Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS

Controversial AIDS reporter Celia Farber collects twenty years of investigative work on AIDS.

Building on her much discussed cover story in Harper’s Magazine—“Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science”—Celia Farber’s Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History Of AIDS asks important questions about the costs and results of the two-decade long “war on AIDS.”

Here Farber conducts new interviews with controversial AIDS dissidents, including UC Berkeley’s Peter Duesberg, UNAM’s Harvey Bialy, and Nobelist Kary Mullis. Their views on HIV and cancer—rarely discussed in the mainstream press—are considered at length.

Also included are accounts of some of the most dramatic and controversial questions caught up in the fight against AIDS. Farber investigates AIDS co-factors, unexplained causes of immunodeficiency (HIV-negative AIDS), estimates of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and, perhaps most importantly, drug treatment plans. In 1989, Farber was the first magazine journalist to call attention to the dangers of high-dose AZT monotherapy. In 2000, she took aim at David Ho’s “hit hard, hit early” treatment plan. In both cases, Farber’s suspicions turned out to be correct. AIDS drugs, when improperly prescribed or promoted, can be much more deadly than AIDS itself.

Farber’s candor and extensive research sheds new light on the AIDS epidemic and its important effects on our current state of medical research.

From 1987 to 1997, Celia Farber wrote and edited SPIN magazine’s AIDS column, “Words From The Front.” She has also written for many magazines and newspapers, including Esquire, Rolling Stone, Gear, Salon, and Harper’s. She lives in New York City.