The Other Side of Aids

“After more than 20 years and 120 billion dollars have been invested in AIDS research, scientists today are still unable to explain how or why HIV causes AIDS.” This is perhaps the least shocking statement that director Robin Scovill utters in his documentary that seems to turn all existing, widely accepted views on HIV and AIDS upside-down. For his film, he interviewed HIV-positive people, doctors and scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Kary B. Mullis and nominee Peter Duesberg. In eight chapters, posing lucid questions like “How sure are we of HIV?” and “Are we free to denounce AIDS?” he deals with the social history of AIDS, the irrelevance of HIV tests, the harmfulness of AIDS medication and the lack of a debate around AIDS, right down to the forced administration of very poisonous medicine to healthy children, just because their mothers were diagnosed HIV-positive on the basis of a test that was never validated. Scovill's wife Christine Maggiore, who was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1992, survived the term the doctors gave her – not by taking medicine, but by asking critical questions.