If the dissidents are right, HIV is not alone. It's only unique in the extremes to which the prevailing medical orthodoxy is invested in it. Despite orthodox claims to the contrary, the dissident movement is not composed of just a few assorted scientists. About half of the members are researchers and medical professionals. Before the emergence of the HIV theory, the presence of antibodies was always considered a sign that the body had successfully fought off an infection.
All people are carriers of hundreds, even thousands, of harmless retroviruses.
Indeed, one of the basic properties of such viruses is that they do not kill cells. Even at its highest observed concentrations, HIV infects less than 1 percent of the immune system's T-cells. To suggest that HIV, which is completely dormant in T-cells, somehow destroys the entire immune system is tantamount to worrying about bleeding to death from a paper cut. AIDS in a gay man almost always involves a different set of diseases than does AIDS in a drug addict, which almost always involves a different set of diseases than does AIDS in a hemophiliac. A true infectious disease should eventually leave its initial risk groups to infect the population at large.