Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

I think you're reversing cause and effect. The NHS constantly generates a flow of negative news that other outlets mostly suppress. The Telegraph does this less so than others, so it may appear to be "waging a war" on it but in reality it's just showing what others would have you not know.

It's probably just worth reading the book as I have only summarized a tiny fraction of it, and I suspect any debate about the topic could end up as just re-writing the book in forum comments. Obviously Duesberg discusses the history of AIDS treatments. Indeed it doesn't discuss treatment history after the book was written, but it makes a convincing case that the AIDS treatments that did exist up to that point were fraudulent in various ways and being presented as successful whilst actually killing patients (this is the justification for the book, in fact).

If I recall correctly, the gist of his argument is like this:

1. When AIDS was new scientists confidently predicted that everyone who caught HIV would die within a year or so. But then people who were HIV+ kept living longer than a year. Rather than treat this as evidence against the link, 'the science' as we call it these days kept being retroactively changed to stretch the supposed incubation period of HIV. This kept going until HIV was claimed to be able to hide non-active for a decade or more.

2. At some point AZT and other anti-retrovirals were developed. These were extremely toxic treatments because they work by stopping cells dividing. They're more like a form of chemotherapy. The drug trials didn't follow the rules of good trials and became hopelessly corrupted, e.g. patients were able to unblind themselves as to whether they were in the placebo group or not and then started trading with others who weren't. They had been told they were guaranteed to die without treatment, so obviously everyone in the process was highly incentivized to get their hands on this supposed miracle drug via fair means or foul. There were many other problems with the trials but that's the one I remember.

3. Not surprisingly given the nature of AZT, people put on it frequently ended up dead even though they hadn't previously been sick. This was interpreted as a failure of the treatment to treat the finally appearing AIDS, rather than the treatment itself killing the patient. The picture was muddied by admissions that of course this therapy had extreme side effects, but it was justified by the guarantee of death that came with HIV.

4. Nonetheless, they kept decreasing the dosages and mixing it with other drugs to reduce the toxicity of the treatments. This was then written up as improvements in the treatment. Duisberg argues they merely kept making a treatment known to be toxic less so. Because (in his theory) HIV wasn't killing the people in the first place, this then led to improving life outcomes which were interpreted as a success for medicine.

5. At this point the HIV/AIDS theory became unfalsifiable. Because HIV was claimed to be a special virus that might kill you very quickly, or might wait decades to do so, everyone with it was given treatment. If they survived a long time, the treatment was the cause. If they died, HIV was the cause. Regardless of what happened the data was interpreted in such a way as to reinforce the theory. Any evidence that disagreed with it was swept under the carpet or fixed via redefinitions, like the addition of HIV positivity to the required symptoms list for AIDS that I previously mentioned.

If you'd like more background then this article by a former science journalist who worked at the Sunday Times might be interesting. At first he believed what he was being told about AIDS, but eventually decided he was being misled and came to feel guilty about his role in promoting AIDS hysteria. He wrote about his experiences here:

https://dailysceptic.org/immunity-hysteria/

https://dailysceptic.org/new-variant/

You didn't read the article, did you now? The numbers say - according to the article itself - that of the patients hospitalized and diagnosed with Covid 44% had a positive test before being admitted - 43% had a positive test within 2 days and the remaining 13% tested positive within 2 weeks [they don't mention the distribution].

What I find repulsive about this article is that they never say 'someone with a broken leg was counted as a Covid case after the mandatory testing' - they just dance around it, make innuendos and let third parties dance closer to it.

Nowhere in the article they state 'asymptomatic cases with an other unrelated diagnosis were counted as Covid cases' - and I am guessing they don't because the don't have the numbers to prove it.

A real journalist would track down the cases - would try and find the 'I went in with a broken leg and was released with a Covid diagnosis', get the discharging papers and write about it.

Now: if there were really so many cases of people hospitalized with a different diagnosis and attributed to Covid to 'jack up the numbers' - where are they? Where are the articles about it?

Until you have these, please: go back to your little green field to play with your friends - the adults are trying to have a conversation here.

Wow - I was re-reading the article, and it jumped on my face:

"The breakdown of daily Covid hospital diagnoses shows that of more than 780 hospitalizations dated last Thursday...with 13 per cent made in the days and weeks that followed"

Can we say that 13% was definitely tested in "days" not "weeks" since last Thursday?

So their:

"Experts said the high number of cases being detected belatedly – at a time when PCR tests were widely available – suggested many such patients had been admitted for other reasons."

At worst would indicate 13% misdiagnosed Covid cases, with the word "belatedly" doing a lot of lifting.

I thought this article was bad - but the more I read it the more it looks like a pile of journalistic manure.

Whose to blame for 60,000 people dying in Vietnam?

Whose to blame for Lobotomies winning the Nobel Prize?

Whose to blame for Thalidomide being widely distributed?

Almost anything can be passed off as legitimate without accountability with a concerted effort by 'authorities' and the 'news media', it's even worse in the modern short attention span news cycle.