’ brew, concocted by one of Gallo’s scientists, Popovic.So, all the French had was a double contaminant. All the Americans had was that same double contaminant.I now turned all my research energy into trying to discover the true cause of AIDS and I’ll begin telling you about that search in Episode Ten of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’Thank you for listening to Episode Nine of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please tell your friends about it.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8502298/  The origin of HIV-1 isolate HTLV-IIIB https://www.sciencefictions.net/  Science Fictions, John Crewdson  "The End of The Beginning" The Plague Program 4 (1993 Documentary) - Jenny Barraclough  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between. In Episode Eight of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘Patient BRU’, I will focus on the first of Luc Montagnier’s 1983  ‘HIV’ experiments.In Episode Seven, I told you about the moment I discovered that the ‘HIV causes AIDS’ narrative was a house built on sand. In 2002, Luc Montagnier, awarded ‘The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008’ for his ‘discovery of human immunodeficiency virus’, admitted the only productive ‘HIV’ his laboratory had produced was a double contamination in the summer of 1983. This should have rendered all research post this date null and void.Let’s look in detail at his ‘Patient BRU’ experiments and the resulting paper, ‘Isolation of a T-lymphotropic retrovirus from a patient at risk for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)’, published on May 20, 1983 and described as a seminal paper for the discovery and characterization of ‘HIV’. It is one of the most cited medical science papers of all time – ground zero as far as ‘HIV’ is concerned.Patient BRU was a 33-year-old homosexual male who sought medical consultation in December 1982. BRU had a history of several episodes of gonorrhea and had been treated for syphilis in September 1982. During interviews he indicated that he had had more than 50 sexual partners per year and had traveled to many countries, including North Africa, Greece, and India. His last trip to New York was in 1979. Laboratory tests were positive for cytomegalovirus (CMV) and Epstein-Barr virus. Herpes simplex virus was detected in cells from his throat.The cell cultures only survived thanks to a blood donation from a Spanish tourist, and then cells taken from umbilical cord tissue. The cell cultures’ activity levels were very low and Montagnier told us in 2002 that he ‘tried unsuccessfully to grow the BRU isolate in different T cell lines.’ In other words ‘BRU’ was a dud.In 2009, a Swedish professor reviewed the paper and concluded: ‘in my view there is no evidence whatsoever in this paper that a new human retrovirus has been isolated! With the data presented, the virus they isolated could well have been HTLV-I or in particular HTLV-II. The paper was obviously written in haste, as acknowledged by Montagnier, and contains numerous errors and omissions in the figures legends.’In fact, Montagnier himself was guarded as to what the experiments actually meant:‘The role of this virus in the etiology of AIDS remains to be determined. Repeated infection by the same virus or other bacterial and viral agents may, in some patients, overload this early defense mechanism and bring about an irreversible depletion of T cells involved in cellular immunity.Thank you for listening to Episode Eight of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’ I hope you enjoyed it. In the next episode, I will look at Montagnier’s summer 1983 experiments which brought about the fatal double contamination.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S  https://www.penroseinquiry.org.uk/finalreport/pdf/LIT0013767.PDF  A History of HIV Discovery, Luc Montagnierhttps://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2008/montagnier/facts/ file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/Isolation_of_a_T-lymphotropic_retrovirus_from_a_pa%20(3).pdf  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon my four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between. In Episode Seven of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘Eureka!’, I will begin telling you how and why I became an HIV heretic.It’s February 2021 and I’ve spent 8 months researching the origins of HIV/AIDS, and written my first novel, ‘Race!’. Unfortunately, ‘Race!’ was based upon a theory I no longer believed in, that HIV was a product of flawed polio vaccine trials in Central Africa in the late 1950s. I was also struggling to have faith in the official HIV Causes AIDS narrative, the so-called Cut Soldier / Cut Hunter theory, which didn’t add up either. I had the feeling that when I got to the moment of HIV discovery, I would find something else that wouldn’t add up. I was correct. Watching the Channel 4 documentary ‘The Plague’ I discovered that there was a contamination in Montagnier’s laboratory which had been passed onto Gallo’s laboratory in Bethesda and to several other laboratories, including Robin Weiss’s UK laboratory which manufactured the UK’s AIDS testing kits, and the laboratory in the USA where the virus for the USA’s AIDS testing kits were manufactured.I quickly look online and find an article written by Luc Montagnier, published in 2002. It states the following:‘To better characterize the new virus, we tried (unsuccessfully)to grow the BRU isolate in different T cell lines. If we had tried the LAI isolate instead, we would have been able to grow the virus without any trouble.In October 1983, we were finally able to grow the BRU isolate in Epstein-Barr virus-transformed B cell lines, although we discovered later that the LAI virus had contaminated our BRU culture. At least six laboratories received the LAI sample (underthe name BRU) from our group and experienced the same contamination. We think that the LAI virus readily contaminated the BRU culture because it associates with a mycoplasma species, Mycoplasma pirum, usually present in T cell lines. This physical association makes a fraction of the Lal virus highly infectious. As mycoplasmas are common contaminants of cultured cells, an infectious pseudotype virus (LAI associated with Mycoplasma pirum) may have caused several contaminations between 1983 and 1984 in different laboratories.’  I then look up mycoplasma contamination and find a 2002 paper, ‘Mycoplasma contamination of cell cultures: Incidence, sources, effects, detection, elimination, prevention’. It states that ‘The contamination of cell cultures by mycoplasmas remains a major problem in cell culture. Mycoplasmas can produce a virtually unlimited variety of effects in the cultures they infect. Besides the loss of an important culture, in the worst case, all experiments might be influenced by the infections and artefacts which are produced.’ I will look at this paper in more detail in future episodes.I am stunned. Right from its inception in 1983, everything to do with HIV research was, literally, contaminated. There was no scientific basis for the HIV mafia’s claim that HIV was the cause of AIDS because there was no pure, killer virus called HIV.Thank you for listening to Episode Seven of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’ I hope you enjoyed it. In the next episode, I will continue telling you about how and why I became an HIV heretic. Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S    "The End of The Beginning" The Plague Program 4 (1993 Documentary) - Jenny Barracloughhttps://www.penroseinquiry.org.uk/finalreport/pdf/LIT0013767.PDF  A History of HIV Discovery, Luc Montagnierhttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3463982/pdf/10616_2004_Article_5113481.pdf Mycoplasma contamination of cell cultures: Incidence, sources, effects, detection, elimination, prevention This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ based upon four years researching HIV/AIDS. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between. In Episode Six of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘The Cut Soldier - part two’, I will tell you about the dodgy science underpinning the official dating of the origin of HIV-1.I have previously referred to the proponents of the official ‘HIV causes AIDS’ narrative as the ‘HIV Mafia’. What I mean by that is a small group of interconnected scientists and public health officials gained early control over nomenclature, publication, invitation to conferences, and history. For example, Beatrice Hahn, who I mentioned in Episode Five, one of the most zealous of the HIV zealots, and her husband George Shaw, another top-order zealot, both believe that HIV originated from a single chimpanzee and a single cut to a single hunter, were both working in the laboratory of Robert Gallo, of whom much more later, in 1983-84, whilst the laboratory was committing all sorts of scientific jiggery pokery. Gallo had been influenced to look for a retroviral cause of AIDS by Myron ‘Max’ Essex, and it was one of his students, Bette Korber, who, by 2000, was in charge of the HIV/AIDS Sequence Database. Other members of the ‘HIV causes AIDS’ mafia include: Don Francis, Robin Weiss, Simon Wain-Hobson, David Ho, James Curran and Anthony Fauci. Having read his autobiography, I exclude Luc Montagnier from that list.According to Edward Hooper’s book, ‘The River’, early in February 2000 Korber appeared at a conference on retrovirology in San Francisco, and gave a presentation about dating the origin of the AIDS pandemic. She and her team, which included Beatrice Hahn, had used “the world’s fastest supercomputer” (which even had a name, Nirvana) to deduce that the common ancestor of HIV-1 Group M (“the Eve virus”) had existed in the year 1930, with a 95 percent confidence interval of plus or minus twenty years, giving a range of 1910 to 1950.According to the gathered press, so far, so straightforward. Unfortunately, as with many apparently straightforward things, the origin of HIV was not as simple as that at all. The 1930 date was not the date when a human was first infected with HIV-1, it is simply the extrapolated date when, it is believed, the last common ancestor of HIV would have existed. We do not even know if that common ancestor was a chimp virus or a human virus. Hooper’s contention was that Hahn and Korber’s work was something of a sleight-of-hand, in that it related to an unproven ancestor and to a date of common ancestry that may not have meant very much in real terms.Furthermore, it was quite difficult to reconcile their theory with good “Darwinian process.” Essentially, they required a chimp hunter who becomes infected in Gabon or Cameroon or Congo Brazzaville between 1910 and 1950, who does not pass on his infection to anyone locally, but instead migrated to the Belgian Congo. Then, at some moment in the fifties or sixties, this chimp hunter (or persons he has infected) needed to start causing pockets of infection in several different parts of the Congo (and perhaps Rwanda and Burundi), to establish the different subtypes. This is not linear progression, with infection passing from one place to the next. This requires several separate introductions of distinctive, yet equidistant, viruses into different populations. There was quite simply no mechanism in the Hahn/Korber theory to explain how these separate introductions may have occurred. Hooper was backed up by Korber’s mentor Gerry Myers, who also appears again in later episodes. Myers believed that several aspects of Korber’s work were flawed and, moreover, that she had overstated her case, supercomputer or not.Thank you for listening to Episode Six of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’ I hope you enjoyed it. In the next episode, I will be telling you about how and why I became an HIV heretic. Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S  http://www.aidsorigins.com/wp-content/uploads/The-River-by-Edward-Hooper-2021-edition.pdf ‘The River’, Edward Hooper This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks, a Leeds-based, retired History teacher, and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and beyond.In Episode Five of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘The Cut Soldier’, I will begin telling you why and how I came to the conclusion that there is no scientific proof that HIV causes AIDS, and that there has been a scarcely believable, industrial scale, 40 year, global conspiracy to cover up the truth. At this juncture, I should make it crystal clear that whilst I am an HIV denier and I have some reservations about the CDC’s methodology and motivations, I am no AIDS denier.Sometimes a statement or a version of events gets repeated so often that it becomes accepted by a large part of humanity as fact, even when the supporting evidence has been disproved long before. This is called an ‘Availability Cascade’, and it is one of the ways in which myth can take over from reality. Personally, an example of one such commonly accepted myth in the public mind would be that HIV is the cause of AIDS — a claim that began with erroneous research papers published on both sides of the Atlantic based on a lab contamination in the mid-eighties - but which is still believed by 99% of the world’s population to this day.I stated in previous episodes that Edward Hooper’s book, ‘The River’, led me down a very deep rabbit hole. However, that only applies to his hypothesis about the origin of HIV and his belief that HIV is the cause of AIDS. As I also stated previously, the book is a mighty tome and it is a goldmine for researchers, like myself, who wish to discover the foundations of the official ‘HIV causes AIDS’ narrativeAt the beginning of February 1999, a press conference was held which announced that a team of American andBritish researchers had discovered the origin of the AIDS virus. Apparently, they had tracked it down to a virus, almost identical to HIV-1, which they had found in a certain type of chimpanzee. Good science dictates that a single SIV sample, which might well have been an aberrant or atypical virus, is quite clearly insufficient evidence on which to base an entire theory of origin of the AIDS pandemic. Good science was not the ‘HIV causes AIDS’ mafia’s strongest point. The epidemic, it was explained, had probably begun when hunters were exposed to infected blood while cutting up chimpanzees for meat. “It took us twenty years to find out where HIV-1 came from’’, said team leader Beatrice Hahn, of Birmingham University, Alabama. Twenty years takes us back to 1979 and alleged ‘HIV’ was allegedly ‘discovered’ in Paris in 1983, but, as I’ll explain in future episodes, accuracy was never the ‘HIV causes AIDS’ mafia’s strong point either. What this scenario required was that the chimp-hunter became infected with SIV in one of the countries to the north, and then moved to Leopoldville (in a different country, ruled by a different colonial master), modern day Kinshasa, where he passed on his virus to someone else, and for this event to start a chain of infection, between the fifties and the seventies, which progressed exclusively eastward, across more than a thousand miles of rain forest, through the Belgian-held territories of Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi, to start the explosion of AIDS in east Africa in the early eighties.An even more bizarre scenario was postulated by the former GP and self-appointed HIV expert, Jacques Pepin, who stated that the first person ever infected with HIV was a starving World War One soldier who caught the virus in Moloundou, Cameroon in 1916, while hunting chimps. His hypothesis is that one of the soldiers got infected while hunting in the forest. A chimpanzee was killed and when cutting the animal to bring it back, there was an injury which got infected with the virus. Eventually, the soldier, after the war, came back all the way to Léopoldville and probably started the very first train of transmission in Léopoldville itself. In the 1960s a Haitian technical assistant who came to the city caught the virus in this region, and eventually took it home where it then spread among gay men. Within a few years it was exported to the US via the gay sex trade, and then spread among gay men and IV drug users in the USA and Europe. .Thank you for listening to Episode Five of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’ I hope you enjoyed it. In the next episode, I will continue telling you about the 40-year global conspiracy and cover-up that is the ‘HIV causes AIDS’ official narrative.  Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S  http://www.aidsorigins.com/wp-content/uploads/The-River-by-Edward-Hooper-2021-edition.pdf ‘The River’, Edward Hooperhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9202531/First-HIV-case-soldier-World-War-One-caught-virus-hunting-chimps.html   ‘The origin of AIDS revealed?’   This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks, a Leeds-based, retired History teacher, and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and beyond.In Episode Four of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘Race!’, I will tell you about the book I wrote in just four months during the summer of 2020.Towards the end of June 2020, I have listened to the radio series, ‘A Big Disease With A Little Name’ and watched the ‘Origin of AIDS’ documentary on Youtube. I have also done a lot of online research into ‘African AIDS.’I discover that in Kinshasa, Zaire, during the mid-1970s, the Congolese physician Kapita Bila noticed a troubling increase in patients consumed by bouts of diarrhoea and persistent tumours. John Ilife states in his book, ‘The African Aids Epidemic: A History’, that by 1983, Bila's records, alongside those of his colleagues and the blood samples of their patients, linked these signs of an emerging epidemic in equatorial Africa with the newly defined human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the disease it caused: acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). Incidentally, Iliffe is wrong about this - HIV was not actually named until 1986 and, in 1983, no-one outside of a Paris laboratory, believed that a retrovirus was the cause of AIDS. I also examine the CDC’s Global Health Chronicles website, a history of the CDC's Early Response to AIDS, which contains several interviews dedicated to the CDC’s work in Africa in the 1980s.The notion that early AIDS cases may have been documented in Kinshasa, Zaire in the mid-70s, tied in with Edward Hooper’s polio vaccine explanation of the origin of HIV, and gave me an idea for a book. The Ali-Foreman ‘Rumble In The Jungle’ fight had occurred in Kinshasa in 1974; what if that fight had turned out to be the super-spreader event that allowed HIV to move outside of Zaire, outside of Africa, and allowed it to be taken to the Americas, Europe and Asia? I quickly put together a 50-chapter outline for ‘Race!’ The book had two interweaving narratives.Narrative One – It’s the summer of 2020. In laboratories all over the world, the race is on to develop a vaccine that will eliminate a killer disease and make its creators fantastically famous and incredibly rich. An American medical institution emerges as a shoe-in to win the race, and sign a multi-million pound NHS contract. When journalist Mark McKenzie discovers that this institution’s vaccination programmes have a murky past, he becomes involved in a race of his own to prevent medical history repeating itself. As a consequence, he puts his own life and the lives of his loved ones in danger, as the medical, business and political establishments join forces against him. Who will win the race!Narrative Two: It’s September 1974 and Gerry Mackenzie, a sports journalist for a top London newspaper, heads off to Kinshasha, Zaire to cover the Ali-Foreman World Heavyweight boxing fight, the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’. During his time in Kinshasa, Mackenzie becomes ill and a story about sport becomes a story about an undiscovered epidemic, as he begins to uncover the horrifying truth about an unfolding medical disaster. Gerry’s story about this epidemic is forgotten for nearly 50 years, until another epidemic brings it out into the open. His journalist son’s quest to uncover the full story behind Gerry’s article leads him into a world where a pandemic’s origins were covered up, where black lives really did not seem to matter, where the protection of animals was non-existent, scientific and medical advisers knew best, and a ‘vaccine race’ had terrible consequences.Three months of hard labour resulted in a 94,500 word epic! However, apart from friend and colleague, Bob Elliston, no-one else ever got to read ‘Race!’ By the time I had fine-tuned and edited it, I was already beginning to lose faith in the Hooper origin of HIV Hypothesis, outlined in Episode Three. However, I had got the bug – I had to fulfill an ambition and write a book, but it had to be a book good enough to be published. Thank you for listening to Episode Four of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’ I hope you enjoyed it.In the next episode, I will tell you how I came to the conclusion that there is no scientific proof that ‘HIV caused AIDS’ and that there has been a 40 year global conspiracy to cover up the truth. Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S  https://www.amazon.co.uk/African-AIDS-Epidemic-History/dp/0821416898   ‘The African Aids Epidemic: A History. John Iliffe.https://globalhealthchronicles.org/aids  CDC’s Global Health chronicles This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks, a Leeds-based, retired History teacher, and I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’. In this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and beyond.In Episode Three of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘The River’, I will introduce you to the book which led me down a very deep, 8-month long, rabbit hole.As I said in Episode Two, in June 2020 I discovered a Youtube video that examined the theory that HIV had been the product of flawed polio vaccine trials in Central Africa in the 1950s.  The main proponent of this theory, Edward Hooper, produced a 1000+ page book called ‘The River.’The product of nearly a decade of research, writing, redrafting and editing, ‘The River’ was published in 1999. Although it led me down a rabbit hole, there is no denying ‘The River’ is a mighty tome, diligently researched, with over 100 pages of notes and references.This is how one reviewer described it on Amazon: ‘The origin of the AIDs epidemic has been one of the major scientific riddles of our time. Edward Hooper's The River is a brilliant piece of scientific journalism that attempts to offer some worthwhile answers and, in doing so, raises some uncomfortable questions. "The biotechnological advances of the last 25 years hold out tantalising promises of human advancement and happiness, but they also confront us potentially with the greatest dangers our species has ever faced." Hooper certainly manages to clear the ground, demolishing a lot of the standard hypotheses on how the AIDs epidemic started. Instead, he produces one that has, at the very least, the merit of being directly falsifiable, however controversial and productive of litigation. In doing so, he raises important questions about the public ethical accountability of scientists, the use of human beings in experiments and the use of animals as the source for vaccines and transplants. If he is right, the attempt in the 1950s to tackle one major epidemic, polio, has inadvertently produced another even greater plague; and even if he is wrong, he has raised some important questions. This is not just a scientific investigation, of course; it is an important human story and Hooper's interviews with many of the scientists involved in tracing the origins of the epidemic are smart and humane. This is a crucial book that no one interested in the issues it raises can afford to ignore.’The heart of Hooper’s hypothesis is that HIV was a man-made creation, and the reason it struck such a chord with me was because, in 2020, the origins of Covid were being hotly debated, with many professionals unwilling to accept the official bat-cave theory, instead preferring to focus on a lab-leak hypothesis. I spent 8 months exhaustively trying to find evidence that supported Hooper’s theory 100% and connected all the dots. At the end of those 8 months, I just could not find that evidence. Edward Hooper was, I am afraid to say, a useful idiot for the ‘HIV causes AIDS’ mafia. Although he did not agree with the official HIV origin myth, that wild-living chimpanzees in southern Cameroon were a natural reservoir of the closely related simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs), he still believed absolutely that AIDS was caused by a deadly virus called HIV. However, by the end of February 2021, I had incontrovertible proof that the scientific basis for ‘HIV causes AIDS’ was a house made of sand. However, by then I had already written one book, and had started work on a second. Neither of them was called ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’Thank you for listening to Episode Three of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’ I hope you enjoyed it.In the next episode, I will tell you about my first book, Race!, written in less than four months, during the summer of 2020.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S  http://www.aidsorigins.com/wp-content/uploads/The-River-by-Edward-Hooper-2021-edition.pdf ‘The River’     ‘Origins of AIDS’ documentary. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks, a Leeds-based, retired History teacher and now debut author.I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ and in this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and its four-year writing process, from inspiration to publication, and beyond.In Episode Two of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, ‘A Big Disease With a Little Name’, I will begin discussing the events which inspired me to write a book.It’s June 2020 and the UK’s virus-triggered lockdown is starting to be eased. I’ve just had an overnight stay in Leeds LGI hospital, nothing to do with Covid, rather an inflamed gallbladder. My teaching job is on hold, I’m feeling grotty, and, because of the lockdown, I can’t go anywhere. As always, I turn to the radio for something interesting to listen to. After flicking through the BBC schedules, I stumble upon ‘A Big Disease With A Little Name’. The blurb tells me the programme remembers ‘the early years of the AIDS crisis, as told by the people who lived through it, from patients to medical staff, activists and politicians.’  Born in 1963, I was 17 when the AIDS crisis began in 1981, but, despite living through the first AIDS decade, when it was rarely out of the headlines, I was ashamed to realize I knew very little about the disease, or its cause, HIV. I decide this is the perfect opportunity to find out more and, so engrossing do I find the content, that I listen to all 10 episodes off the bat. I’ll come back to three of those episodes at a later date.From childhood I’ve always been interested in researching the origins of things, finding out about the first of anything. Obviously, this trait stood me in good stead as a History teacher. Other personal characteristics that History teaching developed were my refusal to take things at face value, to take official accounts with a huge pinch of salt, and to examine alternative theories and test their validity based upon the evidence provided. For example, having researched the events of 9/11 for the best part of five years, I concluded that the official narrative and explanations of that event, as an Al Qaeda operation, were seriously flawed, and some alternative theories of an ‘inside job’ had more credibility.  As is my wont, I quickly become obsessive about finding out about the cause of AIDS, and soon after I begin my quest, I type ‘AIDS conspiracy’ into Google. One thing quickly leads to another, and I discover a Youtube video that explored the theory that HIV had been the product of flawed polio vaccine trials in Central Africa in the 1950s.  Very interesting, I thought.Thank you for listening to Episode Two of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’ I hope you enjoyed it. In the next episode, ‘The River’, I will tell you about my 8-month exploration of a rabbit-hole, a very deep rabbit hole.Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback, with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jvrf/episodes/player?page=1 ‘A Big Disease With A Little Name’ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, I’m Paul Franks, a Leeds-based, retired History teacher and now debut author.I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ and in this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the book and the four-year, book-writing process, from inspiration to publication, and beyond.In Episode One of ‘A Dive Into Darkness’, in order to give you an overview of the book, I will read its synopsis.‘It's March 29th, 2027 and the French Presidential election is looking more like a coronation than a contest. The favourite, Hervé Parcelle, is wondering what, if anything, can go wrong.Meanwhile, Anne-Sophie Montreau is wondering what, if anything, can go right in her life. Languishing in emotional limbo, her only wish for her 40th birthday is to enjoy a stress-free meal with her best friend. However, even that small wish is denied when her godfather reveals long-buried family secrets.Over the course of the next five days, compelled by life-or-death necessity to journey into the dark world once inhabited by her father, introvert bank cybersecurity analyst Anne-Sophie, transforms herself into an extrovert rogue hacker. As she struggles to track down the perpetrators responsible for her father's demise, she uncovers the greatest medical-science scandal in history and a conspiracy that has deceived the planet for 40 years.’Thank you for listening to Episode One of ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’ I hope you enjoyed it.In the next episode, I will discuss the events which inspired me to write ‘A Dive Into Darkness.’Till the next time, goodbye and happy reading.‘A Dive Into Darkness’ is available both as an ebook and paperback with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-dive-into-darkness-paul-franks/1145527746?ean=9781917129855 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dive-Into-Darkness-Paul-Franks-ebook/dp/B0D32DP97S This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com

Hello, my name is Paul Franks, a Leeds-based, retired History teacher and, now, debut novelist. I’ve written a conspiracy-thriller called ‘A Dive Into Darkness’ and in this original podcast series, I’ll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the book and the book-writing process, from inspiration to publication, and all points in between. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cascades.substack.com