ELITE CONTROLLER CHRONICLES I

A Real Life Control Experiment.

Welcome to all fellow Elite Controllers – or “ECs” as we will be known henceforward.

And welcome to all Friends of ECs.

Lifetime membership is free and comes with many benefits – such as regaining your health by not injesting toxic medication every day of your life.

In order to join this group, you have to have tested positive for HIV on a PCR test and not be taking ART.

For the rest of you -- fear not! Because HIV doesn’t exist, you are allowed to identify as an EC.

We also welcome asymptomatic chimpanzee carriers of SIV. In fact, chimpanzees are the Original Elite Controllers.

Full disclosure: I, too, used to believe the nonsense that “HIV comes from Africans eating chimpanzees”.

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My HIV story

I first learned about AIDS in 1981. It went through many name changes. (The name destroyed the popular diet drug AYDS, which was probably a good thing.)

I was living in Paris when the HIV virus was “discovered” in 1983.. I had no reason to question the narrative. There was also something called ARC, or AIDS-related complex, which was a kind of pre-AIDS. Then, sometime in the mid 1980s, I recall a study – possibly from Denmark – saying that ARC would inevitably lead to AIDS. Terminal sentence – not what one wants to hear.

I was tested negative for HIV in 1987 in Boston at a gay health clinic. From then until 2004 I never got tested for HIV. I didn’t get tested during that time because I “didn’t want to know”. Based on my experience, “not wanting to know” -- so long as you are asymptomatic -- is a very effective strategy.

Fast forward to 2004. I was working at a demeaning job at a hedge fund in London and was ready to quit the City for good. It was March 2004, and I had a bout of acute necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis. This was actually the fourth time I suffered from it. (The first time was in 1974, well before HIV was invented.) The dentist was alarmed and asked if I had problems with my immune system. This caused me to panic. In addition to my gum problems, I had a bout of pneumonia, which was treated with antibiotics, and a painless rash on my scalp, which was diagnosed as shingles. I went to gay private health clinic in London for blood tests to see if I was HIV positive. My white blood cell count was 10,000. The NHS diagnosed me as HIV positive. enrolled as patient at St Marys (Imperial College) London. My initial HIV viral load was said to be 25,000, and my CD4 count around 300. I was put on regimen of efavirenz, emtricitabine, and tenofovir. Viral load fell to <50mL within 3 months.

In March 2009 because the horrible side effects from efavirenz – vivid dreams, nightmares, feeling spaced out – I asked to have my HIV regimen switched. They switched me from efavirenz to nevirapine. That nearly killed me. My next blood test recorded an ALT of nearly 1000. (Normal range is below 40.)

I demanded to be put back on efavirenz. My ALT rose further to 1700, the second highest St Mary’s ever recorded, according to what they told me. I told the useless registrar that my ALT was probably exacerbated by the HIV drugs. (She was too thick to make the connection.) Turns out I was right. My case was then transferred to a hepatologist, who told me that I was now allergic to efavirenz. I was taken off efavirenz, given raltegravir. My ALT fell to 800.

HCV diagnosis – 2009. In the same blood test where my ALT came back elevated, I also tested positive for Hep C with a starting viral load of around 200,000, said to be type 1b. (There were apparently 4 main types of Hep C virus, of which Type 1, was the most common. Ridiculous.) The treatment back then was interferon and ribavirin. I wanted to start treatment immediately. Hepatologist told me there was no rush to start treatment because St Mary’s achieved 80% success rate with interferon and ribavirin, a much higher success rate than other clinics. (Question: how can exactly the same drug combination work better in one clinic than another?) Also, 15% of HCV patients “spontaneously cleared HCV”. Right.

HCV treatment – 2009 to 2010, 48 wks. During the summer of 2009 my HIV viral load went up to 150. This was considered “detectable” by the hepatologist and she insisted I wait for it to drop to below 50 copies per mL before starting treatment. (If 150 copies per mL is “detectable”, then according to my recent HIV viral load of 180,000, I ought to be very sick.) I started on the 48 week course of interferon and ribavrin in October 2009. After four weeks my HCV viral load was said to on the order of 1000, which marked me as a “slow responder”. My ALT remained around 800. By the end of the 48 weeks of treatment, my weight fell to 60kg. (I was 180cm tall at the time.) My hemoglobin fell to 10g/dL. When treatment stopped, I “rebounded” with a positive HCV viral load. In 2015 I bought generic Harvoni – Gilead’s blockbuster Hep C drug -- from an Indian generic pharma company. With the “guidance” of my NHS consultant, I “cleared” my HCV in a few weeks. My ALT, however, remained around 125. It finally fell to 30 in 2017.

4 Jan 2025. I came to the conclusion that viruses were not real in late 2024/early January 2025. My decision to stop taking HIV medication was in response to a post by Denis Rancourt in which he showed a clip of Kary Mullis saying that no scientist had ever isolated HIV. I had seen that same video clip several times before, but this is the first time I was able to overcome my cognitive dissonance about the non-existence of viruses. I stopped taking my HIV meds -- Descovy and raltegravir—that day.

Mid Jan 2025. Discovered Jamie on X. Told him that I had a hypothesis for how the NHS determines HIV viral load given that HIV doesn’t exist. I always thought it odd that every time I was interviewed by the NHS HIV doctor before my six month blood tests, they always asked me “Did you take your medication every day? You’re sure you didn’t skip more than a day?” Why would they need to ask me that when they could determine my HIV viral load from the blood tests? It’s like asking a student who scored 100% on an exam: “How many hours did you spend studying for the exam?”

My hypothesis was that if you answered, “Yes, I took my meds every day”, your HIV viral load would come back undetectable. If not, it would come back with a detectable viral load. I called it a “cheat detector”. I assumed that the HIV viral load in this case would be made up. I was wrong about this. The true answer was revealing.

Late February

I posted on X a photo of the last two months of my unused HIV meds at the bottom of a rubbish bin, saying I’d never take this toxic shit again. I told Jamie that, in the interest of science, I should go for my 6 month blood test to see whether my hypothesis about the cheat detector was correct. I said that there was another possibility – that the NHS measured some kind of biomarker as a proxy for HIV viral load – but I had no idea what this could be.

Jamie tried to discourage me from taking the blood test. I told him that having another blood test – after the 100 or so blood tests I had taken over the previous 20 years – was no big deal, and that I’d go in for my test.

This is the one time I’m glad I didn’t take Jamie’s advice!

Mid March 2025 Went for my 6 month blood tests. I lied to my NHS HIV doctor (not my usual one) and told him that I had taken my medication every single day. My HIV viral load came back at 177,000. Interestingly, my HIV viral load test – but no other blood test results – was released at one minute to midnight. Jamie and I found that suspicious. It seems there were shocked/panicked that I had such a high viral load given that I said I had taken my medication every day.

What followed was an onslaught of phone calls from the NHS. They asked me at least 8 times “Are you SURE you took your medication every day?” They said they had seen “viral rebound” in other patients (i.e. heterosexual drug addicts, or Africans), but it was virtually unheard for a gay man not to take his meds every day. I came back for a second blood test, in the interest of science. My viral load was 127,000. Without even clearing it with me, the NHS booked me for an appointment the following week.

Finally I got the following email from my consultant:

Dear EC (lol)

The clinic has tried unsuccessfully to make contact with you to discuss your treatment and recent results. As this has not been possible I will book one further appointment for next week (weds 2^ndApril approx. 330-430 pm). Please let myself or the clinic know if you do not wish to attend or need to change the time.

With best wishes,

Dr L

To which I replied:

Dear L,

I do not wish to attend. Please do not contact me further.

Regards,

EC

And that’s the last time I’ll ever use the NHS again.

What caused the high HIV viral load? Jamie has concluded that one or more of the HIV drugs “chelates” (i.e. attracts) positive magnesium ions in the blood. (A positive ion is one where one electron or more is missing from a magnesium atom.) If you remove positive ions, the blood becomes more acidic. The PCR test was measuring whether the blood “acidity” was the same as the patient’s last HIV test (meaning the patient took his meds every day) or lower (patient has stopped taking his meds). If you’re HIV positive, and you stay on medication faithfully, your blood is more toxic, but you continue register as HIV undetectable. If you’re HIV positive and go off medication, your blood acidity returns to a healthy level.

If this is true, then I hypothesized that if I went to a private doctor to get a PCR test for HIV, and told them that I was negative, they would use different primers for me than the NHS. So I should test negative for HIV on the PCR test.

To be continued…