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

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

September 21, 2026

0:00 | 1:20:04

The rise, fall and rise of the most nonsensical conspiracy theory we've ever heard.

Thanks to Gregg Gonsalves for helping us fact-check this episode!

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

Michael: Oh, that's good.

Aubrey: Thank you.

Michael: I'm Michael Hobbs.

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

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

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

Michael: I'm so excited.

Aubrey: But I really do believe that the core thing that people quibble with is the “HIV doesn't cause AIDS” tends to be the thing that people really grab onto. But I couldn't tell you who like some high-profile AIDS deniers are. I couldn't tell you who AIDS denial organizations are.

Michael: The most high-profile AIDS denier is Will Smith.

Aubrey: What?

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

Aubrey: Oh no, wait, I do know this about-- There's a similar thing about Dave Grohl. No.

Michael: Yeah. The Foo Fighters held a benefit concert.

Aubrey: Man.

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

Aubrey: Boy, oh boy, boy.

Michael: Correlation does not equal causation, Aubrey.

Aubrey: What do they think the effects of HIV are?

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

Aubrey: You shut your fucking mouth. [Michael laughs] Are you kidding me?

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

Aubrey: Is this when they named it GRID?

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

Aubrey: Holy Jones.

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

Aubrey: We've all been there.

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

Aubrey: It is, I will say, very funny to think about poppers for your heart.

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

Aubrey: [laughs] Jesus Christ. The man who gaslit an entire community.

Michael: I know [laughs]

Aubrey: Schmidt believed that AIDS was a psychosomatic disease, that it was caused by an outbreak of “mass hysteria,” and that AIDS patients were in some sense thinking themselves ill. According to Schmidt, the trigger for AIDS was rise of right-wing ideology in America following Ronald Reagan's election as president in 1980. Newly aggressive conservative Christians in their reactionary attacks on gay rights created an unconscious psychodrama in which gay men were cast as shameful and tainted. I have a question. If that's the case, “Why didn't this have its onset during the lavender scare?”

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

Aubrey: Listen, you don't even need to give me more explanation. Just like, if you're like, “It's, oh, the lunch place is closed. It's Ronald Reagan's fault.”

Michael: Definitely Reagan's fault.

Aubrey: I am on board.

Michael: This theory didn't really catch fire, but there were lots of theories going around of what could be causing this. The most common one at the time was something known as immune collapse, which is basically that gay men are getting so many STDs, and they've taken so many STD treatments, and they're all on drugs that everything together collapses the immune system. It's like the Mr. Burns explanation. It's just like, “Well, he has everything.” [Aubrey laughs] This is something especially the mainstream press latched onto. It appears the actual scientists discarded this relatively quickly because there isn't a real theory here. You know that thing that's like, “Do this??? Profit.” This one is like, “People having sex??? AIDS.

Aubrey: Yeah.

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

Aubrey: But not the bad ones, Michael, just the good ones, like cocaine.

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

And that's what people did during this period. Like, “I don't begrudge anybody who proposed a slightly cockamamie theory as long as they investigate it and discard it, which is what people did.

Aubrey: Yeah. I think the issue here always is people who hang on to an untrue thing. [laughs]

Michael: Yeah, exactly.

Aubrey: And people who prioritize their own bias and their own pet theory over the actual dignity and survival of this community.

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

Aubrey: Which is also a dynamic that we know and recognize from other illnesses, right? Like cancer is a good example of this. People get cancer and then may die of something like pneumonia just because they're in such a weakened state.

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

Aubrey: Oh-oh.

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

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

Michael: Frank Sinatra.

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

[laughter]

The early work of Kid Rock is pioneering AIDS denier.

Michael: It's Milli Vanilli. That's why they were invited to the state fair thing in DC. [laughs] So, Peter Duesberg is a German guy who is born in Munster in 1936. He gets his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Frankfurt in 1963. In 1964, he moves to California to join UC Berkeley and work on cancer. So, he is a cancer researcher. So, at the time there's a huge amount of interest in retroviruses as the cause of cancer. There were a ton of experiments in the 20th century showing that you can effectively inject animal with a retrovirus and cause a tumor. This is a wild oversimplification because this is being done in petri dishes and stuff. But the basic idea is that there's a direct link between the introduction of a retrovirus and something called an oncogene, which causes cells to divide out of control. And that's a tumor. That's cancer.

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

Michael: I think you're going to make an UNC joke like an UNC gene, like an older, like a middle-aged, a middle-aged millennial gene.

Aubrey: Onco.

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

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

Aubrey: Peter Duesberg is a man of extraordinary energy, unusual honesty, enormous sense of humor, and a rare critical sense. This critical sense often makes us look twice, then a third time at a conclusion many of us believe to be foregone. However, his critiques are sometimes a major problem for the casual observer. When is he truly debating? When is he only being the devil's advocate? When is he being the devil himself? Jesus Christ. Peter, it is hard for us to tell when you are using your machine gun or your slingshot or simply exercising your vocal cords. [laughs] In any event, you are an extraordinary scientist, a man who makes life more interesting and pleasurable to many of us. And it is my good fortune to know you as a friend. Holy Jones.

Michael: This is like those wedding speeches where it's like they fight all the time and it's been like a rocky journey. You're like, “Ooh, they're not going to make it.”

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

Michael: There's also this anecdote from Seth Kalichman's book. It says, “At his 2008 conference-- this is a conference in favor of Duesberg. It's a conference that Duesberg organized, by the way. At his 2008 conference, Duesberg was the first to ask questions of every speaker, sometimes even before they finished speaking. There was an impulsivity to his challenging the presenters. There were even times when David Rasnick took the microphone away from Duesberg to give others a chance to speak. It's like, “Say no more.” He's the guy who's the first just jolting out of his chair to be like, “Well, have you thought about this?”

Aubrey: One of the things that I used to do in Nonprofit World was plan our staff retreats and strategic planning sessions. When you have this guy in the group, you are structuring the fuck out of every conversation. And you're building everything around like, “God, what's Peter going to do?” We'll have people write down individually, brainstorm. Then they pair off and share just with their partners. Then the person who talks less does the report.

[laughter]

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

Aubrey: Absolutely. We're passing the talking popper.

Michael: [laughs] That took me a second.

Aubrey: Thank you.

Michael: So, basically, over the course of the 1980s, Peter Duesberg turns on his own work and starts to say, retroviruses can't cause any kind of cancer. In Seth Kalichman's book, he says Duesberg was not reporting failed experiments. He didn't have new data. He had not discovered some phenomenon that his work could not explain. He simply changed his mind despite the data. His whole thing with retroviruses is, like, “He says they can't cause cancer because in petri dishes, you can't infect human cells with retroviruses and, cause cancer in the little cells in the petri dish.” But this has happened. At the time, this was not being done because it's difficult. But now, apparently, it's relatively routine. And he still just says this.

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

Michael: It's really weird.

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

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aubrey: Is there other stuff that is leading him to think this way, or is he just like, “Nope, change my mind.”

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

Aubrey: Yeah, that is really strange.

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

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

Michael: I know exactly.

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

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

Aubrey: Great.

Michael: Because HIV is a retrovirus.

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

Michael: So, we're going to talk a little bit about theory that he puts forward in this 1987 article. He starts by noting that the fatality rate of AIDS has been going down relatively steadily. He says the case fatality rate has declined from a high of 88% in 1981 to 32% in 1986. This suggests either that the virulence of the disease is dropping or that other diseases were diagnosed as AIDS. But it does not mean that at all. The case fatality rate of COVID also went down really dramatically in 2020 because more people were being tested yet in the early stages of an epidemic. Typically, you're only seeing the most severe cases, you're only seeing people who are hospitalized.

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

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

Aubrey: Great.

Michael: But like, a lot of viruses work like this.

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

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

Aubrey: What?

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

Aubrey: Other infected groups appear to be at no risk for AIDS. In Haiti and in certain countries in Africa, antibody positive individuals range from 4% to 20% of the population, whereas the incidence of AIDS is estimated at less than 0.01%. Among male homosexuals and hemophiliacs of Hungary, about 5% are AIDS virus positive, yet no symptoms of AIDS were recorded. Clearly, the long lag between infection and AIDS and the large number of virus positive cases in which as yet no AIDS is observed lead to the conclusion that the virus is not sufficient to induce AIDS. So, he's saying it's too long.

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

Aubrey: Well, and also, like, it's not like, we don't know about incubation periods at this point. You can contract something and have quite some time, before you start showing symptoms of it. Like at this point we're aware of like HPV for example.

Michael: He says, “Lead to the conclusion that the virus is not sufficient to induce AIDS or it leads to the conclusion that this virus does this thing, which has not been seen before. It's like somebody saying, like, “We know animals can't fly” so, there's no birds. Birds don't exist.

Aubrey: Yes.

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

Aubrey: I've been saying this.

Michael: Gain a function, baby, send it to Wuhan, get them duplicating it. Add the bats to it. Mm-hmm.

Aubrey: [laughs] Add the bats to it.

Michael: Here's this.

Aubrey: For instance, among 1750 healthcare workers with exposure to AIDS, only one or two were found to be antibody positive. Another study failed to find a single antibody positive person among 101 family contacts of 39 AIDS patients, all of whom had lived in the same household with an AIDS patient for at least three months. Is he assuming that there's like a respiratory something like what?

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

Aubrey: This isn't like somebody in your house has COVID. So, now everybody else in your house has COVID or the flu or take your pick.

Michael: It's like somebody saying, “I shook hands with someone with AIDS and I didn't get it.” Right because it doesn't spread like that.

Aubrey: Yeah. Which was the way that people thought and talked about it at that time, even the science knew better, but the people did not. They'd be like, “I don't want to be in a room with a person who has AIDS. I don't want to shake hands. I don't want to, whatever.”

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

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

Michael: So, basically all of these are just like, “Well, no, we wouldn't.” It would spread randomly between the sexes. Well, the sexes are not having equal amounts of anal sex.

Aubrey: Right.

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

Aubrey: And also, the way that sexual contact happens is that it spreads within communities. You were talking earlier about spreading within specific, like, racial or ethnic communities, spreading within specific areas. So, the idea of randomness there among the sexes is not consistent with any patterns of human behavior that you would reference in trying to figure out how this is being spread.

Michael: And also, he's really stuck on this thing. We would see the development of a consistent pattern of symptoms in those infected. We wouldn't with something that destroys your immune system, it's very inconsistent, the symptoms of AIDS, because whatever opportunistic infection gets to you first is oftentimes what you die of.

Aubrey: Totally.

Michael: So, when people have AIDS, they die of a huge range of things. They have all kinds of other illnesses that are happening in them, which looks insane if you don't know that their immune system doesn't have the power to fight off infection anymore. But if you do know that, you're like, “Well, yeah, it's going to be different for different people because they don't have immune systems.”

Aubrey: Also, like, what does?

Michael: Right?

Aubrey: Like, the flu doesn't look the same.

Michael: Yeah, that's true.

Aubrey: Right? Like, there's just like-- That's a basic. You don't got to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out.

Michael: Because even COVID people have wildly different symptoms.

Aubrey: Yes.

Michael: I never lost my sense of smell, for example.

Aubrey: I lost my sense of taste.

Michael: Were you still eating beans? Just for the texture?

Aubrey: You better fucking believe it. Wild horses couldn't keep me from the beans.

Michael: Just to feel something, just to feel something. I'm still eating beans. [Aubrey laughs]I have to do it. So, okay, that's his 1987 article. He then extends theory throughout the years. Because the problem with this section of his weird cancer article is he doesn't say what does cause AIDS. He's saying, “Okay, HIV is this completely harmless thing which is not contagious. It's only spread mother to child.” There's so much Buckwild shit that I haven't even mentioned.

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

Michael: But then it's like, okay, well, why are people dying? Like, tens of thousands of people were dying in America at this time. So, what are people dying of? So, among gay men, AIDS is actually caused by drug use, poppers and AZT. And AZT is one of the earliest treatments for AIDS. But also, it had, like, really miserable side effects, basically because the dosages were too high and they hadn't liked totally figured it out. So, according to him, it's AZT that is causing the immune collapse, not HIV. But, of course, that's silly because people were dying for years before anybody was getting AZT as a treatment.

Aubrey: Well, this is the sunscreen is actually causing the cancer, not exposure, where you're just like, “No, come on.”

Michael: It's so fucking. It's like, do you know that 100% of people who do chemotherapy have cancer? So, there were these big outbreaks of HIV among hemophiliacs. Because hemophiliacs have blood that doesn't clot. And so, you get these transfusions of a clotting agent. And those clotting agents oftentimes were created by merging the blood of thousands of people. Some of those who had HIV, and so a lot of hemophiliacs got HIV. He says that's not real. It's just like they have hemophilia. So, they're all dying of hemophilia. It's very funny because, a bunch of people got AIDS from blood transfusions, and then the minute they started testing blood for HIV, they stopped getting HIV. He never really, reckons with this in any way. And then in Africa, there's no AIDS, it's poverty and malnutrition.

This one also, I mean, obviously doesn't make fucking sense because living conditions in Africa were getting better at the time when many, many more people were dying of AIDS. And also, AIDS is not cured by getting more food. Like, there's various food programs and stuff to improve people's living conditions. And it doesn't cure their AIDS. So, like, whatever. There's no point in going into the shit because it's so cockamamie.

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

Michael: Yeah, exactly.

Aubrey: But the idea that that is the primary or sole cause of something like that is just like, “Oh, buddy, let's not.”

Michael: So, we're not going to go super into debunking. One of the books that I read had chapter after chapter after chapter of debunking Peter Duesberg's claims. And it's so stupid that I really don't want to spend too much time with the evidence from isolation of the virus and various different studies of it. We really don't need to get into it. It just completely outlandishly falls.

Aubrey: You're doing a ME with Tim Ferriss.

Michael: But I think the main debunking thing is that AIDS acts like an epidemic. It shows up in an area and then all of a sudden, lots and lots and lots of people have it. If AIDS is caused by drug use, you have to explain why gay men were not getting AIDS in the 1970s during fucking disco. There's no explanation of this. The other huge problem for this theory is Western Europe. So, I don't think it's very well known, but the AIDS epidemic in Western Europe was way smaller, like orders of magnitude smaller than it was in the United States. So, in the United States, deaths peaked at 42,000 deaths per year. In the UK, deaths peaked at 2,000.

Aubrey: Holy Jones, that's a huge difference.

Michael: Yeah. And the UK has a smaller population than us, but they don't have 120,000 fifth the population. The AIDS epidemic since the beginning has killed 636,000 people in the United States. The entire epidemic, over the same course of time, killed 27,000 people in Germany.

Aubrey: Is that down to government response?

Michael: Well, mostly, but not entirely. So, it appears that the virus arrived earlier in America and spread faster. So, in 1982, the first year we really started tracking this stuff, America had 451 AIDS deaths and Britain had five. We also had a lot more intravenous drug use than Western Europe did. And apparently, there was a lot more overlap between drug users and gay men. So, when you have these two high risk groups that are intermingling a lot, that just gives the virus more of an opportunity to spread exponentially. But even that is like at least partially a policy outcome. It's not like an act of God that we had way more heroin use in America than they did in Europe. So that set the stage for it. But then there's also all of the policies related to AIDS specifically.

So, very early in the epidemic, Western Europe started doing needle exchanges. The UK was eventually handing out 25 million needles a year. They had needle vending machines in Germany, so like 24 hours a day you can just get clean needles. In the United States, it was illegal for federal funding to go toward needle exchanges. And there were city programs, so it's not like there was no harm reduction stuff going on in the United States, but like, the scale of those programs just never reached the same scale. [Aubrey laughs] And also, most Western European countries have universal healthcare, so they were able to get information and treatments to people much faster. Western Europe was also a lot better at targeting its funding to high-risk groups.

So, in Germany, they just gave a shitload of funding to gay activist NGOs and were like, “Hey, get people to use condoms.” Like, you know your people better than we do. Just try to get safe sex practices normalized in your community. Whereas in the US, there was no federal budget line for targeted outreach to gay and bisexual men, but even among heterosexuals, it was concentrated in drug users, sex workers, it was moving into rural areas, it was concentrating among people of color. It was becoming more concentrated. But the vast majority of the funding and outreach had this weird general population tone of like, it could happen to anyone.

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

Michael: 42,000.

Aubrey: What I want folks to hone in on is that's not just 42,000 deaths a year, which is a wild number of deaths per year, period. That was 42,000 deaths a year in a community that was more isolated, more stigmatized, less likely to receive treatment. We have really seen some hard and horrible shit with COVID. We have really seen some hard and horrible shit on a bunch of different fronts. But the level of death toll in a community that couldn't get the fucking time of day from US Public health systems is staggering.

Michael: So, I'm mentioning all this mostly because I just think it's interesting and not all that well known in the United States. But also, if HIV was not causing AIDS, none of this stuff would be true, right? Like, clean needles would not matter. And if AIDS treatments were causing AIDS, you would see higher rates of death in places that provided treatments to people.

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

Michael: No, it honestly bums me out too much. I watched it for this, and I was just, like, incandescent for the rest of the day.

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

Michael: But this also gets to the next chapter of the story. So, it's 1987. Peter Duesberg has just published this article with a bunch of crank shit about cancer and some even more crank shit about AIDS. He's already been losing credibility in the field for years because of his weird cancer stuff. Turning on his own work and saying that none of it is true. So, this paper is the final nail in the coffin as far as his credibility among other researchers goes. People really stop taking him seriously at this point. So, then the question becomes, how did this crank theory in a random academic journal become something that's prominent enough that there's a Foo Fighters Benefit concert a decade later. So, I said that I wanted to focus on the interesting aspects of this story. One of the most interesting aspects of it is that the popularization of this theory started in the gay media.

Aubrey: Aw, crud. Michael.

Michael: It makes sense when you think about it, but it's very sad the first chapters of this. So, here is an excerpt from Steven Epstein's book.

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

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

Aubrey: As the issues cover advertised, the focus of the article was to encourage people with AIDS not to take the medication AZT, recently approved for AIDS patients. AZT was believed to inhibit replication of the virus in infected cells by interfering with the process of reverse transcription. AZT, in other words, made sense as a treatment for AIDS only if AIDS was caused by HIV. This is precisely what Lauritsen disputed, and much of the article was devoted to the proposition that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. With the discovery of the virus, “Dogma rapidly came to prevail Lauritsen complained. Against this dogmatism, it was until now impossible for dissenters to make their voices heard. “Since 1984, there have been a few of us who stated in print that epidemiological evidence made it most unlikely that HIV could be the sole cause of AIDS. We were isolated. Some AIDS researchers did not believe in the AIDS virus ideology, but in the interest of self-preservation, they remained silent.”

Michael: Aubrey, the wanking motion I made when I read AIDS virus ideology, this is what conspiracy theories always fucking do. They don't point at the primary evidence. They point at like, “Oh, the debate was suppressed. Oh, you can't even ask the question. This tedious meta shit-- [crosstalk]

Aubrey: To call anything blank ideology is like such culture war bullshit. And like, I get that this is the 80s and the culture wars are in their infancy with respect to where they are now, but holy fuck, dude.

Michael: It's weird to think about, but this theory was taken up by a lot of the gay press. There's a chapter of ACT UP, the really famous AIDS activism organization. Their San Francisco chapter was all in on AIDS denialism. There is surveys of gay people including gay people with HIV, that find that more than 40% of them agree with the statement HIV does not cause AIDS. So, this like really went around the gay community in a way that I think has been memory hold but also, I think psychologically makes a lot of sense.

Aubrey: That's what I was just going to say.

Michael: Especially in the 80s and 90s, if you have a terminal illness for which there is no treatment, or the treatment costs like fucking $15,000, which it did in the early years, you're going to be like, “Well, maybe it's fine.”

Aubrey: Yeah.

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

Aubrey: Right. The idea that maybe you can't accept at face value information from the very people who have been ignoring you and leaving you for dead, like very literally leaving you for dead makes a lot of sense to me. And I also think, on top of that, any person facing their own mortality is the perfect target for some real wishful thinking and some magical thinking about their own healing and illness and that kind of thing. And so, these more fringe treatments and frameworks and all of that kind of stuff start to appeal to you because maybe then it doesn't mean you're going to die. Maybe then it doesn't mean that this treatment that is really painful and imprecise isn't what you need. Maybe you need something else completely.

I think this is a little bit of like the Gerson Therapy stuff too. When you have cancer, the idea that like actually you don't need chemo, what you do need is three square meals of organic produce a day. One of those is way more appealing than the other one of those.

Michael: So, this bounces around the gay media in the late 1980s. It jumps over to the mainstream media. I swear to God, I'm not making this up with an Atlantic article-

Aubrey: God damn it, Michael.

Michael: -that popularizes theory. I know 90% of my career at this point is fucking complaining about the Atlantic. I genuinely did not know this when I started researching this episode.

Aubrey: Penned by a three-year-old Thomas Chatterton Williams. [laughs]

Michael: Oh, God. I know, but it's the same fucking thing. It's this like weird fetish for contrarianism. Like, what if everything you know is wrong? So, this article is called AIDS and Insects. And it rests on theory that AIDS is actually caused by pubic lice. And again, anything of sexual behavior and stuff has been completely discarded because of fucking hemophiliacs. And so, the entire article is, as usual, just like this person has this theory and they were being suppressed, they wouldn't get this grant, da, da, da. It has a little vignette at the end about Peter Duesberg and talks about how he's not getting grants anymore. He's been ostracized from the scientific community because what he's saying is fucking wrong. He's just obviously wrong about stuff. And so, he's not getting the prominence that he used to.

So, it goes through all of his, like, ostracism. And then it has this claim. It says, he's so certain of his claim-- This is that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. He's so certain of his claim that he has offered to be inoculated with HIV. And you see this a lot. They're like, he's so sure about it. He's offered to get HIV.

Aubrey: I'll eat my hat.

Michael: He never did it. It's like, bitch, you've been saying this for 20 years. Someone should have just gone there with a fucking syringe.

Aubrey: You know what I'm thinking about is, did you ever watch the Errol Morris documentary, Dr. Death or Mr. Death? I think it is.

Michael: No.

Aubrey: This was about a guy who operated the electric chair, would operate lethal injections, that sort of thing. And when that was banned in the state where he was working, he needed to move on and find something new. And what he found was that because of his experience with lethal injection and killing people, that he was welcomed with open arms by Holocaust deniers who were like, “Oh, he can prove that there was no gas in the chambers at Auschwitz.” And I just think we're having a bunch of good ongoing conversations about deplatforming. And I do think deplatforming, generally speaking, is really effective.

And I also think there is this version of stuff which is like, you then get embraced by a group of people who have motives that are not particularly about science or not particularly about helping people or not particularly about improving the situation.

Michael: Right, exactly.

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

Michael: Well, that's what's so interesting is once the mainstream media starts covering it, they don't really cover on the merits, right? They don't really cover like, “Well, this guy's obviously a fucking crank.” So, they all focus on the suppression of debate, etc. So, there's a British TV documentary called AIDS: The Unheard Voices. There's a New York Times article called A Solitary Dissenter Disputes Cause of AIDS. The LA Times publishes an article called Hero or Heretic that refers to a debate between the dissidents and the AIDS establishment.

Aubrey: This is all those fucking profiles of Richard Spencer.

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

Aubrey: To borrow a phrase from your other cohost, like, “If you're dumb, this goes super fucking hard.”

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

Aubrey: Duesberg, for his part, not only fails to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the epidemiological method, he also recklessly deploys ill thought-out epidemiological arguments to support his own drug, AIDS point of view. Nevertheless, as a retro virologist, Duesberg deserves to be heard. And the ideological assassination that he has undergone will remain an embarrassing testament to the reactionary tendencies of modern science. Irrespective of one's views about the validity of some of Duesberg's arguments, one is forced to ask, at a time when fresh ideas and new paths of investigation are so desperately being sought, how can the AIDS community afford not to fund Duesberg's research? Jesus Christ.

Michael: This is brain dead. It's fucking brain dead. This guy is so wrong. And also, the idea that drugs cause AIDS has been investigated. People looked into poppers, people looked into this immune collapse thing and discarded it because it doesn't make any fucking sense. At the beginning they're like, “Oh yeah, he totally misunderstands epidemiology and like he's misrepresenting other people's data. But you should fund him anyway.” No, if you're misrepresenting people's data and you're making arguments that are obviously false at this point and not implementing new information into your worldview, you shouldn't be funded. That's not how science works. You stand on the shoulders of giants, you're not supposed to just like fucking chip away at the fucking shin bones of giants and be like, “Let's start this debate over with.” You can't have scientific advancement under that view. Keep in mind he has tenure at UC Berkeley. He works at UC Berkeley for the rest of his life.

Aubrey: Tenure. A near perfect system.

Michael: I know. No notes.

Aubrey: No notes. Not a single one.

Michael: And then also he keeps presenting papers to journals, but they can't get past peer review, partly because they're crank shit and partly because he doesn't do research anymore. All he does is essentially write op eds. He just writes his opinion and his analysis of preexisting data. He's not doing any actual work.

Aubrey: Well, and he's off on his own little island. He's been set adrift on his own little ice floe, and nobody is out there with him. So, that alone should be a sign that maybe he's Galileo.

Michael: Exactly. He makes that argument all the fucking time. It's so annoying.

Aubrey: Probably not.

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

Aubrey: Sometimes people are right about who's wrong.

Michael: Yes, but I do actually want to talk a little bit about how the scientific establishment treats Peter Duesberg, because I actually think scientists were good on the way that they treated him. So, in the late 1980s, right after Duesberg publishes his article about cancer and like, oh, by the way, HIV isn't real, there's a huge period of debate. So, because he was such an eminent scientist, because he was so prestigious in the field, people are like, “Okay, let's address this.” So, there's a debate in a journal where Peter Duesberg writes an article called HIV does not cause AIDS, and then respondents write one called HIV causes AIDS. There's a robust debate within journals. There is also this excerpt. This is from a New Yorker article much later.

Aubrey: In 1988, in an effort to put Duesberg's theories to rest, the American foundation for AIDS research sponsored a scientific forum in Washington, D.C. on the origins of the epidemic. One after another, researchers presented data linking the increase of HIV infections around the world to the growing number of AIDS cases. Duesberg rejected the data completely. This was at a time when AIDS was still widely seen as a death sentence and people had even committed suicide after learning they were infected. Anthony Fauci, the federal government's leading AIDS expert, sat silently for hours, usually the most circumspect of scientists. He finally erupted. “This is murder,” he said after listening to Duesberg speak. It's really just that simple.

Michael: Cooking.

Aubrey: Boy.

Michael: The end of the debate period is when a guy named John Maddox, who is the editor in chief of Nature, publishes an article called “Has Duesberg a Right to Reply” where he talks about how whenever they publish fucking anything about HIV, Duesberg will write like a letter to the editor being like, that's based on the idea that it's a virus and it causes AIDS. And that's not true. They usually publish them because he's a member of the National Academy of Sciences and stuff. He describes becoming increasingly frustrated with this. With every single fucking article we write, you write essentially the same response. He also goes over how during this period, “Duesberg is very obviously operating in bad faith.”

So, one of Duesberg's arguments at the time is that if this is caused by a virus, why is it that gay men with AIDS get Kaposi's sarcoma, which is the skin condition, and hemophiliacs with AIDS don't get it. This is one of the original arguments against the idea that it's caused by a virus, which I think was plausible at the time. It is presenting very differently for different groups. But eventually they learn that Kaposi's sarcoma is caused by a version of the herpes virus. When your immune system collapses, the skin conditions is mostly seen in people in their 80s, all of a sudden shows up on men in their 20s. But it's because it's sexually transmitted and hemophiliacs are not having a ton of sex. And so, hemophiliacs don't have Kaposi's sarcoma.

There's a really obvious explanation for this. There was a question, like a legitimate question we investigated and we learned the answer to that question. But Duesberg keeps just saying this. And this John Maddox guy is like, “Look, man, you have answer.” If you're acting in good faith, you should not be using this as an argument anymore. We know the explanation for it, and it's congruent with AIDS being caused by the HIV.

Aubrey: And also, how many times are you going to write the same LTE?

Michael: Exactly.

Aubrey: You are just wasting everybody's time at this point.

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

Aubrey: Nature's most recent refusal of an intended publication by Duesberg was his response to an article on the drug hypothesis by M. Asher. The study used data on a group of more than 1,000 men recruited in 1984 in San Francisco to show no correlation between the incidence of AIDS and previous drug taking.

Michael: So, this is an open and shut thing that if AIDS is caused by drug use, you'd see much higher incidence of AIDS among drug users. And that is not what the study finds.

Aubrey: Duesberg's unpublished reply, on the basis of what is most charitably called a misreading of the text, asserts that the authors must have fabricated some of their data. He goes on to claim that the author's argument supports his view, not theirs. He quarrels with an imagined failure to collect data on drug use after recruitment, and claims that a two-year study cannot test the hypothesis of drug toxicity, requiring 10 years for its effects to become overt. The truth is that a person's right of reply may conflict with a journal's obligations to its readers to provide them with authentic information. Whatever Duesberg's friends say, “The right of reply must be modulated by its content.”

Michael: It's so interesting to see this because this is 1993 and in the letters to the editor section of a journal and it's precisely the debate we're having now. He has a right to reply, like, I guess, he has freedom of speech, etc., but also people who read fucking Nature, one of the most prestigious publications in the country, have a right to read things that are true.

Aubrey: Right.

Michael: You have to have a limit where you just say, “This person is operating in bad faith. We're not going to do this debate anymore.” I think that's totally reasonable, especially with this fucking guy who is just lying through his teeth at this point.

Aubrey: I think the question here is, like, what's our cultural. And like, what's this institution's tolerance for people being so loud and so wrong?

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

Michael: Exactly.

Aubrey: Because there is a cost. And I think it's tempting to go. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, blah, blah, blah. And that can really get you into some bad situations when you're talking about, scientific findings that involve people like health and mortality.

Michael: There's a good article about this called Defending the Boundaries of Science. AIDS Denialism, Peer Review and the Medical Hypothesis Saga by Nicoli Nattrass. And she says what Duesberg has lost is not freedom, but rather the opportunity to publish in a seemingly scientific journal without having to subject his arguments to peer review. This really isn't an issue of freedom of speech. This is an issue of, “Do you get to be seen as a credible scientist when you're not saying things that are credible?” There's another really good article about this the construction of scientific debate called AIDS denialism versus science. Okay, so here's this excerpt.

Aubrey: As Brian Foley, a scientist who works with the HIV database at Los Alamos National Laboratory, commented after a long blog exchange with South African AIDS denialist Anita Allen, there is no such thing as scientific debate, really. Science is about experiments, data and theories to explain the data. If Anita says, “The virus has never been isolated, and I say, “In fact dozens of infectious molecular clones of HIV-1 have been generated and that is as good as isolation gets for retroviruses.” One of us has to be lying.

Michael: This, really crystallized something for me.

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

Michael: There's no such thing as scientific debate is like perfect because I mean, on some level there is scientific debate. Like we talked about that period 1981 to 1984, when there was scientific debate about like, okay, is it poppers, is it immune collapse? That is all totally legitimate. But it was legitimate because it was followed up by investigation and people discarding hypotheses when they turned out not to be true. That is what scientific debate looks like. To the extent that there's a scientific debate, it is investigating hypotheses, not just making the same fucking arguments for decades despite no data behind them.

Aubrey: Right. If you think about, how this would trans, like, imagine working at like a car factory and being like, I have a difference of opinion. I think the steering wheel goes in the trunk.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

Michael: So basically, Nature just decides like, we're not going to publish this fucking guy. There's also an extremely good faith effort to investigate Duesberg's claims by the journal Science. They assigned reporters for three months to look into this theory that HIV does not cause AIDS. They engage with Duesberg a ton. They interview more than 50 experts and they dedicate eight pages of an issue to the most thorough, comprehensive debunking. They do a whole like, back and forth with Duesberg. They're like, “Oh yeah, you said that, but we looked into it and you can't explain it.” And they send it back to him and he just changes the subject or ignores it, right? So, it's very, very, very obvious by this point that like, it's completely false. And then Duesberg is just like, not a credible actor.

Aubrey: Lots of journals have lots of different names. There's something really uniquely incredible about being this guy got fucking bodied by science and nature.

[laughter]

Michael: And there's an overwhelming sense throughout the piece of like, do we really have to do this.

Aubrey: Like now everyone has the Anthony Fauci belabored sigh.

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

But there are three other reasons this really goes dormant. The first reason is that highly active antiretroviral therapy is introduced in 1995 and the death rates plummet. So, AIDS deaths peak at 42,000 in 1995. By 1997, they're down to 17,000. So, from 42,000 to 17,000 in two years, it's like really obvious that this therapy, which is based on the idea that HIV causes AIDS, works incredibly well. So that is one thing. There's also an unbelievably bleak, very high-profile case of a woman named Christine Maggiore, heterosexual lady. She gets infected with HIV in 1992. She starts doing AIDS activism, traditional AIDS activism, like this is why we need antiretrovirals, etc. She meets Peter Duesberg in 1994. He convinces her to get off of her meds.

Aubrey: Go. What?

Michael: He's like, very directly like, “If you are taking AIDS meds, you should stop because the AIDS meds are what causes AIDS.”

Aubrey: Oh, God.

Michael: So, he tells her to stop taking her meds. She then becomes, what we would now know of as an influencer. So, in 2002, she writes an article called My Bout of So-Called AIDS.

Aubrey: Ooh.

Michael: And she gets relatively famous. Like, she's in the media. LA times covers her. There's like a lot of mainstream media coverage of her. Her and her husband produce a documentary called The Other Side of AIDS. This is super bleak, Aubrey. In 2002, she has a daughter and mother to child transmission of HIV is like a very well-known thing. She does not give her daughter any medication and her daughter dies. She says she makes up this whole fucking fake thing that it's an allergic reaction to amoxicillin because Peter Duesberg and the whole movement, they're also syphilis truthers.

Aubrey: Oh, Jesus fucking hell.

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

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

Michael: 3.

Aubrey: Jesus. God.

Michael: It's awful. And this gets a ton of press attention, right? It's like, remember that kooky lady who said that, “HIV doesn't cause AIDS?”. Her fucking daughter is dead and she's dead. And this actually happens numerous times that prominent AIDS denialists die of AIDS.

Aubrey: Yeah, this is all the antivaxx guys in hospital with COVID.

Michael: Kids have measles now.

Aubrey: Yeah, that kind of thing.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aubrey: Yep, yep, yep. Totally. Of course you're like, “Yeah, this is how this ends. That doesn't make it less tragic.” That's just fucking horrendous. And again, it is dynamic that you and I have talked about many times on this show, which is just like, when people are facing down their own mortality, when they're dealing with an illness that is, like, not well understood or widely embraced, of course, people fall into this, like, hole of wishful thinking.

Michael: I know.

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

Michael: I know.

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

Michael: So that's the second thing that happens to really make this go dormant. The third thing is AIDS denialism takes over South Africa. So, Thabo Mbeki gets into this AIDS denialism shit. He also meets with Peter Duesberg. Puts Peter Duesberg on some fucking recommendations committee, like “Expert committee.” He refuses to import antiretrovirals. They're approved by the FDA in 1995. It's not until 2006 that ARVs really start to roll out in South Africa at any kind of scale that has been linked to the deaths of 350,000 people.

Aubrey: Jesus.

Michael: We could do a whole fucking episode on it. It's like really, really bleak. According to him, he became a denier when he read a “Debate” in a South African newspaper between like, a crank denialist and the president of the Southern African HIV AIDS Clinician Society. So, congratulations to whatever fucking newspaper that was you published a debate between an actual expert and just a complete random asshole and the president of the country read it and was like, “There's a debate here.” So, that also gets a ton of headlines, a ton of extremely negative attention. Between all of these things, I think anyone looking at this from afar, which is most news consumers are just like, “Oh, it's really bad to be telling people not to take drugs at this point.” Right?

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

Michael: Yes.

Aubrey: To dissuade people who are not in your situation, who are in different points in their lives, different points in their disease development to tell people to step away from treatments that work is fucking the devil's work.

Michael: I genuinely think this is a fascinating conspiracy theory in that it is just one guy essentially and that it is so directly and obviously harmful. It's rare for a conspiracy theory to just be like, “Oh yeah, this medical condition, you have this virus in your system, don't take drugs that work for it.” Like that's rare. Like you could say that with the antivaxxers, but getting measles and stuff is still quite rare because we basically have herd immunity in America, right? So, most people who don't vaccinate their kids, they won't lose their kids to measles, right. It's still, thank God, a relatively rare event. If you stop taking antiretrovirals, you're going to get AIDS. It's really, really, really bad.

Aubrey: Yeah.

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

Aubrey: Then who? Then who?

Michael: This is such a fucking easy one. What I really seized on though is something starts happening in the early 2000s with the rhetoric of AIDS denialism that sets the stage for the resurgence of it. It's like a little cicada, like burrowing into the earth at this time. So, I read the recommendations document that was produced by this board that was advising Thabo Mbeki in South Africa. These are some of the recommendations that are included in the official South Africa, this is what we think the country should do document.

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

Michael: Supplements.

Aubrey: Investigating the use of immune-boosting medications such as interferons, growth factors, B complex vitamins and herbs such as ginseng, Chinese cucumber, curcumin, aloe vera, garlic and echinacea, encouraging the detoxification of the body through several inexpensive interventions such as massage therapy, music therapy, yoga, spiritual care, homeopathy, Indian ayurvedic medicine, light therapy, and many other methods. I am stunned that colloidal silver does not make an appearance-

Michael: No, I know.

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

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

Aubrey: Nary a single ashwagandha mention.

Michael: And then the health minister of South Africa, who's appointed by Mbeki, recommends raw garlic and skin of the lemon.

Aubrey: Years ago I was on Twitter and there was some discussion happening about, something that was happening in South Africa and someone from Nigeria chimed in and was like, “Hey, everybody from the US, from Canada, from Europe, you guys need to know that South Africa is like our Florida.”

[laughter]

So just like, “I don't know shit about shit, but I think it is occurring to me now,-

Michael: That’s great. I know.

Aubrey: -the Florida of Africa. And also, it's a thing that I've spent a lot of time thinking about being like, what do we think is the Florida of Europe?

Michael: I think.

Aubrey: I think it might be the UK.

Michael: But then this is also. It's kind of Florida, but it's also very LA. All this stuff, but like, it's actually about toxins in your body and it's actually about, vitamins and like. This is the shit we see all the fucking time now, right?

Aubrey: Yeah.

Michael: So, this is an excerpt from the website of a guy named Matthias Rath, who we could do a whole fucking episode on, Aubrey. He's selling mega doses of vitamins in South Africa, and he makes the pills the same size and color as antiretrovirals.

Aubrey: Oh, my God.

Michael: And they're going literally door to door in townships and telling people to stop taking antiretrovirals and take vitamins instead. Like hell is not hot enough for this fucking man. But if you go to his website, this is what he says. And like, I could barely read it because my eyes were rolling so fucking far into the back of my head.

Aubrey: Oh, no. Just the first few words being never before in the history of mankind was a greater crime committed.

Michael: It is so boring. It's so boring.

Aubrey: Holy fuck.

Michael: I know.

Aubrey: Never before in the history of mankind was a greater crime committed than the genocide organized by the pharmaceutical drug cartel. In the interest of the multi-billion-dollar investment business with disease, hundreds of millions of people have died unnecessarily from AIDS, cancer, heart disease and other preventable diseases. And the only reason that these epidemics are still haunting mankind is that they are the multi-billion-dollar marketplace for the pharmaceutical drug cartel. So, here's where we get the RFK Juniors of the world.

Michael: Yes.

Aubrey: And, like, scientologists.

Michael: Yes. [laughs]

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

Michael: I don't want to say to his credit, because he's a complete asshole, but Peter Duesberg doesn't really make arguments like this. He eventually does write a book laying out theory in greater detail. And most of his book, which I read most of, but it's 800 fucking pages long, is about the virus. It's all fake, but it's like you can't isolate it in a petri dish. It's this kind of stuff. It's not really meta stuff, but I think people are realizing, you just need to make these meta-arguments about, like, “Isn't Big Pharma bad? Don't you think Big Pharma is bad?” And then you get people to agree to that, and then you're like, “And also, HIV doesn't cause AIDS.” Like, that is the tactic that they start using.

Aubrey: I will say this is also a known tactic with white nationalist organizations that they'll start with, don't you think immigration is a problem? And then very quickly, they walk you right back into a swastika.

Michael: Right.

Aubrey: You can make observations about perceived problems that are, like, pretty widely held perceptions of those problems as a way of pulling people into extremely ghoulish, harmful rhetoric.

Michael: Don't you hate it when people change lanes without putting their blinker on? That's why the Holocaust is fake. [Aubrey laughs] So, this is also the period where we start getting the celebrity AIDS denialist. So, this is when the Foo Fighters get into it. They're apparently friends with Christine Maggiore and her husband. That's how Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters get into this. They hold their benefit concert. And then we are going to watch the clip of Will Smith talking about his ideas on this issue.

Aubrey: Boy, that is going to bum me out real hard. Not that I'm like a big Will Smith guy.

Michael: No, I know, “It’s too Will Smith.”

Aubrey: I thought I could trust you.

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

Aubrey: Great. Let's do it.

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

Aubrey: Oh, wow. There's a blast from the past

Michael: Zoomers. It's we don't have time. We're not going to explain who this person is. She was on TV.

[audio starts here]

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

Will Smith: Well, that's a good question. Well, I'm with Barbara Walters now. Oh, that's a serious one. Okay, so now, because people are going to chase me after this. People are going to chase me. I believe that it is quite highly possible that the AIDS virus is a result of genetic warfare testing-- [crosstalk]

Barbara Walters: By American agents.

Will Smith: Absolutely.

[laughter]

Will Smith: Am I a conspiracy theorist? I'm a conspiracy theorist. All right.

Barbara Walters: Yeah.

[audio ends here]

[laughter]

Aubrey: That's art, is what that is.

Michael: So good. Oh, Will.

Aubrey: I think the tricky thing about all the government conspiracy stuff is, like, we do have MKUltra. We do have COINTELPRO, fucking Tuskegee, right? This is not unheard of shit. But then you're like, “Oh, no, buddy, you didn't even need any.” All of those have evidence.

Michael: I tried to look into this one. This one is really fringe. And there's not. It's not like they've taken evidence of something and twisted it. It's like there just literally is no evidence for it. It's just a thing that somebody said.

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

Michael: Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

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

Michael: So, basically, the AIDS denialist movement, such as it is, starts making these, like, anti-Big Pharma, like, anti-scientific establishment sorts of arguments, but they don't really catch fire. They don't really catch on. The issue goes dark, but then they get one new argument. And so, I'm going to send you a text, and you have to guess for me where it is from. This is from 2021.

Aubrey: I have to guess where this is from.

Michael: You're going to fucking know.

Aubrey: Okay.

Michael: Can be so easy for you. All right.

Aubrey: Is it from “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?”

Michael: Yes. Yes. Damn it.

Aubrey: This was spoken by Rockapella. [Michael laughs] In a rational universe or in a functioning democracy, combatants would duke out the incendiary HIV AIDS dispute in an open public debate in the scientific literature between the foremost establishment scientists and the best credentialed dissenting ones. But in Tony Fauci's authoritarian technocracy, the ruling medical cabal refuses to allow this dialogue. Like inquisition priests, HIV's high clergy stubbornly resist the possibility that they might be wrong. From the onset, the HIV AIDS religion has seen its survival in moral absolutism, outright discrimination, and merciless suppression of doubt. Okay.

Michael: You know who this is?

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

Michael: Yeah.

Aubrey: For some reason, this feels Jordan Petersonee to me, but I know that's not right. Who is it?

Michael: This is RFK Jr.

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

Michael: Because he has this book that comes out in 2021 called The Real Anthony Fauci. The innovation here, and I think what hits really fucking hard if you're stupid, is that all of this AIDS shit you can tie to Anthony Fauci, and that's what results in the resurgence of this absurd conspiracy theory. So, for most of the 1980s, Anthony Fauci was the head of the NIAID, and before that, he was an AIDS researcher. So, if you read any history of the AIDS epidemic in America, Anthony Fauci is all over it.

Aubrey: Yeah.

Michael: So, essentially, anything you want to tie to Anthony Fauci, you can. There were some-- I haven't even looked into it. But there's, like, there's early trials of AZT where people say that there's discrepancy. The toxicity of AZT when it was being given in large doses. You can then very easily say, “Fauci was trying to poison you.”

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

Michael: No, I know.

Aubrey: What it feels very conservatives only care about sexual assault when it's perceived to be happening in bathrooms by trans people, where you're like, “Oh, a thing that doesn't exist. Cool.”

Michael: Fauci's the reason why a bunch of gay people died in this 80s. What do you think about that? Oh, we think that's good. We think more gay people should have died in the 80s. Yes.

Aubrey: They should have died sooner.

Michael: Yes.

Aubrey: Yeah.

Michael: RFK Jr., has four chapters, more than 100 pages of his fucking book dedicated to this theory. It appears, spoke to Duesberg. Like Duesberg appears throughout the section. He has a whole thing about ejection from the scientific establishment, blah, blah, blah, tedious shit that we've already talked about. It seems like he uses exactly the same arguments. He says at one point, “How can a virus be so destructive when it first enters the body, then turns around and plays dead for 10, 20, 30 years. Yet this is the orthodoxy. It's like, right? That's just what the evidence shows, man. It just lies dormant in your body. I don't know what to tell you, man. It's not orthodoxy.”

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

Michael: It's the chickenpox virus causing shingles later in your life. This is a very well documented thing.

Aubrey: Yes.

Michael: Most of it is him talking about how Fauci suppressed debate. I guess there was something where Fauci was going to go on Good Morning America with Duesberg and they were going to debate and then Duesberg's appearance was canceled. And he says that, like, Fauci canceled the appearance, whatever. Maybe Fauci did and maybe Fauci didn't. But also, Fauci again debated Peter Duesberg directly numerous times during the late 80s and early 1990s. There was a period where there was a lot of debate about this.

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

Michael: We have to read this paragraph. He's kind of funny here.

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

Michael: Mangle reputations. They were mangled.

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

Michael: [laughs] No one was ever canceled before Anthony Fauci canceled Peter Duesberg.

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

Michael: No, exactly.

Aubrey: It has been like Crusades.

Michael: Jesus was the original canceled person. [Aubrey laughs] Like, fuck it. I don't know. It's just so dumb, the whole thing.

Aubrey: Oh God.

Michael: I don't know what scientists are supposed to do, right? Because there was a period of debate, there was lots and lots of good faith debate over this theory for years, right? They debated it. There's also numerous debunkings of this theory. Science assigned numerous journalists who spend months looking at this, assessing the evidence going back to Duesberg, having an open good faith debate conversation about it. And it turned out not to be true. And yet these conspiracist assholes are still saying, “Oh, they refuse to debate it. Oh, why would they look into the claims. All we're asking for is to debate it. It's a fucking lie.”

Aubrey: If the grocery store had nothing to hide, they would let me in at 3 AM, what are they hiding?

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

Aubrey: Everyone's favorite.

Michael: Joe Rogan actually had Peter Duesberg on as a guest in 2012. It didn't get that much attention, weirdly. But anyway, I watched the whole thing. My brain is rotted from watching that.

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

Michael: Oh, did you see? seriously. Oh Aubrey.

Aubrey: Oh, no. My brain is liquefied, leaking out of my fucking ear. So, my condolences.

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

Aubrey: Just speed-- [crosstalk].

Michael: I lose like 5 IQ points every time I research an episode of the show. So, this is Joe Rogan's interview with someone named Gavin de Becker who's like a security guy. And most of the episode isn't about, like wellness stuff, but they get into a tangent about HIV. So, here's this.

[audio starts here]

Gavin: And they're making the case that HIV is the absolute cause of AIDS. Even though literally, the guy who got the Nobel Prize for concluding that feels that you can have AIDS without HIV and you can have HIV without AIDS.

Michael: You know, you can't.

Gavin: I've raised 10 kids. I have two teenage kids. One of my older boys, 31 years old now, tested positive for HIV. Right away come the drugs and he and I met about it. We watched this documentary called House of Numbers and he decided no medication. He's really healthy. He's in the sun a lot. He's having a calm and wonderful life. He lives in Fiji, so he's out in the tropics a lot. And when he took the medication for three weeks, he felt really shitty. Wasn't AZT, it's the new herb cocktail. But he felt really shitty when he stopped. He feels great and we'll see how things go. But the idea that they were trying to push was if you test positive for HIV, they say it point blank, you will die from this disease. And there's nothing that can stop it except these drugs.

Michael: “They say it point blank.”

Gavin: And that turns out not to be true.

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

Michael: No one thought it was aerosol.

Gavin: The Duesberg thing is fascinating.

Michael: No, it's not.

Gavin: Because this all took place in the time with no Internet, no pushback, no conspiracy theorists online to connect the dots.

Aubrey: [Michael laughs] Without the advantage of the conspiracy-- [crosstalk]

Gavin: First of all, there was the inconvenient fact that the vast majority of the people that got “AIDS”, all were hardcore drug users. There were these partiers in the gay community. And anybody that knows anything about drug use knows that if you're a hardcore drug user and you're staying up all night, and you're partying, guess what? You're going to crush your immune system. And you know, they were taking antibiotics, which were at the parties in big bowls.

Joe: Antibiotics?

Gavin: Yeah, because this was a tremendous amount of sex. It was almost a statement of freedom in the gay rights movement. And the people had all kinds of infections. So, they were scooping up antibiotics and taking antibiotics. And of course, AIDS is real. They destroyed their immune system. No question about it. And poppers and Duesberg--[crosstalk]

Joe: Poppers is the big one, right? Amyl nitrite.

Gavin: Well, poppers certainly causes the specific respiratory issue that was associated with AIDS. And they kept changing. The NIH and CDC kept changing the definition along the way. And there's a great line in The Real Anthony Fauci, a book I know you read, where Bobby says, “If you get diagnosed with AIDS in Africa, the fastest way to get cured is go to New York.” Totally different diagnostic method.

[audio ends here]

Aubrey: I just feel so sad and so bored.

Michael: We're back to the fucking immune collapse explanation. We're back to poppers. These things were proposed in 1981 and discarded almost immediately because there's no evidence behind them. It's so absurd.

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

Michael: I know.

Aubrey: If people were hearing much more and media showed more interest in trumpeting the success of these treatments, people would be able to hear stuff like this and be like, “Oh, that's not true. It's working really well.” The treatments that we have are working staggeringly well.

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

Aubrey: It's so fucking bleak, dude.

Michael: But it's like, “Ooh, the orthodoxy is that and everybody said you have to take the medicine. Well, yeah, man, it's that because the medicine works unbelievably well.

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

Michael: Exactly.

Aubrey: Where you're like, “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

Michael: Wasn't this thing of like there were bowls of antibiotics at gay sex parties? Like, no, you have to take antibiotics for seven days in a row. No one's giving away drugs, first of all.

Aubrey: There are bowls of seven-day punch packs, booster packs, come on.

Michael: Jesus Christ. The whole argument is completely fucking backwards. But Rogan has done numerous episodes where him and his guests total just dumbass on dumbass violence, talking about how AIDS is caused by poppers basically. There's also this human centipede bullshit where they read RFK Jr.'s book and they're like, “Oh, did you read in Bobby's book?” And then RFK Jr listens to fucking Joe Rogan. He refers to Joe Rogan constantly. So that just reinforces for RFK Jr., that this is real. And then RFK Jr., talks about it more and then it shows up on Rogan again.

Aubrey: This is the thing that RFK Jr., has in common with Trump is that they are both so fucking hooked on self-reinforcing news media. Right?

Michael: Yeah, I know.

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

Michael: Luckily, I looked around for this where the AIDS denialist movement is now. It hasn't caught on as much as you'd think. Given these very prominent voices promoting it constantly. It is all over the place on Twitter obviously. Elon Musk retweeted like this unbelievably ugly boomer meme that really lazy memes. There's like text on a background, but the text says, “Remember that one time in the 80s and 90s when people died from the AIDS treatment AZT and not the actual AIDS virus. Remember that one doctor who promoted that treatment” and then has a picture of Fauci?

Aubrey: Sure.

Michael: They're really fixated on AZT. Joe Rogan goes on for minutes about these early AZT trials where they didn't even find a benefit. Like, that's not true. It's very odd because like AZT is still used but in fairly limited amounts. It's not the only treatment anymore and you're not given it in large doses. So, it's just irrelevant to moan about AZT.

Aubrey: It's also just fucking rich coming from the end of the political spectrum that is leading the charge against queer and trans people to be like, “Oh, fucking cool, you care now.”

Michael: No, I know.

Aubrey: And the way that you show your care is by saying, “Hey, step away from those life-saving drugs.”

Michael: I know.

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

Michael: [laughs] So, these claims also appear, I learned in the research for this, Aubrey, in Plandemic 3.

Aubrey: No, great.

Michael: They have this claim that you do see bouncing around that 330,000 people died from AZT. I don't know where that claim comes from. It's suspiciously similar to the number of people who died in South Africa from not importing antiretrovirals. So, I don't know if like that's where they've gotten it that like, “Thabo Mbeki gave people AZT and they all died.” But that's literally upside down. It could just be a number pulled out of thin air, I do not know. But this goes around how many people Fauci killed with the AZT. It's like an Aaron Rodgers thing. So far it has not crossed over. I haven't seen it in like Megan Kelly or these links to the mainstream. I looked for it on nationalreview.com, nothing. So, it hasn't gone mainstream yet. But I feel like all of these things are just fucking give it time.

Aubrey: Yeah, totally.

Michael: That'll be in like the fucking Surgeon General's report of like nutrition standards in like three years’ time. Who knows? Last chapter this. In January 2026, Peter Duesberg died. He did not change any of his beliefs. In his 2012 interview with Joe Rogan, he's still repeating the dumb bullshit about Kaposi's sarcoma.

Aubrey: Yeah, great.

Michael: So, a wasted life, a piece of shit rest in piss, and your legacy is a bunch of people dying of AIDS when they didn't have to.

Aubrey: Michael.

Michael: You're trying to think of a joke to end with, but you're too sad. [laughs]

Aubrey: I'm really sad. But I do think I came up with the clickbaity title for our episode.

Michael: Go Do It.

Aubrey: America's next top AIDS denialist.

Michael: Yes, The Kid Rock story.

[laughter]

[music]

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