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

The rise, fall and rise of the most nonsensical conspiracy theory we've ever heard. Thanks to Gregg Gonsalves for helping us fact-check this episode! Support us: Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey's documentaryBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and more Links! Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories and Pseudoscience in a Post-COVID WorldImpure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of KnowledgeThe Duesberg PhenomenonAIDS Denial...

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that's been spending too much time with people who think vaccines cause autism and not enough time with people who think HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Oh, that's good.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  I'm Michael Hops.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  I'm Aubrey Gordon. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase, or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content. Michael.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Aubrey, today, we are talking about AIDS denialism. We are giving this episode some sort of clickbait title, but we're basically going to be talking about AIDS denialism, what it is, where it comes from, and where it is now. So, do you know what it is?

• 0:57Speaker 00

  So, I am coming in pretty fresh on this concept.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  I'm so excited.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  But I really do believe that the, like, core thing that people quibble with is the, like, HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Tends to be the, like, thing that people really grab on to. But I couldn't tell you who, like, some high-profile AIDS deniers are. I couldn't tell you who AIDS-denial organizations are.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  The most high-profile AIDS denier is Will Smith.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  We have a clip later. It's really weird.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  Oh, no, wait. I do know this about, um, there's a similar thing about Dave Grohl, no?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Foo Fighters held a benefit concert.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Man.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  But specifically, we are talking today about the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Correlation does not equal causation. Aubrey.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  What do they think the effects of HIV are?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Nothing. The inventor of this theory describes it as "one of the most harmless viruses known to man."

• 1:56Speaker 00

  You shut your fucking mouth. Are you kidding me?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  It's like buck wild. The whole fucking thing is nuts. So, to tell the story of AIDS denialism, we have to tell a little bit of the story of AIDS. This is mostly based on two books, one of which is called Denying AIDS by Seth Kalikman, and another called Impure Science by Stephen Epstein. Everyone agrees that in the early years of AIDS, there was a lot of, like, debate over what was causing it. So, the first reports appear in 1981 of men who have this, like, very strange cancer. And then you start getting more and more reports of, like, gay men dying of this weird thing, and it presents very differently.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Is this when they named it grids?

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Yes, gay-related immune deficiency. Although even earlier than that, it was literally called, like, gay cancer in the press.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Holy jones.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  So, there's lots of theories on what was causing it, basically because, like, it was just so mysterious and weird. One of the theories was that sperm in your butt reduces immune function.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  We've all been there.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Another explanation was poppers, which are these, like, inhalants that men take for muscle relaxant. It, like, makes anal sex better. This was, like, one of the, like, fairly prominent early explanations, because a lot of the people that got AIDS had been using poppers. Apparently, uh, poppers do have, like, a slightly immunosuppressing effect. And I guess they're, like, really bad for you. I was, like, reading the Cleveland Clinic website this morning. But because they're a vasodilator, they had been given to heart disease patients for years, and none of them got AIDS. So, that gets discarded pretty quickly.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  It is, I will say, very funny to think about. Poppers for your heart.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  I actually didn't know that they had any, like, legitimate use. They were, like, just for gay men, because they sell them as room deodorizers in other countries, because you can't sell them for, like, what people aren't, like, selling them for. But then, there was also a theory, basically, that it was psychosomatic. So, there is a gay psychiatrist named Casper Schmidt, who writes an article proposing that, like, it's a response to the 1980s. So, here is this. This is from an article called "The Man Who Thought AIDS Was All in the Mind."

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Jesus Christ. The man who gaslit an entire community.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  I know.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  Schmidt believed that AIDS was a psychosomatic disease, that it was caused by an outbreak of, quote-unquote, "mass hysteria," and that AIDS patients were, in some sense, thinking themselves ill. According to Schmidt, "The trigger for AIDS was the rise of right-wing ideology in America following Ronald Reagan's election as president in 1980. Newly aggressive conservative Christians, in their reactionary attacks on gay rights, created an unconscious psychodrama in which gay men were cast as shameful and tainted." I have a question.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  If that's the case, why didn't this have its onset during the lavender scare?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  No, I know. It's, it's like, I like where his head's at. He's, like, blaming Ronald Reagan. It's like, oh, good, let's stick with that. But we need to get more specific.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Listen, you don't even need to give me more explanation. Just like, if you're like, it's, "Oh, the lunch place is closed. It's Ronald Reagan's fault."

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely Reagan's fault, yes.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Like, I'm on board.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  This theory didn't really catch fire, but, like, there were lots of theories going around of, like, what could be causing this. The most common one at the time was something known as immune collapse, which is basically that gay men are getting so many STDs, and they've taken so many STD treatments, and they're all on drugs, that, like, everything together collapses the immune system.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  It's sort of like, it's like the Mr. Burns explanation. It's just like, well, he has everything. This is something that, like, especially the mainstream press latched on to. It appears the actual scientists discarded this relatively quickly, because there isn't a real theory here. You know that, that thing that's like, "do this?" question mark, question mark, question mark, "profit?" This one is like, "people having sex?" question mark, question mark, question mark, "AIDS."

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  There's also the issue that, like, I mean, it was the fucking 80s. Like, straight people were also doing a lot of drugs.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  But not the bad ones, Michael. Just the good ones, like cocaine.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  But I do want to say, like, we read so much bad faith garbage for this show about, like, "the scientific debate was suppressed." And like, "Oh, why can't you even debate it?" This period is actually really interesting to me, because there is a real scientific debate going on. And like, this is what scientific debate should look like. People are proposing theories. Some of the theories are more plausible than others. But the people proposing these theories then investigate them and try to disprove them. Like, I think looking at the data and going, "Hey, maybe it's poppers," is totally legitimate, right? But then what you do is you go, "Oh, okay. Well, does everyone who has AIDS use poppers? No. Does everyone who use poppers get AIDS? No. Okay, we can discard it." That's like an actual scientific debate. It's not really about arguments. It's about finding data. And that's what

• 6:55Speaker 01

  people did during this period. Like, I don't begrudge anybody who proposed a slightly cockamamie theory, as long as they investigated and discarded, which is what people did.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the issue here always is, like, people who hang on to an untrue thing.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Right? And people who prioritize their own bias and their own, sort of, like, pet theory over the actual dignity and survival of this community.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  There is a fairly fikund debate about this at the time. But then, of course, what starts happening is, as we learn more about AIDS, we find much more in heterosexual populations. So, by 1982, around 8% of people with AIDS were women, were heterosexual women. We start finding it in drug users. We start finding it in hemophiliacs. There were big outbreaks in the Haitian community in America at the time. So, basically, this period of debate basically ends in 1984, when they isolate the HIV virus. And they're like, "Okay, we now understand this is a virus. It sits in your system. It slowly chips away at your immune system. And then the immune collapse is the reason why people who die of AIDS die of, like, a very wide variety of things," right?

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Which is also a dynamic that we, like, know and recognize from other illnesses, right? Like, cancer is a good example of this.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Right? That, like, people get cancer and then may die of something like pneumonia.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Just because they're in such a weakened state.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  A lot of, like, the most staunch defenders of, like, poppers theory, or, like, immune collapse theory, basically just, like, turn on a dime, and they're like, "Oh, it's a virus. We're going to move on and look for effective treatments for this." Most of the people didn't become cranks and just, like, accepted the explanation and moved on, except for one man, Aubrey.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Uh-oh.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  So, for the next little section, we are going to have to meet a man named Peter Duesberg.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  I was trying to think of who the funniest person is that it could be.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Frank Sinatra.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Peter Duesberg was not on my list. I was imagining an intro that was just, "My name is Kid."

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Like, the early work of Kid Rock is like pioneering AIDS denier.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  It's Milli Vanilli. That's why they were invited to the State Fair thing in DC.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  So Peter Duesberg is a German guy who is born in Münster in 1936. He gets his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Frankfurt in 1963. In 1964, he moves to California to join UC Berkeley and work on cancer. So he is a cancer researcher. So at the time, there's a huge amount of interest in retroviruses as the cause of cancer. There were a ton of experiments in the 20th century showing that you can effectively inject an animal with a retrovirus and cause a tumor. This is like a wild oversimplification because this is being done in like Petri dishes and stuff, but the basic idea is that there's a direct link between the introduction of

• 9:48Speaker 01

  a retrovirus and something called an oncogene, which causes cells to divide out of control. And that's a tumor. That's cancer.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  My mom wouldn't let me get Jinko, so I did have to get Onkos in the 90s.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  I think you're gonna make an unc joke, like an unc gene, like an older, like a middle aged, a middle aged millennial gene.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Onkos.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  So Peter Duesberg is the first person to isolate an actual oncogene. Later on, other researchers find out that there's actually something in your cells called a proto-oncogene, and it's actually the mutation of existing genes that causes cancer. Those people who basically extended that work, they win the Nobel Prize. Peter Duesberg, sometimes people will describe him as like a nominee for the Nobel Prize or whatever. He's not, but he is adjacent to people and in the field that won the Nobel Prize. So he's like considered very respectable at the time. He is inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, which is like a very prestigious thing, and he's considered very credible in the field. However, he does have one fatal

• 10:53Speaker 01

  flaw. Everyone who knows him personally says that he is contrarian to a fault. So this is a introduction to Peter Duesberg at some sort of conference by Robert Gallo, who is the guy who discovers HIV in 1984. He's like a retrovirus researcher. So him and Peter Duesberg are like friends in this field and they're like close friends and collaborators. They eventually become mortal enemies because they are on both sides of this bizarre HIV debate. But here is Robert Gallo in 1984 introducing his friend, Peter Duesberg, at a conference.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  Peter Duesberg is a man of extraordinary energy, unusual honesty, enormous sense of humor, and a rare critical sense. This critical sense often makes us look twice than a third time at a conclusion many of us believe to be foregone. However, his critiques are sometimes a major problem for the casual observer. When is he truly debating? When is he only being the devil's advocate? When is he being the devil himself? Jesus Christ. Peter, it is hard for us to tell when you are using your machine gun or your slingshot or simply exercising your vocal cords. In any event, you are an extraordinary scientist,

• 12:14Speaker 00

  a man who makes life more interesting and pleasurable to many of us, and it is my good fortune to know you as a friend. Holy Jones.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  This is like those wedding speeches where it's like, they fight all the time and like, it's been like a rocky journey. They're not gonna make it.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  You know, what I admire most about him is how impervious he is to criticism.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  There's also this anecdote from Seth Kallikman's book. It says, at his 2008 conference, this is a conference like in favor of Duesberg. It's like a conference that Duesberg organized, by the way.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Great.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  At his 2008 conference, Duesberg was the first to ask questions of every speaker, sometimes even before they finished speaking. There was an impulsivity to his challenging the presenters. There were even times when David Raznick took the microphone away from Duesberg to give others a chance to speak.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  It's like, say no more. He's the guy who's like the first, just like jolting out of his chair to be like, well, have you thought about this?

• 13:09Speaker 00

  One of the things that I used to do in nonprofit world was plan our like staff retreats and strategic planning sessions. When you have this guy in the group, you are structuring the fuck out of every conversation.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Dude, I know.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  And you're building everything around like, God, what's Peter gonna do? We'll have people write down, individually brainstorm, then they pair off and share just with their partners. Then the person who talks less does the report.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  You institute the talking stick policy. I'm sorry, you can't have the stick.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  Absol- fucking, we're passing the talking popper.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  So, that took me as a zucker.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  So basically, over the course of the 1980s, Peter Duesberg turns on his own work and starts to say, retroviruses can't cause any kind of cancer. In Seth Kallikman's book, he says, Duesberg was not reporting failed experiments. He didn't have new data. He had not discovered some phenomenon that his work could not explain. He simply changed his mind despite the data.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  His whole thing with retroviruses is like, he says, they can't cause cancer because in Petri dishes, you can't infect human cells with retroviruses and like cause cancer in the little cells in the Petri dish. But like, this has happened. At the time, this was not being done because it's like difficult, but now apparently it's relatively routine. And he still just says this.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was gonna ask where you think this resistance comes from. Like, this is quite a heel turn to do on your own work.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  It's really weird.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  It's really odd, but it sounds like part of what's happening here is just that straightforward contrarian kind of nature.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  Is there other stuff that is leading him to think this way? Or is he just like, nope, change my mind?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  There's theories of like, he was pissed off that other people in the field were getting Nobel prizes. And like Robert Gallo, there's a whole controversy with the discovery of HIV, but at the time, it was considered that Robert Gallo had discovered HIV and they're close friends. And so like, my friend is getting all these accolades. It seems like there might have been some of that going on, but there is something really weird about a guy who like comes up with these theories and then they're just completely just factually debunked, right? Like, you can't isolate it. And then you can. And he just keeps saying, you can't isolate it.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is really strange.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  His brain doesn't seem to be able to absorb new information. There's something weird about like, he just plays the same tapes. Like, the things that he's saying in 1987 are, I swear to God, word for word, the things that he is saying in 2012.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Boy, I'll tell you what, brain doesn't seem to absorb new information is about the most damning characteristic a scientist could have.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  I know, exactly.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  It would be like if you're like, this person's a poet. They're not very good with words. Not super verbal.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  So as a result of this entire kind of made up theory that retroviruses can't cause cancer, and like, he seems to think that retroviruses are like being unfairly canceled. It's like a maligned woman of the 1990s, but it's like a maligned virus of the 1980s. He publishes an article in 1987 about cancer, about like, oh, we know that cancer can't be caused by retroviruses. And in the end of that paper, it's only a couple pages. He's like, oh, and by the way, HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Great.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Because HIV is a retrovirus.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  While we're at it, actually FYI, fucking mic drop.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  So we're gonna talk a little bit about the theory that he puts forward in this 1987 article. He starts by noting that the fatality rate of AIDS has been going down relatively steadily. He says, the case fatality rate has declined from a high of 88% in 1981 to 32% in 1986. This suggests either that the virulence of the disease is dropping or that other diseases were diagnosed as AIDS. But it does not mean that at all.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Like, the case fatality rate of COVID also went down really dramatically in 2020 because more people were being tested.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  In the early stages of an epidemic, typically you're only seeing the most severe cases, right? You're only seeing people who are hospitalized.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  You haven't established a baseline and you're not going to because you're trying to wrap your arms around like what testing works and what treatments work and like, at what point do you need to hospitalized people and all of that kind of stuff. So like, the nature of that early time, I would imagine, is just like being in flux, right?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  He also says that the testing is flawed because HIV tests only test for the antibodies to HIV. You can tell he really thinks he's cooking. He's like, if you have antibodies to HIV, then why do you have HIV?

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Great, great.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  But like, a lot of viruses work like this.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  If you have antibodies, that means you've been exposed to the fucking thing.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  This is also how they do like measles and chickenpox and all kinds of other things. Like, the fact that you have antibodies doesn't mean that you're like cured of the disease. Like, that just isn't how it works. To his death, right? Like, spoiler, he flogs this theory for the next 40 years until the day that he dies. He died in January of 2026. He does not modify this theory in any way over the course of that time. Like, the core of his theory is basically that like a retrovirus cannot sit dormant in your system without causing symptoms.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  What?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  He's like, no, no, no. The way that viruses work is they either make you sick, like super sick, right when you get them, or they're totally harmless and you just live with them the rest of your life. Those are the only two options. So here's him talking about why the retrovirus theory doesn't work.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Other infected groups appear to be at no risk for AIDS. In Haiti and in certain countries in Africa, antibody positive individuals range from 4 to 20% of the population, whereas the incidence of AIDS is estimated at less than 0.01%. Among male homosexuals and hemophiliacs of Hungary, about 5% are AIDS virus positive, yet no symptoms of AIDS were recorded.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Clearly, the long lag between infection and AIDS and the large number of virus positive cases in which as yet no AIDS is observed, lead to the conclusion that the virus is not sufficient to induce AIDS. So he's saying it's too long.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  There's no argument here, right? He's just saying like, well, some people have HIV and they don't have AIDS. But like, yes, that's the characteristic of the virus that it sits dormant in your system for like up to 10 years.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Well, and also like, it's not like we don't know about incubation periods at this point.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  You can contract something and have quite some time before you start showing symptoms of it. Like at this point, we're aware of like HPV, for example.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  He says like, lead to the conclusion that the virus is not sufficient to induce AIDS, but like, or it leads to the conclusion that this virus does this thing which has not been seen before. It's like somebody saying like, we know animals can't fly. So like, there's no birds, like birds don't exist.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  He is very insistent on this weird thing that AIDS isn't infectious enough.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  I've been saying this.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Gain a function, baby. Send it to Wuhan. Get them duplicating it. Add the bats to it.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Add the bats to it.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Here's this.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  For instance, among 1,750 healthcare workers with exposure to AIDS, only one or two were found to be antibody positive. Another study failed to find a single antibody positive person among 101 family contacts of 39 AIDS patients, all of whom had lived in the same household with an AIDS patient for at least three months. Is he assuming that there's like a respiratory something like what?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  He's like, oh, it doesn't make sense. But you're like, well, it does if it's spread through like sexual juices and blood. Like, I'm not sharing that with my family members who I live with. So yeah, they wouldn't get it.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  This isn't like, somebody in your house has COVID, so now everybody else in your house has COVID. Or the flu, or take your pick, right?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like somebody saying like, I shook hands with someone with AIDS and I didn't get it. Like, right, because it doesn't spread like that.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, which was the way that people thought and talked about it at that time.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  The science knew better, but the people did not. They'd be like, I don't want to be in a room with a person who has AIDS. I don't want to shake hands. I don't want to whatever.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  So we're not going to go through every single argument because there's tons of them, but this is a good summary of kind of the overall case. This is from a New York View of Books article that interviews him and goes over kind of like his overall argument. So here is this.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  If AIDS was caused by an infectious agent, Duesberg claims, one would expect it would have five specific characteristics. One, it would spread randomly between the sexes. Two, the disease would rapidly appear, at least within months. Three, it would be possible to identify, quote, "active and abundant HIV microbes in all cases." Four, cells would die or be impaired beyond the ability of the body to replace them. And five, we would see the development of a consistent pattern of symptoms in those infected.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  So basically, all of these are just like, well, no, we wouldn't.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  It would spread randomly between the sexes. Well, the sexes are not having equal amounts of anal sex.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Heterosexual sex is like less efficient at spreading HIV than anal sex. We know that.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  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,

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Also, like what does?

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  Like, the flu doesn't look the same.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Right, like, there's just like, that's like a basic, you don't gotta be a rocket scientist to figure that one out.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Because even COVID, people have like wildly different symptoms.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Yes!

• 23:23Speaker 01

  I never lost my sense of smell, for example.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  I lost my sense of taste.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Were you still eating beans, just for the texture?

• 23:29Speaker 00

  You better fucking believe it. You, wild horses couldn't keep me from a bean.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  All of these gay men have had it since birth. Surprise!

• 24:01Speaker 01

  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? 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.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Well, this is the like sunscreen is actually causing the cancer, not

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  exposure, where you're just like, no, come on.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  It's so fucking, it's like, you know that 100% of people who do chemotherapy have cancer? 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.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  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. 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, 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?

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Right, like, I'm sure that not having enough food has significant impacts on people's ability to heal from literally anything.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  But the idea that that is like the primary or sole cause of something like that is just like, oh, buddy, let's not.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  So we're not going to go super into debunking. One of the books that I've read had like, chapter after chapter after chapter of debunking Peter Duesberg'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.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  You're doing a me with Tim Ferriss.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  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? 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.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Holy jones, that's a huge difference.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the UK has a smaller population than us, but they don't have 1/25th the population, right?

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Is that down to like government response?

• 27:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  In the United States, it was illegal for federal funding to go toward needle exchanges. 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.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  And also, most Western European countries have universal healthcare, 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. Whereas in the US, there was no federal budget line for targeted outreach to gay and bisexual men.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  Oh, lord.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  What did you say the annual deaths peaked at in the US?

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Forty-two thousand.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  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.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  That was 42,000 deaths a year in a community that was more isolated, more stigmatized, less likely to receive treatment.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  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 US public health systems.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Is staggering.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  Are we gonna listen to the clips of the fucking gay jokes and press conferences and shit like that?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're gonna talk about dead people, not traumatic stuff.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  But this also gets to the next chapter of the story. So, it's 1987. Peter Duesberg 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?

• 31:20Speaker 00

  Oh, lord.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  So, I said that I wanted to focus on the interesting aspects of this story. One of the most interesting aspects of it is that the popularization of this theory started in the gay media.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Aw, crud, Michael!

• 31:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  The first apparent published mention of Duesberg's article came in a cover story by John Lauritsen in the June 1, 1987 issue of The New York Native.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  So that's a gay publication, this is a gay author.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  As the issue's cover advertised, the focus of the article was to encourage people with AIDS not to take the medication AZT. Recently 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 Lauritsen disputed, and much of the article was devoted to the proposition that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  With the discovery of the virus, quote, "Dogma rapidly came to prevail," Lauritsen complained. Against this dogmatism, it was, until now, impossible for dissenters to make their voices heard. Quote, "Since 1984, there have been a few of us who stated in print that epidemiological evidence made it most unlikely that HIV could be the sole cause of AIDS. We were isolated. Some AIDS researchers did not believe in the AIDS virus ideology, but in the interests of self-preservation, they remained silent."

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Aubrey, the wanking motion I made when I read AIDS virus ideology.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  Ugh.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  To call anything blank ideology is like such culture war bullshit.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  I mean, it's sort of weird to think about, but like, this theory was taken up by a lot of the gay press. 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.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  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-holed, but also I think psychologically makes a lot of sense.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  That's what I was just gonna say.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  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 gonna be like, well, maybe it's fine.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  This is also a community that's been completely fucking neglected by the powers that be.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  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 gonna die, maybe then it doesn't mean that this treatment that is really painful and imprecise, right,

• 35:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Mm, yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  One of those is way more appealing than the other one of those.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  God damn it, Michael!

• 35:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Penned by a three-year-old Thomas Chatterton Williams.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  No, 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, and it rests on the theory that AIDS is actually caused by pubic lice. And again, anything of like sexual behavior and stuff has been completely discarded because of fucking hemophiliacs.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  Ugh.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  But 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, da-da-da.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  Great.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  It has a little vignette at the end about Peter Duesberg, 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. 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."

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  And you see this a lot, they're like, he's so sure about it, he's offered to get HIV.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Oh, eat my hat!

• 36:58Speaker 01

  But he never did it.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  It's like, bitch, you've been saying this for 20 years, someone should've just gone there with a fucking syringe.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  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?

• 37:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  This was about a guy who operated, the electric chair would operate lethal injections, that sort of thing. And 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.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Who were like, oh, he can prove that there was no gas in the chambers at Auschwitz.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  They are people who are like signing on for some serious magical thinking.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Well, that's what's so interesting, is, once the 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.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  This is like all those fucking profiles of Richard Spencer.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  The New York Times article, which I also read, is like very negative. 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.

• 39:17Speaker 00

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

• 39:22Speaker 01

  It goes super fucking hard. So here is an abysmal article in the New York Review of Books, which I generally like.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Duesberg, 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, Duesberg 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 Duesberg'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 Duesberg's research?

• 40:15Speaker 00

  Jesus Christ.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  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. That's not how science works.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Tenure, a near-perfect system.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  I know, no, no notes.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  No notes, not a single one.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  And then also, he keeps presenting papers to journals, but they can't get past peer review, partly because they're crank shit and 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.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Well, and he's off on his own little island, right? He's, he's been set adrift on his own little ice floe and nobody is out there with him.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  So like, that alone should be like a sign that, you know, maybe he's Galileo.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. He, he makes that argument all the fucking time. It's so annoying.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  Probably not.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  He's like, they said Galileo was wrong. Yeah, but they also say that like Laura Lumer is wrong, and she fucking is.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Sometimes people are right about who's wrong.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yes. But I do actually want to talk a little bit about how the scientific establishment treats Peter Duesberg, because I actually think scientists were good on the way that they treated him. So in the late 1980s, right after Duesberg 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. So there's a debate in a journal where Peter Duesberg 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.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  This is from a New Yorker article much later.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  In 1988, in an effort to put Duesberg's theories to rest, the American Foundation for AIDS Research sponsored a scientific forum in Washington DC 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. Duesberg rejected the data completely. This 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.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  "This is murder," he said after listening to Duesberg speak. "It's really just that simple."

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Cooking.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Boy.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  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 Duesberg a Right to Reply?", where he talks about how whenever they publish fucking anything about HIV, Duesberg 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.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Right, right, right.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  He describes becoming increasingly frustrated with this. Like, with every single fucking article we write, you write essentially the same response. He also goes over how like during this period, Duesberg is very obviously operating in bad faith. So one of Duesberg'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 a skin condition, and hemophiliacs with AIDS don't get it? Right? 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 learned that Kaposi's sarcoma is caused by a version of the herpes virus.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  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 Duesberg 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. We know the explanation for it, and it's congruent with AIDS being caused by the HIV virus.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  And also, like, how many times are you gonna write the same LTE?

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  You are just kind of wasting everybody's time at this point.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  And so that's essentially what he says in like the rest of the article. So here is an excerpt from later.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  Nature's most recent refusal of an intended publication by Duesberg 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."

• 45:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Duesberg'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. "The 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 Duesberg's friends say, the right of reply must be modulated by its content."

• 46:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  He has a right to reply? Like, I guess, like, he has freedom of speech, et cetera. But also, people who read fucking Nature, one of those prestigious publications in the country, have a right to read things that are true.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  I 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?

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Right? And actually, what's the cost-benefit analysis of letting everyone speak on everything?

• 47:30Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  Because there is a cost, and I think it's tempting to go, ah, everyone's entitled to their opinion, blah, blah, blah, blah. 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.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  There's a good article about this called "Defending the Boundaries of Science: AIDS Denialism, Peer Review, and the Medical Hypothesis Saga" by Nicole Inatras. And she says, "What Duesberg 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."

• 48:03Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  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?

• 48:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  There's another really good article about this, kind of the construction of scientific debate, called "AIDS Denialism Versus Science." Okay, so here's this excerpt.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  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-1 have been generated, and that is as good as isolation gets for retroviruses," one of us has to be lying.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  This like really crystallized something for me.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. There's like true shit and there's not true shit.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  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? 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.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  You'd be like, you don't get to have that opinion, dude.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  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 Duesberg'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 Duesberg 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 with Duesberg. They're like, oh yeah, you said this, but we looked into it and you can't explain it. And then 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 Duesberg is just like, not a credible actor.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  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 nature.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Nature, I know. And there's an overwhelming sense throughout the piece of like, ah, do we really have to do this?

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Right. Like, now everyone has the Anthony Fauci belabored sigh.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. 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. It's not given a lot of credibility. Part of the reason for that is this very high-profile debunking in science in 1994.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  She gets infected with HIV in 1992. She starts doing AIDS activism, kind of traditional AIDS activism, like, this is why we need antiretrovirals, et cetera. She meets Peter Duesberg in 1994. He convinces her to get off of her meds.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Go what?

• 52:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  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."

• 53:00Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  And she gets relatively famous. Like, she's in the media. 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 Duesberg and the whole kind of movement, they're also syphilis truthers.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  Oh, Jesus fucking hell.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  So basically, her daughter dies of AIDS, and then Christina Maggiore also dies of AIDS at age 52.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  How old was her daughter at the time that she passed?

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Three.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  Jesus, God.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  And this actually happens numerous times, that prominent AIDS denialists die of AIDS.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, this is sort of like, all the, like, anti-vax guys in hospital with COVID.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Hey, we kids have measles now.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, that kind of, yup, yup, yup, yup, yup, yup, totally. Of course, you're like, yeah, this is how this ends. That doesn't make it less tragic.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  I know.

• 54:38Speaker 00

  Absolutely, she sort of made a name for herself doing this thing. Absolutely, she spread the message. And also, absolutely, she suffered the loss of her daughter and her own life. Like, I don't know.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  I know.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  That's just horrible. It's just horrible, however you slice it.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  Jesus.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  We could do a whole fucking episode on it. 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. Like, you publish a debate between an actual expert and like, just a complete random asshole, and the president of the country read it and was like, hmm, 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, ooh, it's really bad to be telling people not to take drugs at this point, right?

• 56:10Speaker 00

  I think it's really bad to discourage people from taking treatments at any point.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  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

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  is fucking the devil's work.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  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-vaxers, 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? It's still, thank God, like, a relatively rare event. If you stop taking antiretrovirals, like, you're gonna get AIDS. It's really, really, really bad.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  If this fucking guy is not worthy of ostracism and denunciation and just not engaging in debate, then nobody is.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  Right. Then who?

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  Then who?

• 57:20Speaker 01

  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 Thabo Mbeki in South Africa. 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.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  Improving general nutrition and implementing nutritional education and supplements for the general population.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Supplements.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  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. I am stunned that colloidal silver does not make an appearance

• 58:36Speaker 01

  No, I know.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  on this list. It feels like it should be right there.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Where are the adaptogens? I'm not seeing celery juice on here.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Nary a single Ashwagandha mention?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  And then the Health Minister of South Africa, who's appointed by Mbeki, recommends raw garlic and skin of the lemon.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  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, uh, everybody from the US, from Canada, from Europe, you guys need to know that South Africa is like, our Florida.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  So just like, I don't know shit about shit, but I

• 59:20Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  It's occurring to me now.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  I know.

• 59:23Speaker 00

  The Florida of Africa. And 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.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  Oh my god!

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  And they're going literally door to door in townships and telling people to stop taking antiretrovirals and take vitamins instead. 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.

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  Oh no! Just the first few words being, "Never before in the history of mankind was a greater crime committed."

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  It's so boring. It's so boring. I know.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  "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 multi-billion dollar investment business with disease. Hundreds of millions of people have died unnecessarily from AIDS, cancer, heart disease, and other preventable diseases. And the only reason that these epidemics are still haunting mankind is that they are the multi-billion dollar marketplace for the pharmaceutical drug cartel." So here's where we get the RFK juniors of the world.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Yes!

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  And like Scientologists.

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  There's like a bunch of like, wild ass cranks that join us at this juncture.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  I don't want to say to his credit because he's a complete asshole, but Peter Duesberg 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've 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 dish. 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. And then you're like, and also HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Like, that is the tactic that they start using.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  Right? And then like, very quickly, they walk you right back into a swastika.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  Don't you hate it when people change lanes without putting their blinker on? That's why the Holocaust is fake. So this is also the period where we start getting like, the celebrity AIDS denial list. 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.

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  Boy, that is gonna bum me out real hard. Not that I'm like, a big Will Smith guy or whatever.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Et tu, Will Smith. I know.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  Et tu! I thought I could trust you!

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  He subscribes to like, a different version of this conspiracy theory, but we're gonna watch it because it's funny.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  Great, let's do it.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  So here it is. The other voice you will hear is Barbara Walters.

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  Oh wow, there's a blast from the past.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Zoomers, it's, we don't have time. We're not gonna explain who this person is. She was on TV.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  I read that you felt that the government was deliberately spraying cold germs in subways, was deliberately trying to make people ill with the AIDS virus. This is pretty serious stuff. Do you really feel that?

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  Well, that's a good question. Oh, I'm with Barbara Walters now. Oh, that's a serious one. Okay, so I gotta, now, because people are gonna chase me after this. People are gonna chase me.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  I believe that it is quite highly possible that the AIDS virus is a result of genetic warfare testing.

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  By American agents?

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  Am I a conspiracy theorist? I'm a conspiracy theorist, alright.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  That's art, is what that is.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  It's so good. Oh, Will.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  I mean, like, I think the tricky thing about all the government conspiracy stuff is like, we do have MKUltra, we do have COINTELPRO, fucking Tuskegee, right?

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:44Speaker 00

  Part of the challenge here is, you don't need to go looking for the conspiracy on AIDS. It happened in fucking public.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  So you don't need to go off and like, play jazz and come up with your own version of it.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  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, they don't really catch on. The issue goes dark, but then they get one new argument. And so I'm gonna send you a text and you have to guess for me where it is from. This is from, uh, 2021.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  I have to guess where this is from?

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  You're gonna fucking know. It's gonna be so easy for you, Aubrey.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  Is it from Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, damn it!

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  This was spoken by Rockefeller?

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  "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. But in Tony Fauci's authoritarian technocracy,

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Technocracy.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  You know who this is.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  I don't. It's not Rogan. He can't write.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  For some reason, this feels Jordan Peterson-y to me, but I know that's not right. Who is it?

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  This is RFK Junior.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  Oh, this motherfucker. Of course. The answer was right in front of us all along.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  So essentially, anything you want to tie to Anthony Fauci, you can. 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.

• 1:07:31Speaker 00

  It's very funny for conservatives to be like, actually, in the 80s, you guys were too shitty to gay people.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  No, I know!

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  Where you're like, oh, a thing that doesn't exist? Cool.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  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. We think more gay people should have died in the 80s. Yes.

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  They should have died sooner.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  RFK Junior has four chapters, more than 100 pages of his fucking book dedicated to this theory. He also, it appears, spoke to Duesberg. Like, Duesberg appears throughout this 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. 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.

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  Again, that's HPV, which is linked to cancer. What the fuck?

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  It's the chickenpox virus causing shingles later in your life. Like, there's just, this is a very well documented thing.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  Yes!

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Most of it is him talking about how like, Fauci suppressed debate. I guess there was some thing where Fauci was gonna go on Good Morning America with Duesberg, and they were gonna like, debate. And then Duesberg'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 Duesberg directly numerous times during the late 80s and early 1990s. There was a period where there was a lot of debate about this.

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  It's a little bit like the LTE stuff, right? Where you're like, how many letters to the editor are we gonna publish from this fucking guy? How many times is Anthony Fauci gonna have to debate this dude on shit that they settled 20 years earlier, or whatever?

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Aubrey, I have to read this paragraph because it's kind of funny here.

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

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

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Mangle reputations. They were mangled.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  "History may credit him as the progenitor, even the inventor, of cancel culture."

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  No one was ever canceled before Anthony Fauci canceled Peter Duesberg.

• 1:09:58Speaker 00

  It's really incredible to me that you would go, the inventor of cancel culture wasn't like witch trials.

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  No, exactly.

• 1:10:05Speaker 00

  Crusades or like.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Wouldn't it like Jesus was the original canceled person? Like, fuck it. I don't know. It's just so dumb, the whole thing.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  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? 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 Duesberg, 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.

• 1:10:48Speaker 00

  If the grocery store had nothing to hide, they would let me in at 3 a.m. What are they hiding?

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Oh, I know. God, it's so boring. Speaking of boring, we are going to watch one final clip. This is from, uh, I don't know if you're familiar with it, the Joe Rogan Experience. It's from the Joe Rogan Experience.

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  Everyone's favorite.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Joe Rogan actually had Peter Duesberg 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.

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  This was me yesterday, Michael. I watched the entire fucking Call Her Daddy interview with Nora Smith.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Oh, did you seriously?

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  And I was like, oh, no, my brain is liquefying, leaking out of my fucking ear. So like, my condolences.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Dude, the cognitive decline that we're experiencing as people in our 40s is going so much faster due to what we do.

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  Just speed running that shit.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:11:56Speaker 04

  And they're making the case that, uh, 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.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  You know, you can't.

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  I've raised 10 kids. I have two teenage kids. One of my older boys, 31 years old now, tested positive for HIV. Right away come the drugs and, uh, 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, 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 new herb 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, they say it point blank.

• 1:12:51Speaker 04

  You will die from this disease and there's nothing that can stop it except these drugs.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  They say it point blank.

• 1:12:55Speaker 04

  And that turns out not to be true.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Well, there's a lot of things you said that turned out not to be true. They thought that your children would get it, people in the household would get it, that it was spread, that it could be spread aerosol.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  No one thought it was aerosol.

• 1:13:07Speaker 03

  The, the Duesberg thing is fascinating.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  No, it's not.

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  Because this all took place in a time with no internet, no pushback, no conspiracy theorists online to connect the dots.

• 1:13:18Speaker 00

  That'd be advantage of conspiracy theorists.

• 1:13:20Speaker 03

  First of all, there was the inconvenient fact that the vast majority of the people that got air quotes AIDS.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Air quotes.

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  All were hardcore drug users.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  Jesus, fucking Christmas.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  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, you're partying. Guess what? You're going to crush your immune system.

• 1:13:41Speaker 04

  And you know, they were taking antibiotics, which were at the parties in big bowls.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Bowls.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  Antibiotics.

• 1:13:46Speaker 04

  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, uh, people had all kinds of infections. So they were scooping up antibiotics and taking antibiotics. And of course AIDS is real. They destroyed their immune system, no question about it. And poppers and, and Duesberg.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  Poppers is the big one, right? Inul nitrate.

• 1:14:08Speaker 04

  Well, poppers certainly causes the specific respiratory issue that was associated with AIDS. And they kept changing, you know, the, uh, the NIH and CDC kept changing the definition along the way. And there's a great line in, uh, 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.

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  I just feel so sad and so bored.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:14:48Speaker 00

  One of the things that I think about a fair bit on this show is how bad public health is at PR.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  No, I know.

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  And the story of his son is like really bleak. I don't know all the details.

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  It's so fucking bleak, dude.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:15:25Speaker 00

  This is like, I'm young and I'm healthy. I don't need a COVID vaccine. That's not coming for me.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  We were like, oh, Jesus Christmas.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  Also this 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.

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  There are bowls of seven day punch packs, blister packs. Come on.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  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 Junior's book. And they're like, oh, did you read Bobby's book? And then RFK Junior listens to fucking Joe Rogan. He refers to Joe Rogan constantly. So that just reinforces for RFK Junior that this is real. And then RFK Junior talks about it more and then it shows up on Rogan again.

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  This is the thing that RFK Junior has in common with Trump is that they are both so fucking hooked on like self reinforcing news media, right?

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:16:24Speaker 00

  Is like all they can engage with. It's really stunning.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  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. Is it, it is all over the place on Twitter, obviously.

• 1:16:41Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Elon Musk retweeted like this unbelievably ugly boomer meme that, you know, like really lazy memes. There's like text on a background. But the text says, remember that one time in the eighties and nineties when people died from the AIDS treatment AZT and not the actual AIDS virus? Remember that one doctor who promoted that treatment? And then has a picture of Fauci.

• 1:17:03Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  No, I know.

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  And the way that you show your care is by saying, hey, step away from those lifesaving drugs.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  Like, fuck off, you gremlins. You were the fourth build on news radio. Get a fucking life.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  So these claims also appear, I learned in the research for this, Aubrey, in plandemic three.

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  No, great.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  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, Tabo Mabeki 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. This goes around, like, how many people Fauci killed with the AZT?

• 1:18:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:18:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  That, that'll be in like the fucking surgeon general's report of like nutrition standards in like three years' time. Who knows?

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  Last chapter of this, uh, in January 2026, uh, Peter Duesberg 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.

• 1:19:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, great.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:19:20Speaker 00

  Michael.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  You're trying to think of a joke to end with, but you're too sad.

• 1:19:23Speaker 00

  I'm really sad, but I do think I came up with the clickbaity title for our episode.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  Oh, do it.

• 1:19:30Speaker 00

  America's Next Top AIDS Denialist?

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  Yes, the Kid Rock story.