As a young reporter working for SPIN magazine, Farber started questioning the official narrative around AIDS, and this book is the outgrowth of her decades-long investigation into and writing about this “hot potato” topic.

Long before censorship went mainstream, Farber was put through the wringer.

In 2006, she published an article in Harper’s Magazine titled “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science.” In it, she highlighted the work of virologist and retrobiologist Peter Duesberg, who insisted that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.

In my view, Duesberg was brilliant, but like so many other brilliant scientists, he was widely discredited for not going along with the narrative promoted by the conventional medical establishment.

As a result of her reporting, Farber was vehemently attacked by leading AIDS researchers and activists, so much so, she ended up suing three of the attackers for defamation.

The New York County Supreme Court dismissed her claim in 2011 and upheld the verdict in 2013. Still, she did not quit or back down and kept searching for the truth.

As explained by Farber, Duesberg worked at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, one of the most well-respected scientific institutions in the world. After moving to the United States, he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1987, he published a paper in Cancer Research, proposing that retroviruses are not the cause of cancer, nor the cause of AIDS. According to his scientific biographer, this was the paper that “sealed his scientific doom forever after.”

Farber noted: “Duesberg mapped the genetic structure of retroviruses. So to him, yes, they were entities, but no, they didn’t do anything. They didn’t infect or kill cells. They were harmless. And he had phrases like, ‘HIV, that’s a pussycat. It’s not going to do anything. Saying that HIV is going to cause AIDS is like saying you’re going to conquer China by killing three soldiers a day.’

“In other words, there’s no ‘there’ there. There was no cell death. And fascinatingly or disturbingly, the HIV orthodoxy never contested that. So, I would say they had a supernatural belief in HIV. They would say, ‘We just know HIV causes AIDS,’ and anybody who doesn’t know that is dangerous, homophobic, murderous and so forth.”

As explained by Farber, up until Dr Robert Gallo claimed he’d discovered HIV in his laboratory in 1984, and determined that it caused AIDS, the scientific consensus had been that retroviruses as a class, were not pathogenic.

“So, there’s this very strange midair complete flip where everything changes overnight,” Farber said.

Farber continued: “It’s like a revolutionary change and the classical scientists of integrity were so thrown by this. They didn’t even attend the press conference.

“They didn’t think there was any chance, as they said, that this would fly, this press conference where Robert Gallo announces that a so-called retrovirus is the cause of AIDS.

“Back to Peter. What he does that’s so monumental in the history of American science, post-1980s, is that he, first of all, dissents. And he has no idea that he’s doing anything dangerous, never mind career annihilating. And he’s conducting himself as a scientist should. He’s innocent in what he’s doing, and it’s like a building just falls on him.

Next thing you know, his name becomes synonymous with ‘wrong, dangerous, homophobic, murderous.’ And then this culture kicks in where it becomes a sport and a career advancement to trash Duesberg if you have anything to do with AIDS research.

“It was gladiatorial. They went out of their way to come up with lurid and hideous things to say about him. And it went all over the international press. So, he became this scapegoat for the errors and crimes of [Dr Anthony] Fauci’s AIDS apparatus.

“Meanwhile, over in AIDS land, everything they were predicting and terrorising people with was not coming true at all, was not panning out, whereas Duesberg’s predictions and critiques were panning out exactly. And the more he was right and they were wrong, the more trashed he got.

“So, in a sense, what I’ve covered is not just about the nitty-gritty of the science and who’s correct. It’s about this moment of where science becomes, under Tony Fauci, ‘woke.’ It wasn’t called woke then. It was then called political correctness.

“So, in other words, ‘AIDS spreads like this or like that and is going to affect everybody,’ because that’s what we’re supposed to say politically, not because that’s true biologically or epidemiologically. So, we’re all stuck now in this brand-new era where you get flogged for observing 2+2 = 4.

“The question fascinated me because I just couldn’t square the circle. How come these guys over here are all saying this, and then this top scientist is saying this, and then others rallied around him? Kary Mullis, who invented PCR, and was a staunch defender and friend of Duesberg, always said, ‘He’s absolutely right.’

“So, the dissent movement was saying, ‘There must be proof in science.’ Gallo provided no proof that HIV was the cause of AIDS or a coherent pathogen. So, it just kept growing and growing, and with a few exceptions, I had the field to myself. Nobody wanted to interview these people because it was absolutely radioactive to your career, and I can certainly attest to that.

“I actually didn’t realise it was dangerous. I was naïve. And I was already way too far out at sea when the bludgeoning began and I realised how dangerous it, in fact, was, and that the people we were up against were of a much more dangerous variety than I had realised.”

Farber’s experience is proof positive that even four decades before Fauci sold us on his destructive Covid-19 protocols, he had the power to destroy people and convince the entire country to support a fake narrative.

According to Farber: “Let me speak a little bit how he did that, having lived through it. Let’s say that an editor at a major magazine or newspaper became interested in a story and thought to get a reporter on it. Somehow, he had, I guess it was a surveillance network. He knew and went in there, and somehow the story dies. The reporter gets taken off it. The show gets cancelled.

“I had one friend who had a major local ABC show. It was a new talk-show, and he had Duesberg on and myself. The next thing you know, the whole show is cancelled, and he never worked again. It was GDR [German Democratic Republic] stuff and it was across the board. It was 100 per cent consistent that anybody who touched it [was warned they’d be destroyed] … That was their word, ‘destroy.’

“One top-level AIDS researcher named John P. Moore sent out an open declaration of war [against AIDS] ‘denialists’ that said, ‘We will crush you. We crush all of you.’ So that was the climate of it. Now, after all these years, I’m realising they were part of something much larger.

“They were part of this new revolutionary, post-modern, 2+2 does not equal 4 science. ‘It is whatever we tell you it is.’ They created that empire of terror during AIDS, for sure.

“It’s just that not that many people knew about it because it was still within the corridors of certain risk groups and some unfortunate journalists or scientists who got caught up in it. Then with Covid, they threw a much bigger net because … it was a little more difficult to get people into the trap.”

• The Defender report / By Dr Joseph Mercola / Dr Mercola is the founder of Mercola.com.