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

00:00:00.000 Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that's been spending too

00:00:15.360 much time with people who think vaccines cause autism, and not enough time with people who

00:00:21.400 think HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

00:00:23.920 Oh, that's good.

00:00:24.900 Thank you.

00:00:26.080 I'm Michael Humps.

00:00:27.160 I'm Aubrey Gordon.

00:00:27.980 If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase,

00:00:32.620 or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content. Michael.

00:00:39.080 Aubrey, today we are talking about AIDS denialism. We are giving this episode some sort of clickbait

00:00:46.920 title, but we're basically going to be talking about AIDS denialism, what it is, where it comes

00:00:52.300 from, and where it is now. So do you know what it is?

00:00:57.240 so i am coming in pretty fresh on this concept i'm so excited but i really do believe that the

00:01:03.720 like core thing that people quibble with is the like hiv doesn't cause aids tends to be the like

00:01:10.600 thing that people really grab on to but i couldn't tell you who like some high profile

00:01:18.380 aids deniers are i couldn't tell you who aids denial organizations are the most high profile

00:01:24.860 AIDS denier is Will Smith. What? We have a clip later. It's really weird. Oh, no, wait. I do know

00:01:31.740 this about, um, there's a similar thing about Dave Grohl, no? Yeah, the Foo Fighters held a

00:01:36.360 concert. Man. But specifically, we are talking today about the belief that HIV does not cause

00:01:43.340 AIDS. Boy, oh boy, oh boy. Correlation does not equal causation, Aubrey. What do they think

00:01:48.540 the effects of HIV are? Nothing. The inventor of this theory describes it as one of the most

00:01:55.040 harmless viruses known to man. Dude, shut your fucking mouth. Are you kidding me? It's like 1.00

00:02:00.020 buck wild. The whole fucking thing is nuts. So to tell the story of AIDS denialism, we have to tell 1.00

00:02:05.720 a little bit of the story of AIDS. This is mostly based on two books, one of which is called Denying

00:02:12.500 AIDS by Seth Kallikman and another called Impure Science by Stephen Epstein.

00:02:17.860 Everyone agrees that in the early years of AIDS, there was a lot of like debate over

00:02:23.000 what was causing it.

00:02:24.260 So the first reports appear in 1981 of men who have this like very strange cancer. 0.80

00:02:30.340 And then you start getting more and more reports of like gay men dying of this weird thing

00:02:35.500 and it presents very differently.

00:02:36.920 Is this when they named it GRIDS?

00:02:38.640 Yes, Gay Related Immune Deficiency. 0.94

00:02:41.440 Although even earlier than that, it was literally called like gay cancer in the press. 0.98

00:02:45.400 Holy Jones. 0.96

00:02:46.040 So there's lots of theories on what was causing it,

00:02:48.440 basically because like it was just so mysterious and weird. 0.99

00:02:51.320 One of the theories was that sperm in your butt reduces immune function. 0.99

00:02:57.900 We've all been there. 0.99

00:02:58.680 Another explanation was poppers, which are these like inhalants that men take for muscle relaxant. 0.99

00:03:04.820 It like makes anal sex better. 0.98

00:03:06.600 This was like one of the like fairly prominent early explanations 0.98

00:03:09.380 because a lot of the people that got AIDS had been using poppers.

00:03:12.600 Apparently, poppers do have like a slightly immunosuppressing effect.

00:03:16.780 And I guess they're like really bad for you.

00:03:18.100 I was like reading the Cleveland Clinic website this morning.

00:03:20.520 But because they're a vasodilator,

00:03:22.820 they had been given to heart disease patients for years

00:03:25.800 and none of them got AIDS.

00:03:27.860 So that gets discarded pretty quickly.

00:03:29.940 It is, I will say, very funny to think about.

00:03:33.060 Poppers for your heart.

00:03:34.320 I actually didn't know that they had any like legitimate use. 1.00

00:03:36.980 They were like just for gay men.

00:03:39.380 because they sell them as room deodorizers in other countries

00:03:43.560 because you can't sell them for, like, what people are selling them for.

00:03:46.540 But then there was also a theory basically that it was psychosomatic.

00:03:50.620 So there is a gay psychiatrist named Casper Schmidt

00:03:55.420 who writes an article proposing that, like, it's a response to the 1980s.

00:04:02.380 So here is this.

00:04:04.720 This is from an article called The Man Who Thought AIDS Was All in the Mind.

00:04:08.500 jesus christ the man who gaslit an entire community i know schmidt believed that aids

00:04:16.520 was a psychosomatic disease that it was caused by an outbreak of quote-unquote mass hysteria

00:04:21.860 and that aids patients were in some sense thinking themselves ill according to schmidt

00:04:28.400 the trigger for aids was the rise of right-wing ideology in america following ronald reagan's

00:04:34.200 election as president in 1980. Newly aggressive conservative Christians in their reactionary

00:04:40.980 attacks on gay rights created an unconscious psychodrama in which gay men were cast as 0.99

00:04:47.020 shameful and tainted. I have a question. If that's the case, why didn't this have its onset 0.90

00:04:55.180 during the Lavender Scare? No, I know. It's like, I like where his head's at. He's like

00:05:00.500 blaming ronald reagan it's like oh good let's stick with that but we need to get more specific

00:05:05.800 listen you don't even need to give me more explanation just like if you're like it's

00:05:10.680 oh the lunch place is closed it's ronald reagan's fault like i'm on board this theory didn't really

00:05:16.680 catch fire but like there were lots of theories going around of like what could be causing this

00:05:20.200 the most common one at the time was something known as immune collapse which is basically

00:05:26.840 that gay men are getting so many STDs and they've taken so many STD treatments and they're all on 0.99

00:05:33.240 drugs that like everything together collapses the immune system. It's sort of like, it's like 0.99

00:05:38.960 the Mr. Burns explanation. It's just like, well, he has everything. This is something that like,

00:05:43.540 especially the mainstream press latched onto. It appears the actual scientists discarded this

00:05:48.420 relatively quickly because there isn't a real theory here. You know, that, that thing that's

00:05:53.580 like do this question mark question mark question mark profit this one is like people having sex

00:05:58.000 question mark question mark question mark aids yeah there's also the issue that like i mean it 0.84

00:06:02.000 was the fucking 80s like straight people were also doing a lot of drugs but not the bad ones 0.82

00:06:07.580 just the good ones like cocaine but i do want to say like we read so much bad faith garbage 0.99

00:06:14.700 for this show about like the scientific debate was suppressed and like oh why can't you even

00:06:19.320 debate it. This period is actually really interesting to me because there is a real

00:06:22.640 scientific debate going on. And this is what scientific debate should look like. People are

00:06:28.500 proposing theories. Some of the theories are more plausible than others. But the people proposing

00:06:32.060 these theories then investigate them and try to disprove them. I think looking at the data and

00:06:39.000 going, hey, maybe it's poppers is totally legitimate, right? But then what you do is you

00:06:43.700 go, oh, okay, well, does everyone who has AIDS use poppers? No. Does everyone who use poppers get

00:06:48.980 aids no okay we can discard it that's like an actual scientific debate it's not really about

00:06:53.160 arguments it's about finding data and that's what people did during this period like i don't

00:06:57.180 begrudge anybody who proposed a slightly cockamamie theory as long as they investigate

00:07:02.000 it and discard it which is what people did yeah i think the issue here always is like people who

00:07:06.140 hang on to an untrue thing yeah exactly right and people who prioritize their own bias and their own

00:07:12.520 sort of like pet theory over the actual dignity and survival of this community there is a very

00:07:18.960 fairly fecund debate about this at the time. But then, of course, what starts happening is as we

00:07:23.980 learn more about AIDS, we find much more in heterosexual populations. So by 1982, around

00:07:31.080 8% of people with AIDS were women, were heterosexual women. We start finding it in drug users. We start

00:07:36.460 finding it in hemophiliacs. There were big outbreaks in the Haitian community in America at the time. 0.65

00:07:41.600 So basically, this period of debate basically ends in 1984 when they isolate the HIV virus.

00:07:49.080 And they're like, okay, we now understand this is a virus.

00:07:51.720 It sits in your system.

00:07:53.060 It slowly chips away at your immune system.

00:07:55.320 And then the immune collapse is the reason why people who die of AIDS die of like a very

00:08:00.400 wide variety of things, right?

00:08:02.200 Which is also a dynamic that we like know and recognize from other illnesses, right?

00:08:06.820 Like cancer is a good example of this, right?

00:08:09.380 that like people get cancer and then may die of something like pneumonia just because they're in

00:08:14.680 such a weakened state. A lot of like the most staunch defenders of like Popper's theory or like

00:08:19.160 immune collapse theory basically just like turn on a dime and they're like, oh, it's a virus.

00:08:23.120 We're going to move on and look for effective treatments for this. Most of the people didn't

00:08:26.900 become cranks and just like accepted the explanation and moved on, except for one man,

00:08:32.680 Aubrey. So for the next little section, we are going to have to meet a man named Peter

00:08:38.080 Duesberg. I was trying to think of who

00:08:40.380 the funniest person is

00:08:42.320 that it could be.

00:08:43.840 Frank Sinatra. Peter Duesberg was

00:08:46.280 not on my list. I was imagining an intro

00:08:48.300 that was just, my name is

00:08:50.240 Kid!

00:08:54.060 Like, the early work of

00:08:56.220 Kid Rock is like, pioneering

00:08:58.460 AIDS denier. It's Milli Vanilli. That's why

00:09:00.280 they were invited to the state fair thing in D.C.

00:09:04.260 So, Peter Duesberg is

00:09:06.240 a German guy who is born in Münster in 1936. He gets his doctorate in chemistry from the

00:09:12.660 University of Frankfurt in 1963. In 1964, he moves to California to join UC Berkeley

00:09:20.520 and work on cancer. So he is a cancer researcher. So at the time, there's a huge amount of interest

00:09:27.340 in retroviruses as the cause of cancer. There were a ton of experiments in the 20th century

00:09:33.440 showing that you can effectively inject an animal with a retrovirus and cause a tumor.

00:09:39.920 This is like a wild oversimplification because this is being done in like Petri dishes and stuff.

00:09:43.960 But the basic idea is that there's a direct link between the introduction of a retrovirus

00:09:49.420 and something called an oncogene, which causes cells to divide out of control.

00:09:56.040 And that's a tumor. That's cancer.

00:09:57.780 My mom wouldn't let me get JNCOs, so I did have to get oncos in the 90s.

00:10:01.680 I think you're going to make an unk joke, like an unk gene, like an older, like a middle-aged,

00:10:05.600 a middle-aged millennial gene.

00:10:06.780 Unk goes.

00:10:08.700 So Peter Duesberg is the first person to isolate an actual oncogene.

00:10:14.140 Later on, other researchers find out that there's actually something in your cells called a

00:10:18.340 proto-oncogene, and it's actually the mutation of existing genes that causes cancer.

00:10:24.480 Those people who basically extended that work, they win the Nobel Prize.

00:10:28.780 Peter Duesberg, sometimes people will describe him as like a nominee.

00:10:31.680 for the Nobel Prize or whatever. He's not, but he is adjacent to people and in the field that won

00:10:37.840 the Nobel Prize. So he's like considered very respectable at the time. He is inducted into the

00:10:44.000 National Academy of Sciences, which is like a very prestigious thing. And he's considered very

00:10:49.280 credible in the field. However, he does have one fatal flaw. Everyone who knows him personally

00:10:55.160 says that he is contrarian to a fault.

00:10:59.200 So this is a introduction to Peter Duisburg

00:11:02.740 at some sort of conference by Robert Gallo,

00:11:06.020 who is the guy who discovers HIV in 1984.

00:11:09.180 He's like a retrovirus researcher.

00:11:11.440 So him and Peter Duisburg are like friends in this field

00:11:14.500 and they're like close friends and collaborators.

00:11:16.720 They eventually become mortal enemies

00:11:18.500 because they are on both sides of this bizarre HIV debate.

00:11:21.860 But here is Robert Gallo in 1984

00:11:25.040 introducing his friend, Peter Duisberg, at a conference.

00:11:30.720 Peter Duisberg is a man of extraordinary energy, unusual honesty, enormous sense of humor,

00:11:37.780 and a rare critical sense. This critical sense often makes us look twice than a third time at

00:11:44.840 a conclusion many of us believe to be foregone. However, his critiques are sometimes a major

00:11:50.700 problem for the casual observer? When is he truly debating? When is he only being the devil's

00:11:56.840 advocate? When is he being the devil himself? Jesus Christ. Peter, it is hard for us to tell

00:12:04.160 when you are using your machine gun or your slingshot or simply exercising your vocal cords.

00:12:10.760 In any event, you are an extraordinary scientist, a man who makes life more interesting and

00:12:17.320 pleasurable to many of us and it is my good fortune to know you as a friend holy jones this

00:12:24.380 is like those wedding speeches where it's like they fight all the time and like it's been like

00:12:28.300 a rocky journey they're not gonna make it you know what i admire most about him is how impervious he

00:12:35.940 is to criticism there's also this anecdote from seth callickman's book it says at his 2008

00:12:40.920 conference this is a conference like in favor of duzburg it's like a conference that duzburg

00:12:45.100 organized, by the way. At his 2008 conference, Duisburg was the first to ask questions of every

00:12:50.440 speaker, sometimes even before they finished speaking. There was an impulsivity to his

00:12:54.880 challenging the presenters. There were even times when David Rasnick took the microphone

00:12:58.780 away from Duisburg to give others a chance to speak. It's like, say no more. He's the guy who's

00:13:05.260 like the first just like jolting out of his chair to be like, well, have you thought about this?

00:13:09.640 One of the things that I used to do in nonprofit world was plan our like staff retreats and 0.97

00:13:14.360 strategic planning sessions when you have this guy in the group you are structuring the fuck

00:13:21.820 out of every conversation and you're building everything around like god what's peter gonna do

00:13:27.640 we'll have people write down individually brainstorm then they pair off and share just

00:13:32.440 with their partners then the person who talks less does the report you institute the talking

00:13:38.740 stick policy i'm sorry you can't have the stick absolutely sorry we're passing the talking popper

00:13:43.520 So basically over the course of the 1980s, Peter Duisberg turns on his own work and starts

00:13:55.540 to say retroviruses can't cause any kind of cancer.

00:14:00.680 In Seth Kalikman's book, he says,

00:14:03.200 Duisberg was not reporting failed experiments.

00:14:05.580 He didn't have new data.

00:14:06.920 He had not discovered some phenomenon that his work could not explain.

00:14:09.880 He simply changed his mind despite the data.

00:14:12.400 yeah his whole thing with retroviruses is like he says they can't cause cancer because in petri

00:14:18.420 dishes you can't infect human cells with retroviruses and like cause cancer in the

00:14:23.480 little cells in the petri dish but like this has happened at the time this was not being done

00:14:27.860 because it's like difficult but now apparently it's relatively routine and he still just says

00:14:32.340 this yeah i was gonna ask where you think this resistance comes from like this is quite a heel

00:14:37.600 turn to do on your own work it's really weird it's really odd but it sounds like part of what's

00:14:44.300 happening here is just that straightforward contrarian kind of nature yeah yeah is there

00:14:49.200 other stuff that is leading him to think this way or is he just like nope change my mind there's

00:14:54.400 theories of like he was pissed off that other people in the field were getting nobel prizes

00:14:59.040 and like robert gallo there's a whole controversy with the discovery of hiv but at the time it was

00:15:04.460 consider that Robert Gallo had discovered HIV and they're close friends and so like my friend

00:15:08.120 is getting all these accolades. It seems like there might have been some of that going on but

00:15:12.740 there is something really weird about a guy who like comes up with these theories and then they're

00:15:17.060 just completely just factually debunked right like you can't isolate it and then you can and he just

00:15:21.720 keeps saying you can't isolate it. Yeah that is really strange. His brain doesn't seem to be able

00:15:26.560 to absorb new information. There's something weird about like he just plays the same tapes like

00:15:30.160 the things that he's saying in 1987 are i swear to god word for word the things that he is saying

00:15:35.620 in 2012 boy i'll tell you what brain doesn't seem to absorb new information is about the most damning

00:15:44.660 characteristic a scientist could have i know exactly it would be like if you're like this

00:15:49.200 person's a poet they're not very good with words not super verbal so as a result of this entire

00:15:56.600 kind of made up theory that retroviruses can't cause cancer. And like, he seems to think that

00:16:02.680 retroviruses are like being unfairly canceled. It's like a maligned woman of the 1990s, but it's

00:16:07.960 like a maligned virus of the 1980s. He publishes an article in 1987 about cancer, like, oh, we know

00:16:15.800 that cancer can't be caused by retroviruses. And in the end of that paper, it's only a couple pages.

00:16:21.480 He's like, oh, and by the way, HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Great. Because HIV is a retrovirus.

00:16:26.100 While we're at it, actually, FYI, fucking mic drop. 0.96

00:16:29.380 So we're going to talk a little bit about the theory that he puts forward in this 1987 article. 0.98

00:16:33.960 He starts by noting that the fatality rate of AIDS has been going down relatively steadily.

00:16:41.840 He says, the case fatality rate has declined from a high of 88% in 1981 to 32% in 1986.

00:16:48.920 This suggests either that the virulence of the disease is dropping or that other diseases were diagnosed as AIDS.

00:16:56.880 But it does not mean that at all.

00:16:58.920 Like the case fatality rate of COVID also went down really dramatically in 2020 because more people were being tested.

00:17:05.480 In the early stages of an epidemic, typically you're only seeing the most severe cases, right?

00:17:10.720 You're only seeing people who are hospitalized.

00:17:12.740 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.

00:17:18.920 and what treatments work and like at what point do you need to hospitalize people and all of that

00:17:23.880 kind of stuff. So like the nature of that early time, I would imagine, is just like being in flux,

00:17:30.040 right? He also says that the testing is flawed because HIV tests only test for the antibodies

00:17:37.580 to HIV. You can tell he really thinks he's cooking. He's like, if you have antibodies to HIV,

00:17:43.280 then why do you have HIV?

00:17:45.360 Great.

00:17:46.040 Great.

00:17:46.480 But like a lot of viruses work like this.

00:17:50.180 If you have antibodies, 1.00

00:17:51.260 that means you've been exposed to the fucking thing. 0.99

00:17:54.000 This is also how they do like measles and chicken pox 1.00

00:17:56.100 and all kinds of other things.

00:17:57.080 Like the fact that you have antibodies

00:17:58.240 doesn't mean that you're like cured of the disease.

00:18:01.320 Like that just isn't how it works.

00:18:02.960 To his death, right?

00:18:04.320 Like spoiler, he flogs this theory for the next 40 years

00:18:07.940 until the day that he dies.

00:18:08.940 He died in January of 2026.

00:18:10.440 He does not modify this theory in any way over the course of that time.

00:18:15.640 Like the core of his theory is basically that like a retrovirus cannot sit dormant in your

00:18:22.340 system without causing symptoms.

00:18:24.520 What?

00:18:24.660 He's like, no, no, no.

00:18:25.280 The way that viruses work is they either make you sick, like super sick right when you get

00:18:29.720 them, or they're totally harmless and you just live with them the rest of your life.

00:18:33.180 Those are the only two options.

00:18:34.980 So here's him talking about why the retrovirus theory doesn't work.

00:18:39.020 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%.

00:18:55.560 Among male homosexuals and hemophiliacs of Hungary, about 5% are AIDS virus positive, yet no symptoms of AIDS were recorded.

00:19:05.180 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.

00:19:19.580 So he's saying it's too long.

00:19:21.560 There's no argument here, right?

00:19:23.020 He's just saying, like, well, some people have HIV and they don't have AIDS.

00:19:26.960 But, like, yes, that's the characteristic of the virus,

00:19:29.200 that it sits dormant in your system for, like, up to 10 years.

00:19:31.560 Well, and also, like, it's not like we don't know about incubation periods at this point.

00:19:35.280 Right.

00:19:35.540 You can contract something and have quite some time before you start showing symptoms of it.

00:19:41.360 Like, at this point, we're aware of, like, HPV, for example.

00:19:44.440 He says, like, lead to the conclusion that the virus is not sufficient to induce AIDS,

00:19:48.840 but like or it leads to the conclusion that this virus does this thing which has not been seen

00:19:53.000 before. It's like somebody saying like we know animals can't fly so like there's no birds like

00:19:57.720 birds don't exist. Yes. He is very insistent on this weird thing that AIDS isn't infectious

00:20:03.780 enough. I've been saying this. Gain of function baby send it to Wuhan. Get them duplicating it

00:20:09.340 add the bats to it. Add the bats to it. Here's this. For instance among 1,750 health care 0.97

00:20:18.760 workers with exposure to AIDS, only one or two were found to be antibody positive. Another study

00:20:24.760 failed to find a single antibody positive person among 101 family contacts of 39 AIDS patients,

00:20:31.220 all of whom had lived in the same household with an AIDS patient for at least three months.

00:20:36.680 Is he assuming that there's like a respiratory something? Like what? He's like, oh, it doesn't

00:20:40.580 make sense. But you're like, well, it does if it's spread through like sexual juices and blood. Like

00:20:46.340 I'm not sharing that with my family members who I live with.

00:20:48.540 So yeah, they wouldn't get it.

00:20:49.880 This isn't like somebody in your house has COVID.

00:20:52.540 So now everybody else in your house has COVID or the flu or take your pick, right?

00:20:57.020 It's like somebody saying like, I shook hands with someone with AIDS and I didn't get it.

00:21:00.980 Like, right.

00:21:01.520 Cause it doesn't spread like that.

00:21:02.740 Yeah.

00:21:03.000 Which was the way that people thought and talked about it at that time.

00:21:05.920 The science knew better, but the people did not.

00:21:09.720 They'd be like, I don't want to be in a room with a person who has AIDS.

00:21:12.520 I don't want to shake hands. 1.00

00:21:13.640 I don't want to whatever.

00:21:14.260 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.

00:21:27.040 If AIDS was caused by an infectious agent, Dewsburg claims, one would expect it would

00:21:32.060 have five specific characteristics. One, it would spread randomly between the sexes.

00:21:38.440 Two, the disease would rapidly appear, at least within months. Three, it would be possible to

00:21:44.220 identify, quote, active and abundant HIV microbes in all cases. Four, cells would die or be impaired

00:21:52.180 beyond the ability of the body to replace them. And five, we would see the development of a

00:21:58.260 consistent pattern of symptoms in those infected. So basically all of these are just like,

00:22:03.560 well, no, we wouldn't. It would spread randomly between the sexes. Well, the sexes are not having 0.78

00:22:09.040 equal amounts of anal sex. Heterosexual sex is like less efficient at spreading HIV than anal 1.00

00:22:14.920 sex. We know that. And also the way that sexual contact happens is that it spreads within 1.00

00:22:19.320 communities you were talking earlier about like spreading within specific like racial or ethnic

00:22:23.200 communities spreading within specific areas so like the idea of like randomness there among the

00:22:29.940 sexes is like right not consistent with any sort of like patterns of human behavior that you would

00:22:35.320 reference in trying to figure out how this is being spread and also he's really stuck on this

00:22:39.780 thing we would see the development of a consistent pattern of symptoms in those infected we wouldn't

00:22:46.000 with something that destroys your immune system it's very inconsistent the symptoms of aids because

00:22:50.740 whatever opportunistic infection gets to you first is oftentimes what you die of right so when people

00:22:56.480 have aids they die of a huge range of things they have all kinds of other illnesses that are

00:23:00.560 happening in them which looks insane if you don't know that their immune system doesn't have the

00:23:04.500 power to fight off infection anymore but if you do know that you're like well yeah it's going to

00:23:08.560 be different for different people because they don't have immune systems also like what does

00:23:12.260 right like the flu doesn't look the same yeah that's true right like there's just like that's

00:23:16.360 like a basic you don't gotta be a rocket scientist to figure that one out because even covid people

00:23:21.460 have like wildly different symptoms yes i never lost my sense of smell for example i lost my 0.97

00:23:26.080 sense of taste were you still eating beans just for the texture you better fucking believe it 0.79

00:23:30.900 you wild horses couldn't keep me from a bean just to feel something just to feel something i'm still 0.98

00:23:35.440 I have to do it.

00:23:37.240 So, okay, that's his, like, 1987 article.

00:23:39.960 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.

00:23:49.720 He's saying, okay, HIV is this, like, completely harmless thing which is not contagious.

00:23:54.120 It's only spread mother to child. 0.99

00:23:56.040 There's so much buck wild shit that I haven't even mentioned. 1.00

00:23:58.000 All of these gay men have had it since birth. 1.00

00:24:00.220 Surprise.

00:24:00.900 But then it's like, okay, well, why are people dying?

00:24:02.940 Like tens of thousands of people were dying in America at this time, right?

00:24:05.920 So what are people dying of? 1.00

00:24:07.480 So among gay men, AIDS is actually caused by drug use, poppers, and AZT. 0.99

00:24:14.880 And AZT is one of the earliest treatments for AIDS, but also it had like really miserable side effects, 0.99

00:24:21.140 basically because the dosages were too high and they hadn't like totally figured it out.

00:24:24.540 So according to him, it's AZT that is causing the immune collapse, not HIV.

00:24:30.540 But of course, that's silly because people were dying for years before anybody was getting

00:24:34.580 AZT as a treatment.

00:24:36.000 Well, this is the like sunscreen is actually causing the cancer, not exposure, where you're

00:24:40.360 just like, no, come on, man. 0.92

00:24:41.580 It's so fucking, it's like, you know that 100% of people who do chemotherapy have cancer. 0.97

00:24:45.760 So, you know, there were these big outbreaks of HIV among hemophiliacs, right? 0.99

00:24:50.780 Because hemophiliacs have blood that doesn't clot.

00:24:53.220 And so you get these transfusions of like a clotting agent.

00:24:55.440 And those clotting agents oftentimes were created by merging the blood of like thousands of people.

00:25:01.920 Some of those people had HIV.

00:25:03.240 And so a lot of hemophiliacs got HIV.

00:25:05.340 He says, that's not real.

00:25:07.240 It's just like they have hemophilia.

00:25:08.940 So like they're all dying of hemophilia.

00:25:10.960 It's very funny because like a bunch of people got AIDS from blood transfusions.

00:25:16.380 And then the minute they started testing blood for HIV, they stopped getting HIV.

00:25:21.940 He never really like reckons with this in any way.

00:25:23.640 And then in Africa, there's no AIDS.

00:25:27.660 It's poverty and malnutrition.

00:25:29.660 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.

00:25:37.340 And also like AIDS is not cured by getting more food. 0.85

00:25:40.280 Like there's various food programs and stuff to like improve people's living conditions and like it doesn't cure their AIDS.

00:25:45.980 So like whatever. 0.98

00:25:46.960 There's no point in like going into the shit because it's so cockamamie, right? 0.99

00:25:49.440 Right. Like I'm sure that not having enough food has significant impacts on people's ability to 0.99

00:25:53.960 heal from literally anything. Yeah, exactly. But the idea that that is like the primary or sole

00:25:58.500 cause of something like that is just like, oh, buddy, let's not. So we're not going to go super

00:26:03.440 into debunking. One of the books that I read had like chapter after chapter after chapter of

00:26:08.620 debunking Peter Newsberg's claims. And like, it's so stupid that I really don't want to spend too 0.99

00:26:14.620 much time like with the evidence from like isolation of the virus and like various different 0.97

00:26:18.980 studies of it. Like we really don't need to get into it. It's just like completely outlandishly

00:26:22.480 false. You're doing a me with Tim Ferriss. But I think the main like debunking thing is that AIDS

00:26:28.220 like acts like an epidemic, right? It shows up in an area and then all of a sudden lots and lots

00:26:32.700 and lots of people have it, right? Like if AIDS is caused by drug use, you have to explain why

00:26:37.560 gay men were not getting AIDS in the 1970s during fucking disco. Right. There's no explanation of 1.00

00:26:42.740 this. The other huge problem for this theory is Western Europe. So I don't think it's very well

00:26:47.780 known, but the AIDS epidemic in Western Europe was way smaller, like orders of magnitude smaller

00:26:52.880 than it was in the United States. So in the United States, deaths peaked at 42,000 deaths per year.

00:27:00.240 In the UK, deaths peaked at 2,000. Holy Jones, that's a huge difference.

00:27:06.500 Yeah. And the UK has a smaller population than us, but they don't have 1 25th the population,

00:27:11.060 right? The AIDS epidemic since the beginning has killed 636,000 people in the United States.

00:27:16.320 The entire epidemic over the same course of time killed 27,000 people in Germany.

00:27:21.460 Is that down to like government response?

00:27:23.600 Well, mostly, but not entirely.

00:27:25.380 So it appears that the virus arrived earlier in America and spread faster.

00:27:30.720 So in 1982, the first year we really started tracking this stuff,

00:27:35.100 America had 451 AIDS deaths and Britain had five.

00:27:39.840 We also had a lot more intravenous drug use than Western Europe did.

00:27:44.160 and apparently there was a lot more overlap between drug users and gay men. So when you

00:27:50.020 have these kind of two high-risk groups that are intermingling a lot, that just gives the virus

00:27:54.640 more of an opportunity to spread exponentially. But even that is like at least partially a policy

00:27:59.660 outcome, right? It's not like an act of God that we had way more heroin use in America than they

00:28:04.000 did in Europe, right? So that sort of set the stage for it. But then there's also all of the

00:28:09.440 policies related to AIDS specifically, right? So very early in the epidemic, Western Europe

00:28:14.520 started doing needle exchanges. The UK was eventually handing out 25 million needles a

00:28:19.080 year. They had needle vending machines in Germany. So like 24 hours a day, you can just get clean

00:28:25.020 needles. In the United States, it was illegal for federal funding to go toward needle exchanges.

00:28:31.020 And there were city programs. So it's not like there was no harm reduction stuff going on in

00:28:35.020 the United States, but like the scale of those programs just never reached the same scale.

00:28:41.180 And also most Western European countries have universal healthcare. So they were able to get

00:28:45.480 information and treatments to people much faster. Western Europe was also a lot better at targeting

00:28:50.000 its funding to high risk groups. So in Germany, they just like gave a shitload of funding to gay 0.97

00:28:55.820 activist NGOs. And we're like, Hey, get people to use condoms. Like, you know, your people better 0.96

00:29:00.880 than we do. Just like try to get safe sex practices normalized in your community. Whereas in the US,

00:29:07.340 there was no federal budget line for targeted outreach to gay and bisexual men. But even among

00:29:12.620 heterosexuals, it was concentrated in drug users, sex workers. It was moving into rural areas. It

00:29:18.840 was concentrating among people of color. It was becoming more concentrated, but the vast majority

00:29:23.620 of the funding and outreach had this weird general population tone of like, it could happen to

00:29:29.280 anyone. What did you say the annual deaths peaked at in the US? 42,000. What I want folks to hone

00:29:35.640 in on is that's not just 42,000 deaths a year, which is a wild number of deaths per year,

00:29:42.000 period. That was 42,000 deaths a year in a community that was more isolated, more stigmatized,

00:29:49.560 less likely to receive treatment. Yeah. We have really seen some hard and horrible shit with

00:29:54.640 COVID. We have really seen some hard and horrible shit on a bunch of different fronts. But like, 1.00

00:29:59.280 The level of death toll in a community that couldn't get the fucking time of day from U.S. public health systems is staggering. 0.81

00:30:08.300 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. 0.91

00:30:13.140 But also, if HIV was not causing AIDS, none of this stuff would be true, right?

00:30:18.320 Like, clean needles would not matter.

00:30:21.240 And if AIDS treatments were causing AIDS, you would see higher rates of death in places that provided treatments to people. 0.99

00:30:27.960 Are we going to listen to the clips of the fucking gay jokes and press conferences and 1.00

00:30:31.680 shit like that? 1.00

00:30:32.360 No, it honestly bums me out too much. 1.00

00:30:33.780 I watched it for this and I was just like incandescent for the rest of the day.

00:30:36.500 Yeah, we're going to talk about dead people, not traumatic stuff.

00:30:39.040 But this also gets to the next chapter of the story.

00:30:41.100 So it's 1987. 0.98

00:30:43.580 Peter Duisberg has just published this article with a bunch of crank shit about cancer and 1.00

00:30:48.600 some even more crank shit about AIDS. 0.99

00:30:51.340 He's already been losing credibility in the field for years because of his like weird 0.99

00:30:55.360 cancer stuff, you know, turning on his own work and saying that none of it is true.

00:31:00.120 So this paper is kind of the final nail in the coffin as far as his credibility among other

00:31:05.940 researchers goes. People like really stopped taking him seriously at this point. So then the

00:31:10.500 question becomes, how did this crank theory in a random academic journal become something that's

00:31:16.680 prominent enough that there's like a Foo Fighters benefit concert a decade later? So I said that I

00:31:23.040 wanted to focus on the interesting aspects of the story one of the most interesting aspects of it 0.77

00:31:29.140 is that the popularization of this theory started in the gay media oh crud i know it sort of makes

00:31:38.060 sense when you think about it but it's like it's very sad the first chapters of this so here is

00:31:43.160 a excerpt from stephen epstein's book the first apparent published mention of duzburg's article

00:31:49.460 came in a cover story by John Lauritsen in the June 1st, 1987 issue of The New York Native.

00:31:56.860 So that's a gay publication. This is a gay author. 0.95

00:31:59.040 As the issue's cover advertised, the focus of the article was to encourage people with AIDS 0.78

00:32:04.380 not to take the medication AZT. Recently approved for AIDS patients, AZT was believed to inhibit

00:32:10.960 replication of the virus in infected cells by interfering with the process of reverse

00:32:16.260 transcription. AZT, in other words, made sense as a treatment for AIDS only if AIDS was caused by

00:32:23.880 HIV. This is precisely what Lorentzen disputed, and much of the article was devoted to the

00:32:30.960 proposition that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. With the discovery of the virus, quote,

00:32:37.060 dogma rapidly came to prevail, Lorentzen complained. Against this dogmatism, it was,

00:32:43.640 until now impossible for dissenters to make their voices heard. Quote, since 1984, there have been

00:32:50.360 a few of us who stated in print that epidemiological evidence made it most unlikely that HIV could be

00:32:57.300 the sole cause of AIDS. We were isolated. Some AIDS researchers did not believe in the AIDS virus

00:33:04.880 ideology, but in the interest of self-preservation, they remained silent. Aubrey, the wanking motion

00:33:11.080 i made when i read aids virus ideology this is what conspiracy theories always fucking do they 0.96

00:33:16.580 don't point at the primary evidence they point at like oh the debate was suppressed oh you can't 0.96

00:33:21.200 even ask the question this tedious meta shit to call anything blank ideology is like such culture 0.98

00:33:27.500 war bullshit and like i get that this is the 80s and the culture wars are sort of like in their 0.99

00:33:32.380 infancy with respect to where they are now but like holy fuck dude i mean it's sort of weird to 0.99

00:33:36.760 think about but like this theory was taken up by a lot of the gay press there's a chapter of act up 0.97

00:33:43.020 you know the really famous uh aids activism organization their san francisco chapter was

00:33:46.960 like all in on aids denialism man there's surveys of gay people including gay people with hiv that

00:33:54.280 find that more than 40 percent of them agree with the statement hiv does not cause aids so this like

00:33:59.580 really went around the gay community in a way that i think has been memory hold but also i think

00:34:04.300 psychologically makes a lot of sense that's what i was just gonna say especially in the 80s and 90s 0.99

00:34:08.900 if you have a terminal illness for which there is no treatment or the treatment costs like fucking

00:34:14.280 15 000 which it did in the early years you're gonna be like well maybe it's fine yeah this is

00:34:19.000 also a community that's been completely fucking neglected by the powers that be right the idea

00:34:24.660 that like maybe you can't accept at face value information from the very people who have been 0.78

00:34:31.380 ignoring you and leaving you for dead, like very literally leaving you for dead

00:34:36.120 makes a lot of sense to me. And I also think like on top of that, any person facing their

00:34:41.720 own mortality is like the perfect target for like some real wishful thinking and sort of magical

00:34:49.580 thinking about their own healing and illness and that kind of thing. And so these sorts of like

00:34:54.800 more fringe, like treatments and frameworks and all of that kind of stuff start to appeal to you

00:35:00.040 because maybe then it doesn't mean you're going to die.

00:35:02.600 Maybe then it doesn't mean that this treatment that is really painful and

00:35:06.720 imprecise, right. Isn't what you need.

00:35:09.580 Maybe you need something else completely. I mean,

00:35:11.240 I think this is a little bit of like the Gerson therapy stuff too.

00:35:14.260 When you have cancer, the idea that like, actually you don't need chemo.

00:35:18.580 What you do need is like three square meals of organic produce a day.

00:35:23.560 Yeah.

00:35:23.700 One of those is way more appealing than the other one of those. 0.68

00:35:27.000 So this bounces around the gay media in the late 1980s. 0.74

00:35:30.920 It jumps over to the mainstream media.

00:35:34.060 I swear to God, I'm not making this up.

00:35:36.500 With an Atlantic article. 1.00

00:35:38.420 God damn it, Michael! 0.99

00:35:39.580 That popularizes the theory. 1.00

00:35:41.920 I know like 90% of my career at this point is fucking complaining about the Atlantic.

00:35:45.100 I genuinely did not know this when I started researching this episode. 0.95

00:35:48.340 Penned by a three-year-old Thomas Chatterton Williams.

00:35:51.560 Oh God, I know. 0.99

00:35:53.180 But it's the same fucking thing. 0.99

00:35:54.420 It's this, like, weird fetish for contrarianism. 0.99

00:35:57.280 Like, what if everything you know is wrong?

00:35:59.200 So this article is called AIDS and Insects, and it rests on the theory that AIDS is actually caused by pubic lice. 0.98

00:36:08.920 Again, anything of, like, sexual behavior and stuff has been completely discarded because of fucking hemophiliacs.

00:36:14.480 But so the entire article is, as usual, just like, this person has this theory, and, like, they were being suppressed. 0.96

00:36:20.220 They wouldn't get this grant, da-da-da.

00:36:22.060 Great.

00:36:22.260 It has a little vignette at the end about Peter Duesberg and talks about how, like, yeah, he's not getting grants anymore. 0.97

00:36:30.080 He's been ostracized from the scientific community because what he's saying is fucking wrong. 0.56

00:36:33.580 Like, he's just obviously wrong about stuff. 0.92

00:36:35.980 And so he's not getting, like, the prominence that he used to.

00:36:39.300 So it goes through all of this, like, ostracism.

00:36:41.460 And then it has this claim.

00:36:43.700 It says he's so certain of his claim, this is that HIV doesn't cause AIDS,

00:36:48.040 he's so certain of his claim that he has offered to be inoculated with hiv and you see this a lot 0.55

00:36:53.900 they're like he's so sure about it he's offered to get hiv oh eat my hat he never did it yeah it's 0.98

00:36:59.780 like bitch you've been saying this for 20 years someone should have just gone there with a 0.99

00:37:02.780 fucking syringe you know what i'm thinking about is did you ever watch the errol morris documentary 1.00

00:37:07.680 dr death or mr death i think it is no this was about a guy who operated the electric chair would 0.99

00:37:15.640 operate, lethal injections, that sort of thing. And when that was banned in the state where he

00:37:20.720 was working, he needed to move on and find something new. And what he found was that

00:37:25.860 because of his experience with like lethal injection and killing people, that he was

00:37:30.200 welcomed with open arms by Holocaust deniers who were like, oh, he can prove that there was no gas

00:37:37.260 in the chambers at Auschwitz. And I just think that there is something like I think we're having

00:37:42.880 a bunch of good ongoing conversations about deplatforming and i do think deplatforming

00:37:48.400 generally speaking is really effective and i also think there is this version of stuff which is like

00:37:53.620 you then get embraced by a group of people who have motives that are not particularly about

00:37:59.560 science or not particularly about helping people or not particularly about like improving the

00:38:04.320 situation right exactly they are people who are like signing on for some serious magical thinking

00:38:10.480 Well, that's what's so interesting is once the mainstream media starts covering it, they don't really cover on the merits, right? 0.99

00:38:16.440 They don't really cover like, well, this guy's obviously a fucking crank. 0.94

00:38:19.020 So they all focus on like the suppression of debate, et cetera. 0.95

00:38:22.020 So there's a British TV documentary called AIDS, The Unheard Voices.

00:38:28.640 There's a New York Times article called A Solitary Dissenter Disputes Cause of AIDS.

00:38:33.720 The LA Times publishes an article called Hero or Heretic

00:38:37.020 that refers to a debate between the dissidents and the AIDS establishment. 0.99

00:38:42.640 This is like all those fucking profiles of Richard Spencer. 0.97

00:38:45.880 The New York Times article, which I also read, is like very negative. 0.99

00:38:48.420 It's like, well, this guy's completely wrong.

00:38:50.380 But the framing, the entire framing of the article is like, oh, there's a debate over this.

00:38:54.960 And it sort of takes for granted that one side of the debate is wrong,

00:38:57.420 but it's talking about the debate.

00:38:58.980 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.

00:39:11.080 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. 0.99

00:39:17.240 To borrow a phrase from your other co-host, like if you're dumb, this goes super fucking hard. 1.00

00:39:22.420 Right, it goes super fucking hard. So here is an abysmal article in the New York Review of Books, which I generally like. 0.99

00:39:30.520 Duisberg, for his part, not only fails to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the epidemiological method,

00:39:36.840 he also recklessly deploys ill-thought-out epidemiological arguments to support his own drug-AIDS point of view.

00:39:45.680 Nevertheless, as a retrovirologist,

00:39:48.400 Duisberg deserves to be heard,

00:39:50.300 and the ideological assassination that he has undergone

00:39:53.340 will remain an embarrassing testament

00:39:55.200 to the reactionary tendencies of modern science.

00:39:58.660 Irrespective of one's views about the validity

00:40:00.860 of some of Duisberg's arguments,

00:40:03.080 one is forced to ask,

00:40:04.320 at a time when fresh ideas and new paths of investigation

00:40:08.440 are so desperately being sought,

00:40:10.800 how can the AIDS community afford 0.72

00:40:12.680 not to fund Dewsburg's

00:40:14.740 research. Jesus Christ.

00:40:16.320 This is brain dead. It's 0.63

00:40:18.540 fucking brain dead. 1.00

00:40:20.540 This guy is so wrong 1.00

00:40:22.600 and also the idea that drugs

00:40:24.900 cause AIDS has

00:40:26.620 been investigated. People looked

00:40:28.540 into poppers. People looked into this immune

00:40:30.580 collapse thing and discarded it 0.97

00:40:32.600 because it doesn't make any fucking sense. 0.90

00:40:34.940 At the beginning, they're like, oh yeah, 0.97

00:40:36.780 he totally misunderstands epidemiology

00:40:38.720 and he's misrepresenting other people's

00:40:40.860 data, but you should fund him anyway.

00:40:42.680 No, if you're misrepresenting people's data and you're making arguments that are obviously

00:40:46.520 false at this point and not implementing new information into your worldview, you shouldn't

00:40:52.400 be funded.

00:40:52.940 That's not how science works.

00:40:54.140 You stand on the shoulders of giants. 0.99

00:40:57.020 You're not supposed to just like fucking chip away at the fucking shin bones of giants and 0.99

00:41:01.540 be like, let's start this debate over with. 0.99

00:41:03.280 You can't have scientific advancement under that view.

00:41:07.640 Keep in mind, he has tenure at UC Berkeley.

00:41:10.180 He works at UC Berkeley for the rest of his life.

00:41:11.960 Tenure.

00:41:12.400 a near perfect system i know no no notes no notes not a single one and then also he keeps 0.98

00:41:18.160 presenting papers to journals but they can't get past peer review partly because they're crank shit 0.68

00:41:22.840 partly because he doesn't do research anymore all he does is essentially write op-eds like he just 0.94

00:41:27.900 writes his like opinion and his analysis of pre-existing data he's not doing any actual work

00:41:32.840 well and he's off on his own little island right he's he's been set adrift on his own little ice

00:41:37.740 flow and nobody is out there with him right so like that alone should be like a sign that you 0.97

00:41:45.940 know maybe he's galileo exactly he makes that argument all the fucking time it's so annoying 0.82

00:41:52.300 probably not he's like they said galileo was wrong yeah but they also say that like laura loomer is 0.87

00:41:57.100 wrong and she fucking is sometimes people are right about who's wrong yes but i do actually

00:42:01.560 want to talk a little bit about how the scientific establishment treats peter duzburg because i 0.99

00:42:06.860 actually think scientists were good on the way that they treated him. So in the late 1980s,

00:42:13.380 right after Duisberg publishes his article about like cancer and like, oh, by the way,

00:42:18.000 HIV isn't real. There's a huge period of debate. So because he was such an eminent scientist,

00:42:23.480 because he was so prestigious in the field, people are like, okay, let's address this. So

00:42:27.040 there's a debate in a journal where Peter Duisberg writes an article called HIV does not cause AIDS,

00:42:32.660 and then respondents write one called HIV Causes AIDS. There's like a robust debate within journals.

00:42:38.880 There is also this excerpt. This is from a New Yorker article much later.

00:42:45.780 In 1988, in an effort to put Dewsburg's theories to rest, the American Foundation for AIDS Research

00:42:52.460 sponsored a scientific forum in Washington, D.C. on the origins of the epidemic. One after another,

00:42:59.300 researchers presented data linking the increase of HIV infections around the world to the growing

00:43:04.860 number of AIDS cases. Duisburg rejected the data completely. This was at a time when AIDS was still

00:43:11.400 widely seen as a death sentence, and people had even committed suicide after learning they were

00:43:16.940 infected. Anthony Fauci, the federal government's leading AIDS expert, sat silently for hours,

00:43:22.940 usually the most circumspect of scientists he finally erupted this is murder he said after

00:43:29.900 listening to duzburg speak it's really just that simple cooking boy the sort of the end of the

00:43:35.760 debate period is when a guy named john maddox who is the editor-in-chief of nature publishes

00:43:42.360 an article called has duzburg a right to reply where he talks about how whenever they publish 0.87

00:43:48.600 fucking anything about HIV, 0.97

00:43:51.160 Dewsberg will write like a letter 1.00

00:43:52.600 to the editor being like,

00:43:53.580 that's based on the idea that it's a virus

00:43:55.040 and it causes AIDS and that's not true.

00:43:57.140 They usually publish them

00:43:58.480 because like he's, you know,

00:43:59.320 a member of the National Academy of Sciences

00:44:00.500 and stuff.

00:44:01.200 He describes becoming increasingly frustrated

00:44:04.300 with this, like with every single 0.99

00:44:06.860 fucking article we write, 0.99

00:44:07.940 you write essentially the same response. 1.00

00:44:10.540 He also goes over how like during this period,

00:44:13.420 Dewsberg is very obviously

00:44:15.120 operating in bad faith.

00:44:16.800 So one of Duisburg's arguments at the time is that if this is caused by a virus,

00:44:23.060 why is it that gay men with AIDS get Kaposi's sarcoma, which is the skin condition,

00:44:28.140 and hemophiliacs with AIDS don't get it, right?

00:44:31.200 This is like one of the original arguments against the idea that it's caused by a virus,

00:44:35.360 which I think was kind of plausible at the time, right?

00:44:37.640 Like it's presenting very differently for different groups.

00:44:39.720 But eventually they learn that Kaposi's sarcoma is caused by a version of the herpes virus.

00:44:44.460 When your immune system collapses, the skin condition is mostly seen in like people in their 80s,

00:44:49.900 all of a sudden shows up on like men in their 20s.

00:44:52.420 But it's because it's sexually transmitted and hemophiliacs are not having a ton of sex

00:44:57.240 and so hemophiliacs don't have Kaposi's sarcoma.

00:44:59.580 There's like a really obvious explanation for this.

00:45:02.100 There was a question, like a legitimate question.

00:45:04.200 We investigated and we learned the answer to that question.

00:45:07.040 But Dewsburg keeps just saying this.

00:45:09.060 And this John Maddox guy is like, look man, you have an answer.

00:45:11.800 If you're acting in good faith, you should not be using this as an argument anymore.

00:45:15.240 We know the explanation for it, and it's congruent with AIDS being caused by the HIV 0.93

00:45:19.240 writers. 0.81

00:45:19.900 And also, like, how many times are you going to write the same LTE?

00:45:22.840 Exactly.

00:45:23.400 You are just kind of wasting everybody's time at this point.

00:45:25.980 And so that's essentially what he says in, like, the rest of the article.

00:45:28.640 So here is an excerpt from later.

00:45:31.720 Nature's most recent refusal of an intended publication by Dewsberg was his response to

00:45:36.360 an article on the drug hypothesis by M. Asher.

00:45:40.140 The study used data on a group of more than 1,000 men recruited in 1984 in San Francisco

00:45:45.240 to show no correlation between the incidence of AIDS and previous drug taking.

00:45:50.300 So this is kind of an open and shut thing that if AIDS is caused by drug use,

00:45:54.580 you'd see much higher incidence of AIDS among drug users, and that is not what the study finds.

00:45:59.460 Duisburg's unpublished reply, on the basis of what is most charitably called a misreading of

00:46:04.340 the text, asserts that the authors must have fabricated some of their data.

00:46:09.460 He goes on to claim that the author's argument supports his view, not theirs.

00:46:14.760 He quarrels with an imagined failure to collect data on drug use after recruitment and claims

00:46:20.740 that a two-year study cannot test the hypothesis of drug toxicity requiring 10 years for its

00:46:26.260 effects to become overt.

00:46:28.260 The truth is that a person's right of reply may conflict with a journal's obligations

00:46:32.860 to its readers to provide them with authentic information.

00:46:36.900 Whatever Duisberg's friends say, the right of reply must be modulated by its content.

00:46:42.340 It's so interesting to see this because this is 1993 in the letters to the editor section

00:46:48.220 of a journal, and it's precisely the debate we're having now.

00:46:51.140 Yeah.

00:46:51.360 He has a right to reply, like, I guess, like he has freedom of speech, etc.

00:46:57.100 But also, people who read fucking Nature, one of those prestigious publications in the

00:47:01.860 country, have a right to read things that are true. 0.94

00:47:04.140 Right. You have to have a limit where you just say this person is operating in bad faith. We're

00:47:09.360 not going to do this debate anymore. I think that's totally reasonable, especially with this

00:47:13.640 fucking guy who is just like lying through his teeth at this point. I think the question here 0.99

00:47:18.660 is like, what's our cultural and like, what's this institution's tolerance for people being

00:47:24.220 so loud and so wrong? Yeah. Yeah. Right. And actually, what's the cost benefit analysis of

00:47:29.140 letting everyone speak on everything? Exactly. Because there is a cost. And I think it's

00:47:33.400 tempting to go, ah, everyone's entitled to their opinion, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that can

00:47:38.040 really get you into some bad situations when you're talking about like scientific findings

00:47:43.020 that involve people's like health and mortality. There's a good article about this called

00:47:48.200 Defending the Boundaries of Science, AIDS Denialism, Peer Review, and the Medical Hypothesis Saga by

00:47:53.340 Nicola Natras. And she says, what Duisburg has lost is not freedom, but rather the opportunity

00:47:58.680 to publish in a seemingly scientific journal without having to subject his arguments to peer

00:48:02.940 review this really isn't an issue of like freedom of speech this is an issue of like do you get to

00:48:09.600 be seen as a credible scientist when you're not saying things that are credible yeah there's

00:48:14.140 another really good article about this kind of the construction of scientific debate called

00:48:18.260 aids nihilism versus science okay so here's this excerpt as brian foley a scientist who works with

00:48:25.720 the hiv database at los alamos national laboratory commented after a long blog exchange with south

00:48:32.660 African AIDS denialist Anita Allen, there is no such thing as scientific debate, really.

00:48:39.500 Science is about experiments, data and theories to explain the data. If Anita says, quote,

00:48:45.420 the virus has never been isolated. And I say, quote, in fact, dozens of infectious molecular

00:48:51.360 clones of HIV one have been generated. And that is as good as isolation gets for retroviruses.

00:48:58.420 One of us has to be lying. This like really crystallized something for me.

00:49:01.680 yeah totally there's like true shit and there's not true shit there's no such thing as scientific 0.98

00:49:06.360 debate it's like perfect because i mean on some level there is scientific debate like we talked 0.99

00:49:10.940 about that period 1981 to 1984 when there was scientific debate about like okay is it poppers

00:49:16.260 is it immune collapse that is all totally legitimate but it was legitimate because it

00:49:21.080 was followed up by investigation and people discarding hypotheses when they turned out

00:49:27.240 not to be true that is what scientific debate looks like to the extent that there's a scientific 0.94

00:49:31.820 debate it is investigating hypotheses not just making the same fucking arguments for decades

00:49:38.460 despite no data behind them right if you think about you know how this would translate imagine 0.78

00:49:44.040 like working at like a car factory and being like i have a difference of opinion i think the steering

00:49:48.820 wheel goes in the trunk yeah yeah you'd be like you don't get to have that opinion dude so basically 0.99

00:49:54.040 nature just decides like we're not going to publish this fucking guy. There's also an extremely good 0.93

00:49:59.640 faith effort to investigate Dewsburg's claims by the journal Science. They assigned reporters for

00:50:07.300 three months to look into like this theory that HIV does not cause AIDS. They engage with Dewsburg

00:50:14.380 a ton. They interview more than 50 experts and they dedicate eight pages of an issue to the most

00:50:20.860 thorough comprehensive debunking they do a whole like back and forth of deusberg they're like oh

00:50:24.780 yeah you said this but we looked into it and you can't explain it and they send it back to him and

00:50:28.560 he just like changes the subject or ignores it right so it's very very very obvious by this

00:50:32.800 point that like it's completely false and then deusberg is just like not a credible actor lots

00:50:37.420 of journals have lots of different names there's something really uniquely incredible about being

00:50:42.480 like this guy got fucking bodied by like science and nature and there's an overwhelming sense

00:50:50.940 throughout the piece of like do we really have to do this right like now everyone has the anthony 0.96

00:50:56.600 fauci belabored sigh exactly so basically the sort of scientific establishment took this debate in

00:51:03.740 good faith they debated him directly by 1994 they're like we're done and we're just gonna

00:51:08.320 ignore you from now on he continues not to get grants but people don't really like publish things 0.96

00:51:12.740 they don't publish his fucking deranged op-eds and AIDS denialism really goes dormant for a while 0.93

00:51:17.560 there's a pretty long period starting in the late 1990s where AIDS denialism doesn't really show up 0.99

00:51:24.100 in mainstream media and when it does it's typically framed as like look at this kooky weirdo who

00:51:30.060 believes this crazy thing it's not really framed as like a debate or we need to hear this out it's

00:51:36.380 not given a lot of credibility. Part of the reason for that is this very high profile debunking in

00:51:41.000 science in 1994. But there are three other reasons this like really goes dormant. The first reason

00:51:48.560 is that highly active antiretroviral therapy is introduced in 1995 and like the death rates

00:51:55.180 plummet. So AIDS deaths peak at 42,000 in 1995. By 1997, they're down to 17,000. So from 42,000

00:52:04.120 to 17,000 in two years.

00:52:06.500 It's like really obvious

00:52:07.940 that this therapy, which is based

00:52:10.240 on the idea that HIV causes

00:52:12.160 AIDS, works incredibly

00:52:14.200 well. So that is one thing. 0.75

00:52:16.340 There's also an unbelievably

00:52:18.360 bleak, very high profile 1.00

00:52:20.100 case of a woman

00:52:22.200 named Christine Maggiore. 0.95

00:52:24.540 Heterosexual lady. She gets 1.00

00:52:26.300 infected with HIV in 1992.

00:52:29.040 She starts doing

00:52:30.160 AIDS activism, kind of traditional AIDS activism 0.70

00:52:32.080 like this is why we need antirector virals

00:52:34.060 etc she meets peter duzberg in 1994 he convinces her to get off of her meds what i mean he's like

00:52:43.100 very directly like if you are taking aids meds you should stop because the aids meds are what

00:52:48.180 causes aids oh god so he tells her to stop taking her meds she then becomes like what we would now

00:52:54.460 know of as like an influencer so in 2002 she writes an article called my bout of so-called

00:53:00.360 AIDS. And she gets relatively famous. Like she's in the media. LA Times covers her. There's like

00:53:07.040 a lot of mainstream media coverage of her. Her and her husband produce a documentary called

00:53:11.420 The Other Side of AIDS. This is super bleak, Aubrey. In 2002, she has a daughter and mother

00:53:17.520 to child transmission of HIV is like a very well-known thing. She does not give her daughter

00:53:23.040 any medication and her daughter dies. She says she makes up this whole fucking fake thing that 1.00

00:53:28.980 it's an allergic reaction to amoxicillin because peter duzberg and the whole kind of movement 0.99

00:53:34.820 they're also uh syphilis truthers oh jesus fucking hell so basically her daughter dies of aids and

00:53:41.060 then christina maggiore also dies of aids at age 52 how old was her daughter at the time that she 0.95

00:53:45.880 passed three jesus god it's awful and this gets a ton of press attention right it's like remember 0.99

00:53:51.220 that kooky lady who said that like hiv doesn't cause aids yeah her fucking daughter is dead and 1.00

00:53:55.080 she's dead. Yeah. And this actually happens numerous times that prominent AIDS denialists 1.00

00:54:00.100 die of AIDS. Yeah. I mean, this is sort of like all the like anti-vax guys in the hospital with

00:54:06.020 COVID. Kids have measles now. Yeah. Totally. Of course you're like, yeah, this is how this ends.

00:54:13.340 That doesn't make it less tragic. Yeah. That's just fucking horrendous. And again, it is sort

00:54:19.220 of this like dynamic that you and I have talked about many times on this show, which is just like

00:54:24.580 when people are facing down their own mortality when they're dealing with an illness that is like

00:54:29.880 not well understood or widely embraced of course people fall into this like hole of wishful thinking

00:54:37.180 i know absolutely she sort of made a name for herself doing this thing absolutely she spread

00:54:42.760 the message and also absolutely she suffered the loss of her daughter and her own life like i don't

00:54:48.460 know i know it's just horrible it's just horrible however you slice it so that's like the second

00:54:53.320 thing that happens to really make this go dormant. The third thing is AIDS denialism takes over South

00:54:58.580 Africa. So Thabo Mabeki gets into this AIDS denialism shit. He also meets with Peter Duesberg, 0.99

00:55:06.280 puts Peter Duesberg on like some fucking recommendations committee, like quote unquote 0.98

00:55:09.700 expert committee. He refuses to import antiretrovirals. You know, they're approved by the 0.98

00:55:15.880 FDA in 1995. It's not until 2006 that ARVs really start to roll out in South Africa at any kind of

00:55:22.220 scale. That has been linked to the deaths of 350,000 people. Jesus. We could do a whole

00:55:27.800 fucking episode on it. It's like really, really bleak. According to him, he became a denier when 0.99

00:55:33.260 he read a quote unquote debate in a South African newspaper between like a crank denialist and the

00:55:40.620 president of the Southern African HIV AIDS Clinician Society. So congratulations to whatever

00:55:46.180 fucking newspaper that was. Like you publish a debate between an actual expert and like just a 0.99

00:55:50.420 complete random asshole. And the president of the country read it and was like, there's a debate 0.99

00:55:55.100 here. So that also gets a ton of headlines, a ton of like extremely negative attention.

00:56:01.420 Between all of these things, I think anyone looking at this from afar, which is like most

00:56:06.220 news consumers are just like, oh, it's really bad to be telling people not to take drugs at

00:56:10.160 this point. Right. I think it's really bad to discourage people from taking treatments

00:56:14.040 at any point yes to dissuade people who are not in your situation who are in like different points

00:56:22.820 in their lives different points in their disease development to tell people to step away from 0.69

00:56:28.520 treatments that work yeah is fucking the devil's work i also i i genuinely think this is a

00:56:35.100 fascinating conspiracy theory in that it is just one guy essentially and that it is so directly 0.83

00:56:40.840 and obviously harmful right it's rare for a conspiracy theory to just be like oh yeah this

00:56:46.020 medical condition you have this virus in your system don't take drugs that work for it like

00:56:51.160 that's rare like you could say that with the anti-vaxxers but like getting measles and stuff

00:56:56.260 it's still quite rare because we basically have herd immunity in america right so like most people

00:57:00.220 who don't vaccinate their kids they won't lose their kids to measles right it's still thank god

00:57:04.260 like a relatively rare event if you stop taking anti-revivals like you're gonna get aids it's

00:57:09.240 really, really, really bad. If this fucking guy is not worthy of ostracism and denunciation and 1.00

00:57:15.660 just not engaging in debate, then nobody is. Right. Then who? Yeah. Then who? This is such 1.00

00:57:20.920 a fucking easy one. What I really seized on though is something starts happening in the early 2000s 0.98

00:57:27.000 with the rhetoric of AIDS denialism that sets the stage for the resurgence of it. It's like a little

00:57:34.240 cicada, like burrowing into the earth at this time. So I read the recommendations document

00:57:40.300 that was produced by this board that was advising Thapa Mbeki in South Africa. These are some of the

00:57:48.700 recommendations that are included in the kind of official South Africa, like this is what we think

00:57:54.340 the country should do document. Improving general nutrition and implementing nutritional education

00:58:00.640 and supplements for the general population.

00:58:03.360 Supplements.

00:58:04.260 Investigating the use of immune-boosting medications

00:58:07.080 such as interferons, growth factors, B-complex vitamins, and herbs

00:58:11.580 such as ginseng, Chinese cucumber, curcumin, aloe vera, garlic, and echinacea.

00:58:18.180 Encouraging the detoxification of the body

00:58:20.520 through several inexpensive interventions

00:58:22.740 such as massage therapy, music therapy, yoga, spiritual care, homeopathy,

00:58:27.960 Indian Ayurvedic medicine, light therapy, and many other methods. I am stunned that colloidal

00:58:35.140 silver does not make an appearance. No, I know. On this list. It feels like it should be right

00:58:39.600 there. Where are the adaptogens? I'm not seeing celery juice on here. Nary a single ashwagandha

00:58:45.840 mention. And then the health minister of South Africa, who's appointed by Mabeki, 0.89

00:58:49.940 recommends raw garlic and skin of the lemon. Years ago, I was on Twitter and there was some

00:58:56.100 like discussion happening about like something that was happening in South Africa and someone

00:59:02.220 from Nigeria chimed in and was like, Hey, uh, everybody from the U S from Canada, from Europe,

00:59:09.440 you guys need to know that South Africa is like our Florida. 0.99

00:59:17.520 I don't know shit about shit, but I, that's great. It's occurring to me now. I know the Florida of 0.99

00:59:24.160 africa and also it's a thing that i've spent a lot of time thinking about being like what do we

00:59:28.280 think is the florida of europe i think it might be the uk but then this is also i mean it's kind

00:59:32.380 of florida but it's also very la all this stuff but like it's actually about toxins in your body 0.99

00:59:36.540 and it's actually about like vitamins and like i mean this is the shit we see all the fucking time 0.86

00:59:40.780 now right so this is an excerpt from the website of a guy named matthias rath who we could do a 0.96

00:59:48.920 whole fucking episode on Aubrey he's selling mega doses of vitamins in South Africa and he makes 0.50

00:59:55.300 the pills the same size and color as antiretrovirals oh my god and they're going literally 0.98

01:00:02.020 door to door in townships and telling people to stop taking antiretrovirals and take vitamins 0.97

01:00:07.460 instead like hell is not hot enough for this fucking man but if you go to his website this 0.98

01:00:12.700 is what he says and like I could barely read it because my eyes were rolling so fucking far into 0.99

01:00:16.700 the back of my head oh no just the first few words being never before in the history of mankind 0.98

01:00:22.980 was a greater crime committed it's so boring holy fuck i know never before in the history of mankind 0.99

01:00:30.540 was a greater crime committed than the genocide organized by the pharmaceutical drug cartel 0.99

01:00:36.980 in the interest of the multi-billion dollar investment business with disease

01:00:41.440 hundreds of millions of people have died unnecessarily from aids cancer heart disease

01:00:46.740 and other preventable diseases and the only reason that these epidemics are still haunting mankind

01:00:51.800 is that they are the multi-billion dollar marketplace for the pharmaceutical drug cartel

01:00:57.340 so here's where we get the rfk juniors of the world yes and like scientologists yeah like there's

01:01:03.260 like a bunch of like wild ass cranks that join us at this juncture i don't want to say to his credit 0.99

01:01:08.400 it because he's a complete asshole, but Peter 0.99

01:01:10.360 Duesberg doesn't really make arguments like 1.00

01:01:12.380 this. He eventually does write a book

01:01:14.560 laying out the theory in greater

01:01:16.460 detail, and most of

01:01:18.420 his book, which I read most of, 0.98

01:01:20.360 but it's 800 fucking pages long, 0.99

01:01:22.120 is about, like, the virus. It's all fake, 0.99

01:01:24.420 but it's like, you can't isolate it in a Petrie-ish.

01:01:26.280 It's this kind of stuff. It's not really meta stuff.

01:01:28.200 But I think people are realizing, like,

01:01:30.300 you just need to make these meta arguments

01:01:31.880 about, like, isn't Big Pharma bad? Don't you think Big Pharma

01:01:34.520 is bad? And then you get people to agree

01:01:36.360 to that. And you're like, and also HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Like that is the tactic that they

01:01:40.340 start using. I will say this is also like a known tactic with white nationalist organizations that

01:01:46.160 they'll start with like, don't you think immigration is a problem? Right. Right. And

01:01:49.700 then like very quickly they walk you right back into a swastika. Right. You can make observations 0.88

01:01:57.900 about perceived problems that are like pretty widely held perceptions of those problems

01:02:04.520 as a way of pulling people into like extremely ghoulish harmful rhetoric don't you hate it when 0.86

01:02:13.440 people change lanes without putting their blinker on that's why the holocaust is fake so this is

01:02:18.080 also the period where we start getting like the celebrity aids denialist so this is when like the

01:02:24.020 foo fighters get into it they're apparently friends with christina maggiore and her husband

01:02:28.420 like that's how dave roll and the foo fighters get into this they hold their benefit concert

01:02:32.580 And then we are going to watch the clip of Will Smith talking about his ideas on this issue.

01:02:40.680 Boy, that is going to bum me out real hard.

01:02:44.480 Not that I'm like a big Will Smith guy or whatever.

01:02:48.420 No, I know. Et tu, Will Smith.

01:02:49.800 Et tu? I thought I could trust you.

01:02:52.640 He subscribes to like a different version of this conspiracy theory, but we're going to watch it because it's funny.

01:02:57.900 Great. Let's do it.

01:02:58.680 So here it is.

01:03:00.460 the other voice you will hear is barbara walters oh wow there's a blast from the past zoomers it's

01:03:07.640 we don't have time we're not going to explain who this person is she was on the tv

01:03:10.180 i read that you felt that the government was deliberately spraying coal germs in subways

01:03:18.840 was deliberately trying to make people ill with the aids virus this is pretty serious stuff do

01:03:27.400 you really feel that well that's a good question well i'm with barbara walters now oh that's a

01:03:32.940 serious one okay so i gotta now because people are going to chase me after this people are going to

01:03:37.140 um i believe that it is quite highly possible that that the the aids virus is a result of

01:03:49.620 genetic warfare testing by american agents absolutely

01:03:57.660 oil am i a conspiracy theorist i'm a conspiracy theorist

01:04:04.340 that's art is what that is oh well i mean like i think the tricky thing about all the government 0.73

01:04:17.380 conspiracy stuff is like we do have mk ultra we do have cointelpro fucking tuskegee right like 0.94

01:04:25.940 this is like not unheard of shit but then you're like oh no buddy you didn't even need any all of 0.86

01:04:32.600 those have evidence i tried to look into this one this one is like really fringe and there's not it's 0.98

01:04:38.340 not like they've taken evidence of something and twisted it it's like there just literally is no

01:04:42.140 evidence for it it's like it's just a thing that somebody said part of the challenge here is you 0.62

01:04:45.740 don't need to go looking for the conspiracy on aids it happened in fucking public yeah that's

01:04:51.020 true yeah so you don't need to go off and like play jazz and come up with your own version of it 0.88

01:04:56.900 so basically the aids analysis movement such as it is starts making these like anti-big pharma

01:05:02.640 like anti-scientific establishment sorts of arguments but they don't really catch fire

01:05:07.280 they don't really catch on the issue goes dark but then they get one new argument and so i'm

01:05:15.640 going to send you a text and you have to guess for me where it is from this is from uh 2021 0.76

01:05:22.060 i have to guess where this is from you're gonna fucking know okay give me so easy for you all 0.98

01:05:27.440 right is it from where in the world is carmen san diego yes yes damn it this was spoken by 0.98

01:05:33.040 rockapella uh in a rational universe or in a functioning democracy combatants would duke out 0.61

01:05:40.780 the incendiary HIV-AIDS dispute in an open public debate in the scientific literature between the

01:05:46.820 foremost establishment scientists and the best credentialed dissenting ones. But in Tony Fauci's

01:05:52.900 authoritarian technocracy, the ruling medical cabal refuses to allow this sort of dialogue.

01:06:01.300 Like Inquisition priests, HIV's high clergy stubbornly resist the possibility that they

01:06:09.600 might be wrong from the onset the hiv aids religion has seen its survival in moral absolutism 0.95

01:06:17.400 outright discrimination and merciless suppression of doubt okay you know who this is i don't it's

01:06:24.800 not rogan he can't write yeah for some reason this feels jordan peterson-y to me but i know 0.99

01:06:30.980 that's not right who is it this is rfk jr oh this motherfucker of course the answer was right in 0.97

01:06:38.360 front of us all along because he has this book that comes out in 2021 called the real anthony 1.00

01:06:43.200 fauci the the innovation here and i think what hits really fucking hard if you're stupid is that 0.99

01:06:49.760 all of this aids shit you can tie to anthony fauci yeah and that's what results in the resurgence 0.99

01:06:56.500 of this absurd conspiracy theory so for most of the 1980s anthony fauci was the head of the niaid 0.91

01:07:03.700 and before that, he was an AIDS researcher.

01:07:07.540 So if you read any history of the AIDS epidemic in America,

01:07:10.800 Anthony Fauci is all over it.

01:07:12.740 So essentially anything you want to tie to Anthony Fauci, you can.

01:07:17.180 There were some, I haven't even looked into it,

01:07:18.860 but there's like, there's early trials of AZT

01:07:21.740 where people say that there's discrepancy,

01:07:24.060 the toxicity of AZT when it was being given in large doses.

01:07:28.400 You can then very easily say like,

01:07:29.980 Fauci was trying to poison you. 0.99

01:07:31.540 It's very funny for conservatives to be like, actually, in the 80s, you guys were too shitty 1.00

01:07:37.680 to gay people. 0.99

01:07:38.880 No, I know what it feels very like, you know, conservatives only care about sexual assault 0.97

01:07:44.660 when it's perceived to be happening in bathrooms by trans people where you're like, oh, a thing

01:07:49.660 that doesn't exist. 0.99

01:07:50.760 Cool. 1.00

01:07:51.280 Fauci is the reason why a bunch of gay people died in the 80s. 1.00

01:07:54.340 What do you think about that? 1.00

01:07:55.100 Oh, we think that's good.

01:07:56.100 Right. 1.00

01:07:56.280 We think more gay people should have died in the 80s. 1.00

01:07:58.160 Yes. 1.00

01:07:58.380 They should have died sooner. 0.99

01:08:00.460 Yes. 0.99

01:08:00.740 Yeah. 0.99

01:08:01.540 R.K. Jr. has four chapters, more than 100 pages of his fucking book dedicated to this theory. 0.99

01:08:07.140 Oh, Lord. 0.97

01:08:07.720 He also, it appears, spoke to Duesberg, like Duesberg appears throughout the section. 0.94

01:08:13.220 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.

01:08:18.800 It seems like he uses exactly the same arguments. 0.64

01:08:21.720 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?

01:08:29.360 Yet this is the orthodoxy.

01:08:30.740 it's like right that's just what the evidence shows man it's just it lies dormant in your body

01:08:35.240 like i don't know what to tell you man it's not orthodoxy again that's hpv which is linked to 0.92

01:08:40.980 cancer what the fuck it's the chicken pox virus causing shingles later in your life like there's 0.92

01:08:46.360 just this is a very well documented thing yes most of it is him talking about how like fauci 0.99

01:08:52.600 suppressed debate yeah i guess there was some thing where fauci was going to go on good morning

01:08:56.740 America with Dewsburg and they were going to like debate. And then Dewsburg's appearance was

01:09:01.720 canceled. And he says that like Fauci canceled the appearance, whatever. Maybe Fauci did and maybe

01:09:06.800 Fauci didn't. But also Fauci, again, debated Peter Dewsburg directly numerous times during the late

01:09:13.040 80s and early 1990s. There was a period where there was a lot of debate about this. It's a

01:09:17.420 little bit like the LTE stuff, right? Where you're like, how many letters to the editor are we going

01:09:22.460 to publish from this fucking guy. How many times is Anthony Fauci going to have to debate this dude 0.99

01:09:27.220 on shit that they settled 20 years earlier or whatever? We have to read this paragraph. He's 0.99

01:09:31.220 kind of funny here. Instead of civilly debating these dissidents and writers and common sense

01:09:36.160 questions posed by Dewsberg and other critics, Dr. Fauci's strategy has been to exercise his

01:09:42.180 frightening capacity to silence dissent and mangle reputations. Mangle reputations. They were mangled.

01:09:48.320 history may credit him as the progenitor even the inventor of cancel culture

01:09:53.260 no one was ever canceled before anthony fauci canceled peter duzburg it's really incredible

01:09:59.800 to me that you would go the inventor of cancel culture wasn't like witch trials

01:10:05.080 or like crusades or like like jesus was the original canceled person 0.99

01:10:10.060 like fuck it i don't know it's just so dumb the whole thing oh god i don't know what scientists 0.98

01:10:18.560 are supposed to do right because there was a period of debate there was lots and lots of 1.00

01:10:22.200 good faith debate over this theory for years right they debated it there's also numerous

01:10:27.140 debunkings of this theory right science assigned numerous journalists to spend months looking at

01:10:32.060 this assessing the evidence going back to duzburg having an open good faith debate conversation about 0.97

01:10:36.660 it and it turned out not to be true and yet these conspiracist assholes are still saying oh they 0.94

01:10:42.260 refuse to debate it oh why would they look into the claims all we're asking for is to debate it 1.00

01:10:46.380 it's a fucking lie if the grocery store had nothing to hide they would let me in at 3 a.m 0.96

01:10:51.960 what are they hiding oh i know god it's so boring speaking of boring we are going to watch one final 0.99

01:10:58.520 clip this is from uh i don't know if you're familiar with it the joe rogan experience from

01:11:03.920 the joe rogan experience everyone's favorite joe rogan actually had peter duzberg on as a guest 0.86

01:11:09.980 in 2012 it didn't get that much attention weirdly but anyway i watched the whole fucking thing my 0.98

01:11:14.700 brain is rotted from watching that this was me yesterday michael i watched the entire fucking 0.99

01:11:20.600 call her daddy interview with nara smith oh did you seriously oh no my brain is liquefied 0.99

01:11:26.780 leaking out of my fucking ear so like my condolences dude the cognitive decline that 0.99

01:11:31.760 we're experiencing as people in our 40s is going so much faster due to what we do so much fucking 0.99

01:11:35.820 i lose like five iq points every time i research an episode of the show uh so this is joe rogan's 0.85

01:11:40.820 interview with someone named gavin de becker who's like a security guy and most of the episode isn't

01:11:47.840 about like wellness stuff but they get into a tangent about hiv so here's this and they're

01:11:56.580 making the case that HIV is the absolute cause of AIDS, even though literally the guy who got

01:12:02.880 the Nobel Prize for concluding that feels that you can have AIDS without HIV, and you can have

01:12:07.320 HIV without AIDS. I've raised 10 kids. I have two teenage kids. One of my older boys, 31 years old

01:12:14.000 now, tested positive for HIV. Right away come the drugs, and he and I met about it. We watched this

01:12:21.240 documentary called House of Numbers. And he decided no medication. He's really healthy. He's

01:12:26.620 in the sun a lot. He's having a calm and wonderful life. He lives in Fiji. So he's out in the tropics

01:12:32.560 a lot. And when he took the medication for three weeks, he felt really shitty. It wasn't AZT. It's

01:12:38.620 the newer cocktail. But he felt really shitty. When he stopped, he feels great. And we'll see 0.86

01:12:43.880 how things go. But the idea that they were trying to push was, if you test positive for HIV, they

01:12:50.060 They say it point blank.

01:12:51.120 You will die from this disease and there's nothing that can stop it except these drugs.

01:12:54.900 They say it point blank.

01:12:55.460 And that turns out not to be true.

01:12:57.300 Well, there's a lot of things you said that turn out not to be true.

01:12:59.720 They thought that your children would get it.

01:13:01.860 People in the household would get it.

01:13:03.220 That it could be spread aerosol.

01:13:07.160 No one thought it was aerosol.

01:13:07.980 The Deuceburg thing is fascinating.

01:13:10.500 No, it's not.

01:13:10.980 Because this all took place in the time with no internet, no pushback, no conspiracy theorists online to connect the dots.

01:13:17.980 And his assertion was, first of all, there was the inconvenient fact that the vast majority of the people that got, air quotes, AIDS, all were hardcore drug users. 0.81

01:13:29.380 There were these partiers in the gay community. 0.65

01:13:32.380 And anybody that knows anything about drug use knows that if you're a hardcore drug user and you're staying up all night and you're partying, guess what? 0.97

01:13:40.380 You're going to crush your immune system.

01:13:41.940 And, you know, they were taking antibiotics, which were at the parties in big bowls.

01:13:46.300 Antibiotics.

01:13:46.820 Yeah, because they had all this was a tremendous amount of sex.

01:13:49.920 It was almost a statement of freedom in the gay rights movement. 0.84

01:13:53.320 And the people had all kinds of infections.

01:13:55.780 So they were scooping up antibiotics and taking antibiotics.

01:13:59.180 And of course, AIDS is real.

01:14:00.960 They destroyed their immune system.

01:14:02.820 No question about it.

01:14:03.880 And Poppers and and Duisburg Poppers is the big one.

01:14:07.240 Right. Yeah.

01:14:07.680 Nitrate. Well, Poppers certainly causes the specific respiratory issue that was associated with AIDS.

01:14:13.720 And they kept changing, you know, the NIH and CDC kept changing the definition along the way.

01:14:19.880 And there's a great line in the real Anthony Fauci, a book I know you read, where Bobby says, if you get diagnosed with AIDS in Africa, the fastest way to get cured is go to New York.

01:14:31.180 Totally different diagnostic method.

01:14:34.440 I just feel so sad and so bored. 0.98

01:14:37.700 We're back to the fucking immune collapse explanation. 0.99

01:14:40.240 We're back to poppers. 0.97

01:14:41.160 These things were proposed in 1981 and discarded almost immediately

01:14:45.220 because there's no evidence behind them.

01:14:47.160 It's so absurd.

01:14:48.460 One of the things that I think about a fair bit on this show

01:14:51.160 is how bad public health is at PR.

01:14:54.920 No, I know.

01:14:55.920 If people were hearing much more and media showed more interest

01:15:01.020 in trumpeting the success of these treatments,

01:15:03.720 people would be able to hear stuff like this and be like,

01:15:06.320 oh, that's not true.

01:15:07.180 It's working really well.

01:15:08.440 yeah the treatments that we have are working sort of staggeringly well and the story of his son is

01:15:13.300 like really bleak i don't know all the details it's so fucking bleak dude but it's like oh the

01:15:18.660 orthodoxies that you have it and everybody said you have to take the medicine well yeah man it's 0.92

01:15:23.520 that because the medicine works unbelievably well this is like i'm young and i'm healthy i don't

01:15:27.900 need a covid vaccine that's not coming for me exactly you're like oh jesus christmas thing of 0.96

01:15:32.840 like there were bowls of antibiotics at gay sex parties like no you have to take antibiotics for 0.98

01:15:38.280 like seven days in a row they're not no one's giving away drugs first of all there are bowls 1.00

01:15:42.780 of seven day punch packs booster packs come on right the whole argument is completely fucking 1.00

01:15:48.900 backwards but rogan has done numerous episodes where him and his guests total just dumb ass on 0.99

01:15:54.600 dumb ass violence talking about how like aids is caused by poppers basically there's also this 0.99

01:15:59.520 human centipede bullshit where like they read rfk jr's book and they're like oh did you read 1.00

01:16:04.280 Bobby's book. And then RFK Jr. listens to fucking Joe Rogan. He refers to Joe Rogan constantly. 1.00

01:16:08.900 So that just reinforces for RFK Jr. that this is real. And then RFK Jr. talks about it more.

01:16:13.800 And then it shows up on Rogan again. This is the thing that RFK Jr. has in common with Trump is

01:16:19.340 that they are both so fucking hooked on like self-reinforcing news media, right? Yeah, I know. 0.98

01:16:24.860 Is like all they can engage with. Yeah. It's really stunning. Luckily, I mean, I looked around

01:16:29.920 for this kind of where the AIDS denialist movement is now, it hasn't caught on as much

01:16:35.380 as you'd think, right?

01:16:36.620 Given these like very prominent voices promoting it constantly, it is all over the place on

01:16:40.860 Twitter, obviously.

01:16:42.220 Elon Musk retweeted like this unbelievably ugly boomer meme that was like really lazy

01:16:49.200 memes.

01:16:49.500 There's like text on a background, but the text says, remember that one time in the 80s

01:16:53.880 and 90s when people died from the AIDS treatment, AZT, and not the actual AIDS virus?

01:16:59.200 remember that one doctor who promoted that treatment

01:17:02.280 and then has a picture of Fauci?

01:17:03.900 Sure.

01:17:04.380 They're really fixated on AZT.

01:17:06.700 Joe Rogan goes on for minutes about like these early AZT trials

01:17:10.300 where like they didn't even find a benefit.

01:17:12.180 Like that's not true.

01:17:13.580 It's very odd because like AZT is still used,

01:17:15.980 but in fairly limited amounts.

01:17:17.640 Like it's not the only treatment anymore

01:17:19.780 and you're not given it in large doses.

01:17:22.300 So it's just kind of irrelevant to moan about AZT. 0.96

01:17:24.880 It's also just fucking rich coming from the end of the political spectrum 0.98

01:17:28.440 that is leading the charge against queer and trans people to be like oh fucking cool you care 0.98

01:17:33.180 now no i know and the way that you show your care is by saying hey step away from those life-saving 1.00

01:17:38.820 drugs i know like fuck off you gremlins you were the fourth build on news radio get a fucking life 0.98

01:17:48.960 so these claims also appear i learned in the research for this aubrey in 1.00

01:17:55.080 Plandemic 3, they have this claim that you do see bouncing around that like 330,000 people died from

01:18:02.960 AZT. I don't know where that claim comes from. It's suspiciously similar to the number of people

01:18:09.120 who died in South Africa from not importing antiretrovirals. So I don't know if like that's

01:18:15.680 where they've gotten it, that like Thabo Mbeki gave people AZT and they all died, but like that's

01:18:20.260 literally upside down. It could be a number pulled out of thin air. I do not know. But this goes

01:18:24.040 around like how many people Fauci killed with the AZT right it also it's like an Aaron Rodgers

01:18:29.720 thing so far it has not crossed over like I haven't seen it in like you know Megyn Kelly

01:18:35.300 or these kind of links to the mainstream right I looked for it on nationalreview.com nothing 0.95

01:18:40.660 so it hasn't kind of gone mainstream yet but I feel like all of these things are just fucking 0.89

01:18:46.540 give it time yeah totally that'll be in like the fucking surgeon general's report of like 0.81

01:18:52.220 nutrition standards in like three years time who knows last chapter of this uh in january 2026 0.78

01:18:59.000 uh peter duzberg died he did not change any of his beliefs in his 2012 interview with joe rogan 0.96

01:19:05.960 he's still repeating the dumb bullshit about kaposi's sarcoma yeah great so a wasted life 1.00

01:19:11.100 a piece of shit uh rest in piss and your legacy is a bunch of people dying of aids when they 1.00

01:19:18.280 didn't have to michael you're trying to think of a joke to end with but you're too sad i'm really 1.00

01:19:24.020 sad but i do think i came up with the clickbaity title for our episode oh do it america's next top

01:19:31.800 aids denialist yes the kid rock story

01:19:48.280 We'll be right back.

Maintenance Phase - September 21, 2026

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

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