The central thesis of AIDS and the Doctors of Death, stated by the author himself, is as follows: "(T)he first AIDS cases in America were diagnosed in gays in Manhattan, a few months after the hepatitis B vaccine trials began in Manhattan. If any of those men were directly injected and infected with the AIDS virus during the vaccine trials, they could have developed the disease quickly or could have sexually transmitted the virus to other gays. This could explain why AIDS started exclusively in New York City gays shortly after the experimental trials." Unfortunately, while Dr. Cantwell makes some valid points, he falls significantly short of proving that AIDS was deliberately introduced into the gay population of the United States. Certainly there are precedents for such ghastly experimentation (see the Tuskegee syphilis study), and my openness to the possibility is why I bought the book in the first place, but nothing like a smoking gun is presented here.

Most conspicuously, Cantwell overlooks the baffling case of Robert Rayford, the St. Louis teenager who died in 1969 and may have been the earliest casualty of AIDS in North America. Rayford's sad, mysterious story made national news in October 1987, so it's possible that Cantwell did not have the opportunity to address it in this book, which was published just a couple of months later. He did comment on the Rayford case in 2014, albeit briefly and dismissively. Cantwell is a sincere researcher, but I believe it's fair to say that objectivity is not his long suit. ( )

There is no evidence whatsoever that the hepatitis B vaccine contained HIV. Cantwell's hypothesis was tested: there was no difference in the incidence of AIDS in men who had or hadn't received the vaccine. ( )