Item #29: Valendar Turner, Nevirapine and Placebo

A short letter published in the March 10, 2005, issue of Nature quietly unpegged the core claim of NIAID and its satellite organizations in the AIDS industry regarding nevirapine’s “effectiveness.” Written by Dr. Valendar Turner, a surgeon at the Department of Health in Perth, Australia, the letter read:

Sir—While raising concerns about “standards of record keeping” in the HIVNET 012 trial in Uganda, in your News story, “Activists and Researchers rally behind AIDS drug for mothers,” you overlook a greater flaw. None of the available evidence for nevirapine comes from a trial in which it was tested against a placebo. Yet, as the study’s senior author has said, a placebo is the only way a scientist can assess a drug’s effectiveness with scientific certainty.

The HIVNET 012 trial abandoned its placebo group in early 1998 after only 19 of the 645 mothers randomized had been treated, under pressure of complaints that the use of a placebo was unethical.

The HIV transmission rate reported for nevirapine in the HIVNET 012 study was 13.1%. However, without antiviral treatments, mother-to-child transmission rates vary from 12% to 48%. The HIVNET 012 outcome is higher than the 12% transmission rate reported in a prospective study of 561 African women given no antiretroviral treatment.

Farber quotes Valendar Turner's letter which makes the same misrepresentation about nevirapine not being tested against placebo discussed above.

As explained above nevirapine clearly performed better than placebo, despite Turner’s allegations. Of note is that Turner is a prominent AIDS denialist in his own right, so is scarcely an objective reviewer of the trial data.

Nevirapine did not perform better than a placebo. The Gallo document leaps to the conclusion that if Nevirapine produced better results on a surrogate marker than AZT in one environment, and that if in a totally different environment, AZT produced better results than a placebo, that therefore Nevirapine is better than a placebo. Such logic works well in artificial situations such as mathematics, but not in real biological systems.
Calling Turner names is an unscientific attempt to defuse his concerns about the trial by diverting attention from his ideas towards a demonized image of his personality. The implication is that because Dr. Turner is a critic of mainstream AIDS science he should be barred from criticizing mainstream AIDS science. Very convenient for people who don't want mainstream AIDS science criticized.