Longtime State Department Reporter Dies, 63, To Domestic Media Silence

Photo Courtesy of Macedonian International News Agency

Lambros Papantoniou, correspondent for the Elettheros Typos, a Greek daily in Athens, dies the night of Wednesday, May 27, and the blogs were silent. Maybe there was something deeper about the way that Mr. Papantoniou, a man who had been asking questions in press briefings in the Department of State for a very long time, was not the talk of numerous political blogs that had so often mentioned his name. His remarks had inherently influenced the dynamic in some of the most regular discussions directing the tone of press comprehension of American foreign policy. What I’m really trying to say here is that the condition in any given press briefing, whether with Robert Wood or Ian Kelly, is a fairly hazardous. Ask an unusual question, and you may be seen, unfairly or not, as wasting other peoples’ time. On a few occasions, unfairly or no, Mr. Papantoniou was viewed as wasting others’ time by questioning whether there was really a solid link between HIV and AIDS.

To follow up, I contacted the president of the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society, David Crowe, based on information from this press release. In an interview by phone, I asked Mr. Crowe why Mr. Papantoniou was so hung up on this issue about the relationship between HIV and AIDS.

Mr. Crowe: “The best understanding that we can make is that HIV has never been purified. There are no claims that it has ever been purified. There are claims that it has been isolated, but when you look at what it means to isolate the virus, it doesn’t mean that you’ve proven that any virus is present let alone a specific virus. So because of the purification in – in – in a sense that’s comparable to what we normally think of as purification, which would be separating the virus from all other organic materials. And that’s essentially what Lambros was asking: Where is the evidence that it’s been purified? And, secondly, have you ever seen the purified virus — (inaudible) — from a human as opposed to from some artificial lab culture?

“So even if you could pull out a virus out of a culture that was derived from, human blood for example, there’s so many other things that go into that culture, that’s still not proof that the virus came from a person. But given that nobody’s purified HIV even from a laboratory culture, that kind of a secondary question.”

Crowe believes that SARS was an epidemic caused by a drug therapy based on a fear that there was a new pneumonia out there.

David Crowe describes Mr. Papantoniou as “a mystery wrapped up in an enigma.” He told me that a close friend of Mr. Papantoniou, a Harvard-trained pathologist named Dr. Andrew Maniotis, had told Crowe that Papantoniou had been treated with AIDS drugs. He said, “I believe that, when he was in the hospital, they were treating him with AIDS drugs. But I also understand he had other health problems.” But, as this was hearsay, he hesitated to tell me this because he didn’t “want to report something that was inaccurate.” He got me in touch with Dr. Maniotis.

Dr. Maniotis described Papatoniou as a close friend who had been “fighting for weeks” for his life. The impact of the loss weighed heavy on the tone of his voice. Dr. Maniotis described Papantoniou as “one of the most dynamic human beings that has ever, you know, pushed human rights and freedom in the world.” The pathologist denied that he had told Crowe that Papantoniou had been treated with AIDS drugs or that the doctor was HIV positive.

“Nobody really knows why he’s gone,” said Dr. Maniotis, who said that Mr. Papantoniou was “like a brother” to him. “He had a very stressful time,” he added. “Now he’s dead.” He continued to say that, as a pathologist by some training, it’s easier to figure out why someone “just died, but it’s rare to find why they did die.” He said he wasn’t certain if we’ll really ever know why the reporter died.

He described him as a “humanitarian” that “the world will miss.”