RFK Jr.'s Buckwild Belief That HIV Doesn't Cause AIDS

22:01Aubrey Gordon:So basically all of these are just like, well, no, we wouldn't. Right. It would spread randomly between the sexes. Well, the sexes are not having equal amounts of anal sex. Right. Heterosexual sex is like less efficient at spreading HIV than anal sex. We know that. And also the way that sexual contact happens is that it spreads within communities. You were talking earlier about like spreading within specific like racial or ethnic communities, spreading within specific areas. So like the idea of like randomness there among the sexes is like not consistent with any sort of like patterns of human behavior that you would reference in trying to figure out how this is being spread.

22:38Aubrey Gordon:And also he's really stuck on this thing. We would see the development of a consistent pattern of symptoms in those infected, we wouldn't with something that destroys your immune system. It's very inconsistent, the symptoms of AIDS, because whatever opportunistic infection gets to you first is oftentimes what you die of. Right. Totally. So when people have AIDS, they die of a huge range of things. They have all kinds of other illnesses that are happening in them, which looks insane if you don't know that their immune system doesn't have the power to fight off infection anymore. But if you do know that, you're like, well yeah it's going to be different for different people because they don't have immune systems also like what does right like the flu doesn't look the same yeah that's true right like there's just like that's like a basic you don't gotta be a rocket scientist to figure that one out because even covid people have like wildly different symptoms yes i never lost my sense of smell for example i lost my sense of taste were you still eating beans just for the texture you better fucking believe it you wild horses couldn't keep me from the beans just to feel something just to feel something i'm still eating beans i have to do it so okay that's his like 1987 article he then sort of extends the theory throughout the years because the problem with this like section of his like weird cancer article is he doesn't say what does cause aids right he's saying okay hiv is this like completely harmless thing which is not contagious it's only spread mother to child there's so much buck wild shit that i haven't even mentioned all of these gay men have had it since birth surprise but then it's like okay well why are people dying like tens of thousands of people were dying in America at this time, right?

24:05Aubrey Gordon:So what are people dying of? So among gay men, AIDS is actually caused by drug use, poppers, and AZT. And AZT is one of the earliest treatments for AIDS, but also it had like really miserable side effects, basically because the dosages were too high and they hadn't like totally figured it out. So according to him, it's AZT that is causing the immune collapse, not HIV. But of course, that's silly because people were dying for years before anybody was getting AZT as a treatment. Well, this is the like sunscreen is actually causing the cancer. Exactly. Where you're just like, no, come on, man. It's like, you know that 100 % of people who do chemotherapy have cancer.

24:45Aubrey Gordon:So, you know, there were these big outbreaks of HIV among hemophiliacs, right? Because hemophiliacs have blood that doesn't clot. And so you get these transfusions of like a clotting agent. And those clotting agents oftentimes were created by merging the blood of like thousands of people. Some of those people had HIV. And so a lot of hemophiliacs got HIV. He says, that's not real. It's just like they have hemophilia. So like they're all dying of hemophilia. It's very funny because like a bunch of people got AIDS from blood transfusions. And then the minute they started testing blood for HIV, they stopped getting HIV.

25:21Aubrey Gordon:He never really like reckons with this in any way. And then in Africa, there's no AIDS. It's poverty and malnutrition. This one also, I mean, obviously doesn't make fucking sense because like living conditions in Africa were getting better at the time when many, many more people were dying of AIDS. And also like AIDS is not cured by getting more food. Like there's various food programs and stuff to like improve people's living conditions and like it doesn't cure their AIDS. So like whatever. There's no point in like going into the shit because it's so cockamamie, right? Right. Like I'm sure that not having enough food has significant impacts on people's ability to heal from literally anything.

25:55Yeah, exactly. But the idea that that is like the primary or sole cause of something like that, it's just like, oh, buddy, let's not.

26:01Aubrey Gordon:So we're not going to go super into debunking. One of the books that I read had like chapter after chapter after chapter of debunking Peter Newsberg's claims. And like, it's so stupid that I really don't want to spend too much time like with the evidence from like isolation of the virus and like various different studies of it. Like we really don't need to get into it. It's just like completely outlandishly false. You're doing a me with Tim Ferriss. But I think the main like debunking thing is that AIDS like acts like an epidemic, right? It shows up in an area and then all of a sudden lots and lots and lots of people have it, right?

26:33Aubrey Gordon:Like if AIDS is caused by drug use, you have to explain why gay men were not getting AIDS in the 1970s during fucking disco. There's no explanation of this. The other huge problem for this theory is Western Europe. So I don't think it's very well known, but the AIDS epidemic in Western Europe was way smaller, like orders of magnitude smaller than it was in the United States. So in the United States, deaths peaked at 42 ,000 deaths per year. In the UK, deaths peaked at 2 ,000. Holy Jones, that's a huge difference. Yeah, and the UK has a smaller population than us, but they don't have 125th the population, right?

27:11Aubrey Gordon:The AIDS epidemic since the beginning has killed 636 ,000 people in the United States. The entire epidemic over the same course of time killed 27 ,000 people in Germany. Is that down to like government response? Well, mostly, but not entirely. So it appears that the virus arrived earlier in America and spread faster. So in 1982, the first year we really started tracking this stuff, America had 451 AIDS deaths and Britain had five. We also had a lot more intravenous drug use than Western Europe did. And apparently there was a lot more overlap between drug users and gay men. So when you have these kind of two high-risk groups that are intermingling a lot, that just gives the virus more of an opportunity to spread exponentially.

27:57Aubrey Gordon:But even that is like at least partially a policy outcome, right? It's not like an act of God that we had way more heroin use in America than they did in Europe, right? So that sort of set the stage for it. But then there's also all of the policies related to AIDS specifically, right? So very early in the epidemic, Western Europe started doing needle exchanges. The UK was eventually handing out 25 million needles a year. They had needle vending machines in Germany. So like 24 hours a day, you can just get clean needles. In the United States, it was illegal for federal funding to go toward needle exchanges.

28:30Aubrey Gordon:And there were city programs. So it's not like there was no harm reduction stuff going on in the United States. But like the scale of those programs just never reached the same scale. And also most Western European countries have universal health care. So they were able to get information and treatments to people much faster. Western Europe was also a lot better at targeting its funding to high risk groups. So in Germany, they just like gave a shitload of funding to gay activist NGOs. And we're like, hey, get people to use condoms. Like, you know your people better than we do. just like try to get safe sex practices normalized in your community.

29:05Aubrey Gordon:Whereas in the US, there was no federal budget line for targeted outreach to gay and bisexual men. But even among heterosexuals, it was concentrated in drug users, sex workers. It was moving into rural areas. It was concentrating among people of color. It was becoming more concentrated, but the vast majority of the funding and outreach had this weird general population tone of like, it could happen to anyone. What did you say the annual deaths peaked at in the US? 42 ,000. What I want folks to hone in on is that's not just 42 ,000 deaths a year, which is a wild number of deaths per year, period.

29:42That was 42 ,000 deaths a year in a community that was more isolated, more stigmatized, less likely to receive treatment. Yeah. We have really seen some hard and horrible shit with COVID. We have really seen some hard and horrible shit on a bunch of different fronts. But like, The level of death toll in a community that couldn't get the fucking time of day from U.S. public health systems is staggering.

30:08Aubrey Gordon:So I'm mentioning all this mostly because I just think it's interesting and like not all that well known in the United States. But also, if HIV was not causing AIDS, none of this stuff would be true, right? Like clean needles would not matter. And if AIDS treatments were causing AIDS, you would see higher rates of death in places that provided treatments to people. Are we going to listen to the clips of the fucking gay jokes and press conferences and shit like that? No, it honestly bums me out too much. I watched it for this and I was just like incandescent for the rest of the day. Yeah, we're going to talk about dead people, not traumatic stuff.

30:39Aubrey Gordon:But this also gets to the next chapter of the story. So it's 1987. Peter Duisburg has just published this article with a bunch of crank shit about cancer and some even more crank shit about AIDS. He's already been losing credibility in the field for years because of his like weird cancer stuff, you know, turning on his own work and saying that none of it is true. So this paper is kind of the final nail in the coffin as far as his credibility among other researchers goes. People like really stopped taking him seriously at this point. So then the question becomes, how did this crank theory in a random academic journal become something that's prominent enough that there's like a Foo Fighters benefit concert a decade later?

31:20Aubrey Gordon:So I said that I wanted to focus on the interesting aspects of the story. One of the most interesting aspects of it is that the popularization of this theory started in the gay media. Oh, crud, Michael! I know. It sort of makes sense when you think about it, but it's like, it's very sad, the first chapters of this. So here is a excerpt from Stephen Epstein's book. The first apparent published mention of Dewsberg's article came in a cover story by John Lauritsen in the June 1st, 1987 issue of The New York Native. So that's a gay publication. This is a gay author. As the issue's cover advertised, the focus of the article was to encourage people with AIDS not to take the medication AZT.

32:07Recently approved for AIDS patients, AZT was believed to inhibit replication of the virus in infected cells by interfering with the process of reverse transcription. AZT, in other words, made sense as a treatment for AIDS only if AIDS was caused by HIV. This is precisely what Lorentzen disputed, and much of the article was devoted to the proposition that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. With the discovery of the virus, quote, dogma rapidly came to prevail, Lorentzen complained. Against this dogmatism, it was, until now, impossible for dissenters to make their voices heard. Quote,

33:00Some AIDS researchers did not believe in the AIDS virus ideology, but in the interest of self-preservation, they remained silent.

33:09Aubrey Gordon:Aubrey, the wanking motion I made when I read AIDS virus ideology. This is what conspiracy theories always fucking do. They don't point at the primary evidence. They point at like, oh, the debate was suppressed. Oh, you can't even ask the questions. This tedious meta shit. To call anything blank ideology is like such culture war bullshit. Yeah, I know. And like, I get that this is the 80s and the culture wars are sort of like in their infancy with respect to where they are now. But like, holy fuck, dude. I mean, it's sort of weird to think about. But like this theory was taken up by a lot of the gay press.

33:41Aubrey Gordon:There's a chapter of ACT UP, you know, the really famous AIDS activism organization. Their San Francisco chapter was like all in on AIDS denialism. Oh, man. There's surveys of gay people, including gay people with HIV, that find that more than 40 % of them agree with the statement HIV does not cause AIDS. So this like really went around the gay community in a way that I think has been memory hold, but also I think psychologically makes a lot of sense. That's what I was just going to say. Especially in the 80s and 90s, if you have a terminal illness for which there is no treatment or the treatment costs like fucking$15 ,000, which it did in the early years, you're going to be like, well, maybe it's fine.

34:18Aubrey Gordon:Yeah. This is also a community that has been completely fucking neglected by the powers that be. Right. The idea that like maybe you can't accept at face value information from the very people who have been ignoring you and leaving you for dead, like very literally leaving you for dead. makes a lot of sense to me. And I also think like on top of that, any person facing their own mortality is like the perfect target for like some real wishful thinking and sort of magical thinking about their own healing and illness and that kind of thing. And so these sorts of like more fringe, like treatments and frameworks and all of that kind of stuff start to appeal to you because maybe then it doesn't mean you're going to die.

35:02Maybe then it doesn't mean that this treatment that is really painful and imprecise, right? Isn't what you need. Maybe you need something else completely. I mean, I think this is a little bit of like the Gerson therapy stuff too. When you have cancer, the idea that like, actually you don't need chemo. What you do need is like three square meals of organic produce a day. One of those is way more appealing than the other one of those.

35:27Aubrey Gordon:So this bounces around the gay media in the late 1980s. It jumps over to the mainstream media. I swear to God, I'm not making this up with an Atlantic article. God damn it, Michael! That popularizes the theory. I know like 90 % of my career at this point is fucking complaining about the Atlantic. I genuinely did not know this when I started researching this episode. Penned by a three-year-old Thomas Chatterton Williams. Oh God, I know. But it's the same fucking thing. It's this like weird fetish for contrarianism. Like what if everything you know is wrong? So this article is called AIDS and Insects.

36:02Aubrey Gordon:And it rests on the theory that AIDS is actually caused by pubic lice. Again, anything of like sexual behavior and stuff has been completely discarded because of fucking hemophiliacs. So the entire article is, as usual, just like this person has this theory and like they were being suppressed. They wouldn't get this grant. It has a little vignette at the end about Peter Duisberg and talks about how like, yeah, he's not getting grants anymore. He's been ostracized from the scientific community because what he's saying is fucking wrong. Like he's just obviously wrong about stuff. And so he's not getting like the prominence that he used to.

36:39Aubrey Gordon:So it goes through all of this like ostracism. And then it has this claim. It says he's so certain of his claim, this is that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, he's so certain of his claim that he has offered to be inoculated with HIV. And you see this a lot. They're like, he's so sure about it, he's offered to get HIV. Oh, eat my hat. He never did it. It's like, bitch, you've been saying this for 20 years. Someone should have just gone there with a fucking syringe. You know what I'm thinking about is, did you ever watch the Errol Morris documentary, Dr. Death? Or Mr. Death, I think it is? No. This was about a guy who operated, the electric chair would operate lethal injections, that sort of thing.

37:17And when that was banned in the state where he was working, he needed to move on and find something new. And what he found was that because of his experience with like lethal injection and killing people that he was welcomed with open arms by Holocaust deniers who were like, oh, he can prove that there was no gas in the chambers at Auschwitz. And I just think that there is something like I think we're having a bunch of good ongoing conversations about deplatforming. And I do think deplatforming, generally speaking, is really effective. And I also think there is this version of stuff, which is like you then get embraced by a group of people who have motives that are not particularly about science or not particularly about helping people or not particularly about like improving the situation.

38:05Right, exactly. They are people who are like signing on for some serious magical thinking. Well, that's what's so interesting is once the

38:12Aubrey Gordon:mainstream media starts covering it, they don't really cover on the merits, right? They don't really cover like, well, this guy's obviously a fucking crank. So they all focus on like the suppression of debate, et cetera. So there's a British TV documentary called AIDS, the Unheard Voices. There's a New York Times article called A Solitary Dissenter Disputes Cause of AIDS. The LA Times publishes an article called Hero or Heretic that refers to a debate between the dissidents and the AIDS establishment. This is like all those fucking profiles of Richard Spencer. The New York Times article, which I also read, is like very negative.

38:48Aubrey Gordon:It's like, well, this guy's completely wrong, but the framing, the entire framing of the article is like, oh, there's a debate over this. And it sort of takes for granted that one side of the debate is wrong, but it's talking about the debate. And if you look at those surveys of people with HIV, gay men who believe in the HIV doesn't cause AIDS theory, you are so much more likely to believe that if you think that there is a debate. The minute you think there's a debate, right, about climate change or anything else, it's like, oh, I can take one side in this debate because there's a debate happening.

39:17To borrow a phrase from your other co-host, like, if you're dumb, this goes super fucking hard.

39:22Aubrey Gordon:It goes super fucking hard. So here is an abysmal article in the New York Review of Books, which I generally like. Dewsberg, for his part, not only fails to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the epidemiological method, he also recklessly deploys ill-thought-out epidemiological arguments to support his own drug-AIDS point of view. Nevertheless, as a retrovirologist, Duisberg deserves to be heard, and the ideological assassination that he has undergone will remain an embarrassing testament to the reactionary tendencies of modern science. Irrespective of one's views about the validity of some of Duisberg's arguments, one is forced to ask, at a time when fresh ideas and new paths of investigation are so desperately being sought, how can the AIDS community afford not to fund Dewsberg's research?

40:15Jesus Christ.

40:16Aubrey Gordon:This is brain dead. It's fucking brain dead. This guy is so wrong. And also the idea that drugs cause AIDS has been investigated. People looked into poppers, people looked into this immune collapse thing and discarded it because it doesn't make any fucking sense. At the beginning, they're like, oh yeah, he totally misunderstands epidemiology and like he's misrepresenting other people's data, but you should fund him anyway. No, if you're misrepresenting people's data and you're making arguments that are obviously false at this point and not implementing new information into your worldview, you shouldn't be funded.

40:52Aubrey Gordon:That's not how science works. You stand on the shoulders of giants. you're not supposed to just like fucking chip away at the fucking shin bones of giants and be like let's start this debate over with you can't have scientific advancement under that view keep in mind he has tenure at uc berkeley he works at uc berkeley for the rest of his life tenure a near perfect system i know no no notes no notes not a single one and then also he keeps presenting papers to journals but they can't get past peer review partly because they're crank shit partly because he doesn't do research anymore all he does is essentially write op-eds like he just writes his like opinion and his analysis of pre-existing data he's not doing any actual work well and he's off on his own little island right he's he's been set adrift on his own little ice flow and nobody is out there with him right so like that alone should be like a sign that you know maybe he's galileo exactly he makes that argument all the fucking time it's so annoying Probably not.

41:53Aubrey Gordon:He's like, they said Galileo was wrong. Yeah, but they also say that like Laura Loomer is wrong and she fucking is. Sometimes people are right about who's wrong. Yes. But I do actually want to talk a little bit about how the scientific establishment treats Peter Duisburg because I actually think scientists were good on the way that they treated him. So in the late 1980s, right after Duisburg publishes his article about like cancer and like, oh, by the way, HIV isn't real. There's a huge period of debate. So because he was such an eminent scientist, because he was so prestigious in the field, people were like, okay, let's address this.

42:26Aubrey Gordon:So there's a debate in a journal where Peter Duisberg writes an article called HIV Does Not Cause AIDS. And then respondents write one called HIV Causes AIDS. There's like a robust debate within journals. There is also this excerpt. This is from a New Yorker article much later. In 1988, in an effort to put Dewsburg's theories to rest, the American Foundation for AIDS Research sponsored a scientific forum in Washington, D.C. on the origins of the epidemic. One after another, researchers presented data linking the increase of HIV infections around the world to the growing number of AIDS cases. Dewsburg rejected the data completely.

43:09This was at a time when AIDS was still widely seen as a death sentence, and people had even committed suicide after learning they were infected. Anthony Fauci, the federal government's leading AIDS expert, sat silently for hours, usually the most circumspect of scientists. He finally erupted. This is murder, he said after listening to Dewsburg speak. It's really just that simple.

43:33Aubrey Gordon:Cooking. Boy. The sort of the end of the debate period is when a guy named John Maddox, who is the editor-in-chief of Nature, publishes an article called Has Duisberg a Right to Reply? where he talks about how whenever they publish fucking anything about HIV, Duisberg will write like a letter to the editor being like, that's based on the idea that it's a virus and it causes AIDS and that's not true. They usually publish them because like he's, you know, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and stuff. He describes becoming increasingly frustrated with this. Like with every single fucking article we write, you write essentially the same response.

44:10Aubrey Gordon:He also goes over how like during this period, Duisburg is very obviously operating in bad faith. So one of Duisburg's arguments at the time is that if this is caused by a virus, why is it that gay men with AIDS get Kaposi's sarcoma, which is the skin condition, and hemophiliacs with AIDS don't get it? This is like one of the original arguments against the idea that it's caused by a virus, which I think was kind of plausible at the time, right? Like it's presenting very differently for different groups. But eventually they learn that Kaposi's sarcoma is caused by a version of the herpes virus.

44:44Aubrey Gordon:When your immune system collapses, the skin condition is mostly seen in like people in their 80s, all of a sudden shows up on like men in their 20s. But it's because it's sexually transmitted and hemophiliacs are not having a ton of sex. And so hemophiliacs don't have Kaposi's sarcoma. There's like a really obvious explanation for this. There was a question, like a legitimate question. We investigated and we learned the answer to that question. But Dewsburg keeps just saying this. And this John Maddox guy is like, look, man, you have an answer. If you're acting in good faith, you should not be using this as an argument anymore.

45:15Aubrey Gordon:We know the explanation for it. And it's congruent with AIDS being caused by the HIV writers. And also like how many times you're going to write the same LTE. Exactly. You are just kind of wasting everybody's time at this point. And so that's essentially what he says in like the rest of the article. So here is an excerpt from later. Nature's most recent refusal of an intended publication by Dewsberg was his response to an article on the drug hypothesis by M. Asher. The study used data on a group of more than 1 ,000 men recruited in 1984 in San Francisco to show no correlation between the incidence of AIDS and previous drug taking.

45:50Aubrey Gordon:So this is kind of an open and shut thing that if AIDS is caused by drug use, you'd see much higher incidence of AIDS among drug users. And that is not what the study finds. Duisburg's unpublished reply on the basis of what is most charitably called a misreading of the text asserts that the authors must have fabricated some of their data. He goes on to claim that the author's argument supports his view, not theirs. He quarrels with an imagined failure to collect data on drug use after recruitment and claims that a two-year study cannot test the hypothesis of drug toxicity requiring 10 years for its effects to become overt.

46:28The truth is that a person's right of reply may conflict with a journal's obligations to its readers to provide them with authentic information. Whatever Duisberg's friends say, the right of reply must be modulated by its content.

46:42Aubrey Gordon:It's so interesting to see this because this is 1993 in the letters to the editor section of a journal and it's precisely the debate we're having now. Yeah. He has a right to reply, like I guess he has freedom of speech, etc. But also people who read fucking Nature, one of those prestigious publications in the country, have a right to read things that are true. You have to have a limit where you just say this person is operating in bad faith. We're not going to do this debate anymore. I think that's totally reasonable, especially with this fucking guy who is just like lying through his teeth at this point.

47:17I think the question here is like, what's our cultural and like, what's this institution's tolerance for people being so loud and so wrong? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And actually, what's the cost benefit analysis of letting everyone speak on everything? Exactly. Because there is a cost. And I think it's tempting to go, everyone's entitled to their opinion. And that can really get you into some bad situations when you're talking about like scientific findings that involve people's like health and mortality.

47:46Aubrey Gordon:There's a good article about this called Defending the Boundaries of Science, AIDS Denialism, Peer Review, and the Medical Hypothesis Saga by Nicole E. Natras. And she says, what Dewsburg has lost is not freedom, but rather the opportunity to publish in a seemingly scientific journal without having to subject his arguments to peer review. This really isn't an issue of like freedom of speech. This is an issue of like, do you get to be seen as a credible scientist when you're not saying things that are credible? There's another really good article about this kind of the construction of scientific debate called AIDS denialism versus science.

48:20Aubrey Gordon:OK, so here's this excerpt. As Brian Foley, a scientist who works with the HIV database at Los Alamos National Laboratory, commented after a long blog exchange with South African AIDS denialist Anita Allen, there is no such thing as scientific debate, really. Science is about experiments, data and theories to explain the data. if Anita says quote the virus has never been isolated and I say quote in fact dozens of infectious molecular clones of HIV one have been generated and that is as good as isolation gets for retroviruses one of us has to be lying this like really crystallized something for me yeah totally there's like true shit and there's not true shit there's no such thing as scientific debate it's like perfect because I mean on some level there is scientific debate like we talked about that period 1981 to 1984 when there was scientific debate about like, okay, is it poppers?

49:16Aubrey Gordon:Is it immune collapse? That is all totally legitimate, but it was legitimate because it was followed up by investigation and people discarding hypotheses when they turned out not to be true. That is what scientific debate looks like. To the extent that there's a scientific debate, it is investigating hypotheses, not just making the same fucking arguments for decades despite no data behind them. Right. If you think about, you know, how this would translate, like imagine like working at like a car factory and being like, I have a difference of opinion. I think the steering wheel goes in the trunk.

49:50Yeah, yeah, yeah.

49:50Aubrey Gordon:You'd be like, you don't get to have that opinion, dude. So basically nature just decides like, we're not going to publish this fucking guy. There's also an extremely good faith effort to investigate Dewsbury's claims by the journal Science. they assigned reporters for three months to look into like this theory that hiv does not cause aids they engage with dewsberg a ton they interview more than 50 experts and they dedicate eight pages of an issue to the most thorough comprehensive debunking they do a whole like back and forth of dewsberg they're like oh yeah you said this but we looked into it and you can't explain it and they send it back to him and he just like changes the subject or ignores it right so it's very very very obvious by this point that like it's completely false and then deuceberg is just like not a credible actor lots of journals have lots of different names there's something really uniquely incredible about being like this guy got fucking bodied by like science and and there's an overwhelming sense throughout the piece of like do we really have to do this Right, like now everyone has the Anthony Fauci belabored sigh.

50:58Exactly.

50:59Aubrey Gordon:So basically, the sort of scientific establishment took this debate in good faith. They debated him directly. By 1994, they're like, we're done. And we're just going to ignore you from now on. He continues not to get grants. But people don't really like publish things. They don't publish his fucking deranged op-eds. And AIDS denialism really goes dormant for a while. There's a pretty long period starting in the late 1990s where AIDS denialism doesn't really show up in mainstream media. And when it does, it's typically framed as like, look at this kooky weirdo who believes this crazy thing. It's not really framed as like a debate or we need to hear this out.

51:36Aubrey Gordon:It's not given a lot of credibility. Part of the reason for that is this very high profile debunking in science in 1994. But there are three other reasons this like really goes dormant. The first reason is that highly active antiretroviral therapy is introduced in 1995 and like the death rates plummet. So AIDS deaths peak at 42 ,000 in 1995. By 1997, they're down to 17 ,000. So from 42 ,000 to 17 ,000 in two years. It's like really obvious that this therapy, which is based on the idea that HIV causes AIDS, works incredibly well. So that is one thing. There's also an unbelievably bleak, very high-profile case of a woman named Christine Maggiore, heterosexual lady.

52:25Aubrey Gordon:She gets infected with HIV in 1992. She starts doing AIDS activism, kind of traditional AIDS activism, like this is why we need antiretrovirals, etc. She meets Peter Duisberg in 1994. He convinces her to get off of her meds. What? What? I mean, he's like very directly like if you are taking AIDS meds, you should stop because the AIDS meds are what causes AIDS. Oh, God. So he tells her to stop taking her meds. She then becomes like what we would now know of as like an influencer. So in 2002, she writes an article called My Bout of So-Called AIDS. Ooh. And she gets relatively famous. Like she's in the media.

53:05Aubrey Gordon:LA Times covers her. There's like a lot of mainstream media coverage of her. her and her husband produce a documentary called The Other Side of AIDS. This is super bleak, Aubrey. In 2002, she has a daughter and mother to child transmission of HIV is like a very well known thing. She does not give her daughter any medication and her daughter dies. She says she makes up this whole fucking fake thing that it's an allergic reaction to amoxicillin because Peter deusberg and the whole kind of movement they're also uh syphilis truthers oh jesus fucking hell so basically her daughter dies of aids and then christina maggiore also dies of aids at age 52 how old was her daughter at the time that she passed three jesus god it's awful and this gets a ton of press attention right it's like remember that kooky lady who said that like hiv doesn't cause aids yeah her fucking daughter is dead and she's dead yeah and this actually happens numerous times that prominent AIDS denialists die of AIDS.

54:01Yeah. I mean, this is sort of like all the like anti-vax guys in the hospital with COVID. Kids have measles now. Yeah. Totally. Of course, you're like, yeah, this is how this ends. That doesn't make it less tragic. Yeah. That's just fucking horrendous. And again, it is sort of this like dynamic that you and I have talked about many times on this show, which is just like when people are facing down their own mortality, when they're dealing with an illness that is like not well understood or widely embraced. Of course, people fall into this like hole of wishful thinking. I know. Absolutely. She sort of made a name for herself doing this thing.

54:41Absolutely. She spread the message. And also, absolutely. She suffered the loss of her daughter and her own life. Like, I don't know. I know. That's just horrible. It's just horrible however you slice it.

54:52Aubrey Gordon:So that's like the second thing that happens to really make this go dormant. The third thing is AIDS denialism takes over South Africa. So Thabo Mbeki gets into this AIDS denialism shit. He also meets with Peter Duesberg, puts Peter Duesberg on like some fucking recommendations committee, like quote unquote expert committee. He refuses to import antiretrovirals. You know, they're approved by the FDA in 1995. It's not until 2006 that ARVs really start to roll out in South Africa at any kind of scale. that has been linked to the deaths of 350 ,000 people. Jesus. We could do a whole fucking episode on it.

55:28Aubrey Gordon:It's like really, really bleak. According to him, he became a denier when he read a quote-unquote debate in a South African newspaper between like a crank denialist and the president of the Southern African HIV AIDS Clinicians Society. So congratulations to whatever fucking newspaper that was. You publish a debate between an actual expert and just a complete random asshole and the president of the country read it and was like, there's a debate here. So that also gets a ton of headlines, a ton of like extremely negative attention. Between all of these things, I think anyone looking at this from afar, which is like most news consumers are just like, oh, it's really bad to be telling people not to take drugs at this point, right?

56:11I think it's really bad to discourage people from taking treatments at any point. Yes. To dissuade people who are not in your situation, who are in like different points in their lives, different points in their disease development, to tell people to step away from treatments that work is fucking the devil's work.

56:33Aubrey Gordon:I also, I genuinely think this is a fascinating conspiracy theory in that it is just one guy, essentially, and that it is so directly and obviously harmful. Right? It's rare for a conspiracy theory to just be like, oh, yeah, this medical condition you have, this virus in your system, don't take drugs that work for it. Like, that's rare. Like, you could say that with the anti-vaxxers, but like, getting measles and stuff is still quite rare because we basically have herd immunity in America, right? So like, most people who don't vaccinate their kids, they won't lose their kids to measles, right?

57:03Aubrey Gordon:It's still, thank God, like a relatively rare event. If you stop taking anti-vacervivals, like, you're going to get AIDS. It's really, really, really bad. If this fucking guy is not worthy of ostracism and denunciation and just not engaging in debate, then nobody is. Right. Then who? Yeah. Then who? This is such a fucking easy one. What I really seized on, though, is something starts happening in the early 2000s with the rhetoric of AIDS denialism that sets the stage for the resurgence of it. It's like a little cicada, like burrowing into the earth at this time. So I read the recommendations document that was produced by this board that was advising Thapa Mubecki in South Africa.

57:46Aubrey Gordon:These are some of the recommendations that are included in the kind of official South Africa, like this is what we think the country should do document. Improving general nutrition and implementing nutritional education and supplements for the general population. Supplements. investigating the use of immune boosting medications such as interferons, growth factors, B-complex vitamins and herbs such as ginseng, Chinese cucumber, curcumin, aloe vera, garlic and echinacea, encouraging the detoxification of the body through several inexpensive interventions such as massage therapy, music therapy, yoga, spiritual care, homeopathy, Indian Ayurvedic medicine, light therapy and many other methods.

58:32I am stunned that colloidal silver does not make an appearance on this list. It feels like it should be right there.

58:40Aubrey Gordon:Where are the adaptogens? I'm not seeing celery juice on here. Nary a single ashwagandha mention. And then the health minister of South Africa, who's appointed by Mabeki, recommends raw garlic and skin of the lemon. Years ago, I was on Twitter and there was some like discussion happening about like something that was happening in South Africa and someone from Nigeria chimed in and was like, hey, everybody from the US, from Canada, from Europe, you guys need to know that South Africa is like our Florida. So just like, I don't know shit about shit, but it's occurring to me now. I know. The Florida of Africa.

59:24And also it's a thing that I've spent a lot of time thinking about being like, what do we think is the Florida of Europe? I think it might be the UK.

59:30Aubrey Gordon:But then this is also, I mean, it's kind of Florida, but it's also very LA. All this stuff. But like, it's actually about toxins in your body. And it's actually about like vitamins. And like, I mean, this is the shit we see all the fucking time now, right? So this is an excerpt from the website of a guy named Matthias Rath, who we could do a whole fucking episode on, Aubrey. He's selling mega doses of vitamins in South Africa. And he makes the pills the same size and color as antiretrovirals. Oh my God. And they're going literally door to door in townships and telling people to stop taking antivirals and take vitamins instead.

1:00:07Aubrey Gordon:Like hell is not hot enough for this fucking man. But if you go to his website, this is what he says. And like I could barely read it because my eyes were rolling so fucking far into the back of my head. Oh no. Just the first few words being never before in the history of mankind was a greater crime committed. It's so boring. Holy fuck. I know. Never before in the history of mankind was a greater crime committed than the genocide organized by the pharmaceutical drug cartel in the interest of the multibillion dollar investment business with disease. Hundreds of millions of people have died unnecessarily from AIDS, cancer, heart disease and other preventable diseases.

1:00:48And the only reason that these epidemics are still haunting mankind is that they are the multibillion dollar marketplace for the pharmaceutical drug cartel. So here's where we get the RFK juniors of the world. Yes. And like Scientologists. Yes. Like there's like a bunch of like wild ass cranks that join us at this juncture.

1:01:07Aubrey Gordon:I don't want to say to his credit because he's a complete asshole, but Peter Duisburg doesn't really make arguments like this. He eventually does write a book laying out the theory in greater detail. And most of his book, which I read most of, but it's 800 fucking pages long, is about like the virus. It's all fake, but it's like you can't isolate it in a petri-ish. It's this kind of stuff. It's not really meta stuff. But I think people are realizing, like, you just need to make these meta arguments about, like, isn't Big Pharma bad? Don't you think Big Pharma is bad? And then you get people to agree to that.

1:01:36Aubrey Gordon:And then you're like, and also HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Like, that is the tactic that they start using. I will say this is also like a known tactic with white nationalist organizations that they'll start with, like, don't you think immigration is a problem? Right. Right. And then, like, very quickly they walk you right back into a swastika. Right. You can make observations about perceived problems that are like pretty widely held perceptions of those problems as a way of pulling people into like extremely ghoulish, harmful rhetoric. Don't you hate it when people change lanes without putting their blinker on?

1:02:15Aubrey Gordon:That's why the Holocaust is fake. So this is also the period where we start getting like the celebrity AIDS denialists. So this is when like the Foo Fighters get into it. They're apparently friends with Christina Maggiore and her husband. Like that's how Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters get into this. They hold their benefit concert. And then we are going to watch the clip of Will Smith talking about his ideas on this issue. Boy, that is going to bum me out real hard. Not that I'm like a big Will Smith guy or whatever. No, I know. Et tu, Will Smith. Et tu? I thought I could trust you. He subscribes to like a different version of this conspiracy theory, but we're going to watch it because it's funny.

1:02:57Aubrey Gordon:Great. Let's do it. So here it is. The other voice you will hear is Barbara Walters. Oh, wow. There's a blast from the past. Zoomers, it's we don't have time. We're not going to explain who this person is. She was on TV. I read that you felt that the government was deliberately spraying coal germs in subways, was deliberately trying to make people ill with the AIDS virus. This is pretty serious stuff. Do you really feel that? Well, that's a good question. Well, I'm with Barbara Walters now. Oh, that's a serious one. Okay, so I got it now because people are going to chase me after this. People are going to chase me.

1:03:38I believe that it is quite highly possible that the AIDS virus is a result of genetic warfare testing. By American agents? Absolutely. Will. Am I a conspiracy theorist? I'm a conspiracy theorist, aren't I? Yeah.

1:04:10Aubrey Gordon:that's art is what that is oh well i mean like i think the tricky thing about all the government conspiracy stuff is like we do have mk ultra we do have cointelpro fucking tuskegee right like this is like not unheard of shit but then you're like oh no buddy you didn't even need any all of those have evidence i tried to look into this one this one is like really fringe and there's not it's not like they've taken evidence of something and twisted it it's like there just literally is no evidence for it it's like it's just a thing that somebody said part of the challenge here is you don't need to go looking for the conspiracy on aids it happened in fucking public yeah that's true yeah so you don't need to go off and like play jazz and come up with your own version of it So basically the AIDS analysis movement, such as it is, starts making these like anti-Big Pharma, like anti-scientific establishment sorts of arguments, but they don't really catch fire.

1:05:07Aubrey Gordon:They don't really catch on. The issue goes dark, but then they get one new argument. And so I'm going to send you a text and you have to guess for me where it is from. This is from 2021. I have to guess where this is from? You're going to fucking know. Okay. It's going to be so easy for you all, right? Is it from where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? Yes. Yes. Damn it. This was spoken by Rockapella. In a rational universe or in a functioning democracy, combatants would duke out the incendiary HIV AIDS dispute in an open public debate in the scientific literature between the foremost establishment scientists and the best credentialed dissenting ones.

1:05:51But in Tony Fauci's authoritarian technocracy, Technocracy. The ruling medical cabal refuses to allow this sort of dialogue. Like Inquisition priests, HIV's high clergy stubbornly resist the possibility that they might be wrong. From the onset, the HIV AIDS religion has seen its survival in moral absolutism, outright discrimination, and merciless suppression of doubt. Okay. You know who this is. I don't. It's not Rogan. He can't write. Yeah. For some reason, this feels Jordan Peterson-y to me, but I know that's not right. Who is it?

1:06:33Aubrey Gordon:This is RFK Jr. Oh, this motherfucker. Of course. The answer was right in front of us all along. Because he has this book that comes out in 2021 called The Real Anthony Fauci. The innovation here, and I think what hits really fucking hard if you're stupid, is that all of this AIDS shit, you can tie to Anthony Fauci. And that's what results in the resurgence of this absurd conspiracy theory. So for most of the 1980s, Anthony Fauci was the head of the NIAID. And before that, he was an AIDS researcher. So if you read any history of the AIDS epidemic in America, Anthony Fauci is all over it. So essentially anything you want to tie to Anthony Fauci, you can.

1:07:17Aubrey Gordon:There were some, I haven't even looked into it, but there's like, there's early trials of AZT where people say that there's discrepancy, the toxicity of AZT when it was being given in large doses. You can then very easily say like Fauci was trying to poison you. It's very funny for conservatives to be like, actually in the 80s, you guys were too shitty to gay people. No, I know. What? It feels very like, you know, conservatives only care about sexual assault when it's perceived to be happening in bathrooms by trans people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where you're like, oh, a thing that doesn't exist? Cool.

1:07:51Aubrey Gordon:Fauci's the reason why a bunch of gay people died in the 80s. What do you think about that? Oh, we think that's good. Right. We think more gay people should have died in the 80s. Yes. They should have died sooner. Yes. Yeah. R.K. Jr. has four chapters, more than 100 pages of his fucking book dedicated to this theory. Oh, Lord. He also, it appears, spoke to Dewsburg, like Dewsburg appears throughout the section. He has a whole thing about like his like ejection from the scientific establishment, blah, blah, blah, tedious shit that we've already talked about. It seems like he uses exactly the same arguments.

1:08:21Aubrey Gordon:He says at one point, how can a virus be so destructive when it first enters the body, then turns around and plays dead for 10, 20, 30 years? Yet this is the orthodoxy. It's like, right, that's just what the evidence shows, man. It's just, it lies dormant in your body. Like, I don't know what to tell you, man. It's not orthodoxy. Again, that's HPV, which is linked to cancer. What the fuck? It's the chickenpox virus causing shingles later in your life. Like there's just, this is a very well-documented thing. Yes! Most of it is him talking about how like Fauci suppressed debate. I guess there was some thing where Fauci was going to go on Good Morning America with Dewsburg and they were going to like debate.

1:09:00Aubrey Gordon:And then Dewsburg's appearance was canceled. And he says that like Fauci canceled the appearance, whatever. Maybe Fauci did and maybe Fauci didn't. But also Fauci, again, debated Peter Duisberg directly numerous times during the late 80s and early 1990s. There was a period where there was a lot of debate about this. It's a little bit like the LTE stuff, right? Where you're like, how many letters to the editor are we going to publish from this fucking guy? How many times is Anthony Fauci going to have to debate this dude on shit that they settled 20 years earlier or whatever? We have to read this paragraph because he's kind of funny here.

1:09:32Instead of civilly debating these dissidents and writers and common sense questions posed by Duisburg and other critics, Dr. Fauci's strategy has been to exercise his frightening capacity to silence dissent and mangle reputations.

1:09:46Aubrey Gordon:Mangle reputations. They were mangled. History may credit him as the progenitor, even the inventor of cancel culture. No one was ever canceled before Anthony Fauci canceled Peter Duisburg. It's really incredible to me that you would go, the inventor of cancel culture wasn't like witch trials. No, exactly. Or like crusades. Or like... Would it be like Jesus was the original canceled person? Like, fuck it. I don't know. It's just so dumb, the whole thing. Oh, God. I don't know what scientists are supposed to do, right? Because there was a period of debate. There was lots and lots of good faith debate over this theory for years, right?

1:10:25Aubrey Gordon:They debated it. There's also numerous debunkings of this theory, right? Science assigned numerous journalists to spend months looking at this, assessing the evidence, going back to Dewsburg, having an open good faith debate conversation about it. and it turned out not to be true. And yet these conspiracist assholes are still saying, oh, they refuse to debate it. Oh, why would they look into the claims? All we're asking for is to debate it. It's a fucking lie. If the grocery store had nothing to hide, they would let me in at 3 a.m. What are they hiding? Oh, I know. God, it's so boring. Speaking of boring, we are going to watch one final clip.

1:10:59Aubrey Gordon:This is from, I don't know if you're familiar with it, the Joe Rogan experience. It's from the Joe Rogan experience. Oh, God, everyone's favorite. Joe Rogan actually had Peter Duisberg on as a guest in 2012. It didn't get that much attention, weirdly. But anyway, I watched the whole fucking thing. My brain is rotted from watching that. This was me yesterday, Michael. I watched the entire fucking Call Her Daddy interview with Nara Smith. Oh, did you seriously? And I was like, oh no, my brain is liquefied and leaking out of my fucking ear. So like, my condolences. Dude, the cognitive decline that we're experiencing as people in our 40s is going so much faster due to what we do.

1:11:34Aubrey Gordon:Just speed running. I lose like five IQ points every time I research an episode of the show. So this is Joe Rogan's interview with someone named Gavin DeBecker, who's like a security guy. And most of the episode isn't about like wellness stuff, but they get into a tangent about HIV. So here's this. And they're making the case that that HIV is the absolute cause of AIDS, even though literally the guy who got the Nobel Prize for concluding that. feels that you can have AIDS without HIV and you can have HIV without AIDS. I've raised 10 kids. I have two teenage kids. One of my older boys, 31 years old now, tested positive for HIV.

1:12:16Right away come the drugs, and he and I met about it. We watched this documentary called House of Numbers, and he decided no medication. He's really healthy. He's in the sun a lot. He's having a calm and wonderful life. He lives in Fiji, so he's out in the tropics a lot. And when he took the medication for three weeks, he felt really shitty. It wasn't AZT. It's the newer cocktail. But he felt really shitty. When he stopped, he feels great. And we'll see how things go. But the idea that they were trying to push was if you test positive for HIV, they say it point blank, you will die from this disease and there's nothing that can stop it except these drugs.

1:12:54They say it point blank. And that turns out not to be true. Well, there's a lot of things you said that turn out not to be true. They thought that your children would get it, people in the household would get it, that it could be spread aerosol. No one thought it was aerosol. The Dewsburg thing is fascinating. No, it's not. Because this all took place in the time with no internet, no pushback, no conspiracy theorists online to connect the dots. And his assertion was, first of all, there was the inconvenient fact that the vast majority of the people that got, air quotes, AIDS, all were hardcore drug users.

1:13:29Jesus fucking Christmas. There were these partiers in the gay community. And anybody that knows anything about drug use knows that if you're a hardcore drug user and you're staying up all night and you're partying, guess what? You're going to crush your immune system. And, you know, they were taking antibiotics, which were at the parties in big bowls. Bowls? Antibiotics. Yeah. Because they had all—this was a tremendous amount of sex. It was almost a statement of freedom in the gay rights movement. And the people had all kinds of infections. So they were scooping up antibiotics and taking antibiotics.

1:13:59And, of course, AIDS is real. They destroyed their immune system, no question about it. And Poppers and Duisburg. Poppers is the big one, right? In all nitrate. Well, Poppers certainly causes the specific respiratory issue that was associated with AIDS. And they kept changing, you know, the NIH and CDC kept changing the definition along the way. And there's a great line in the real Anthony Fauci, a book I know you read, where Bobby says, if you get diagnosed with AIDS in Africa, the fastest way to get cured is go to New York. Totally different diagnostic method. I just feel so sad and so bored.

1:14:37Aubrey Gordon:We're back to the fucking immune collapse explanation. We're back to poppers. These things were proposed in 1981 and discarded almost immediately because there's no evidence behind them. It's so absurd. One of the things that I think about a fair bit on this show is how bad public health is at PR. I know. If people were hearing much more and media showed more interest in trumpeting the success of these treatments, people would be able to hear stuff like this and be like, oh, that's not true. It's working really well. The treatments that we have are working sort of staggeringly well. And the story of his son is like really bleak.

1:15:14Aubrey Gordon:I don't know all the details. It's so fucking bleak, dude. But it's like, ooh, the orthodoxies that you have it and everybody said you have to take the medicine. Well, yeah, man, it's that because the medicine works unbelievably well. This is like I'm young and I'm healthy. I don't need a COVID vaccine. That's not coming for me. Exactly. We were like, oh, Jesus Christ. Also the thing of like there were bowls of antibiotics at gay sex parties. Like, no, you have to take antibiotics for like seven days in a row. They're not no one's giving away drugs. First of all, there are bowls of seven day punch packs.

1:15:44Aubrey Gordon:Booster packs. Come on. The whole argument is completely fucking backwards. But Rogan has done numerous episodes where him and his guests total just dumbass on dumbass violence talking about how like AIDS is caused by poppers basically. There's also this human centipede bullshit where like they read RFK Jr.'s book and they're like, oh, did you read Bobby's book? And then RFK Jr. listens to fucking Joe Rogan. He refers to Joe Rogan constantly. So that just reinforces for RFK Jr. that this is real. And then RFK Jr. talks about it more and then it shows up on Rogan again. This is the thing that RFK Jr.

1:16:17has in common with Trump is that they are both so fucking hooked on like self-reinforcing news media, right? Yeah, I know. Is like all they can engage with. Yeah. It's really stunning.

1:16:28Aubrey Gordon:Luckily, I mean, I looked around for this kind of where the AIDS denialist movement is now. It hasn't caught on as much as you'd think, right, given these like very prominent voices promoting it constantly. It is all over the place on Twitter, obviously. Sure. Elon Musk retweeted like this unbelievably ugly boomer meme. Yeah, great. That, you know, like really lazy memes. There's like text on a background. But the text says, remember that one time in the 80s and 90s when people died from the AIDS treatment AZT and not the actual AIDS virus? Remember that one doctor who promoted that treatment?

1:17:02Aubrey Gordon:And then has a picture of Fauci. Sure. They're really fixated on AZT. Joe Rogan goes on for minutes about like these early AZT trials where like they didn't even find a benefit like that's not true. It's very odd because like AZT is still used but in fairly limited amounts. Like it's not the only treatment anymore and you're not given it in large doses. So it's just kind of irrelevant to moan about AZT. It's also just fucking rich coming from the end of the political spectrum that is leading the charge against queer and trans people to be like, oh, fucking cool. You care now? No, I know. And the way that you show your care is by saying, hey, step away from those life-saving drugs.

1:17:39I know. Like, fuck off, you gremlins. You were the fourth build on news radio. Get a fucking life.

1:17:49Aubrey Gordon:So these claims also appear, I learned in the research for this, Aubrey, in Plandemic 3. No, great. They have this claim that you do see bouncing around that like 330 ,000 people died from AZT. I don't know where that claim comes from. It's suspiciously similar to the number of people who died in South Africa from not importing antiretrovirals. So I don't know if like that's where they've gotten it that like Thabo Mbeki gave people AZT and they all died. But like that's literally upside down. It could be a number pulled out of thin air. I do not know. But this goes around like how many people Fauci killed with the AZT.

1:18:27Aubrey Gordon:Right. It also – it's like an Aaron Rodgers thing. So far it has not crossed over. Like I haven't seen it in like, you know, Megyn Kelly or these kind of links to the mainstream, right? I looked for it on nationalreview.com, nothing. So it hasn't kind of gone mainstream yet, but I feel like all of these things are just fucking give it time. Yeah, totally. That'll be in like the fucking Surgeon General's report of like nutrition standards in like three years time. Who knows? Why? Last chapter of this in January, 2026, Peter Duisberg died. he did not change any of his beliefs in his 2012 interview with joe rogan he's still repeating the dumb bullshit about kaposi's sarcoma yeah great so a wasted life a piece of shit uh rest in piss and your legacy is a bunch of people dying of aids when they didn't have to michael you're trying to think of a joke to end with but you're too sad i'm really sad but i do think I came up with the clickbaity title for our episode.

1:19:29Oh, do it. America's Next Top AIDS Denialist.

1:19:32Aubrey Gordon:Yes, the Kid Rock Story.

1:19:57Thank you.