It can hardly be disputed that science and medicine today are awash in disinformation.
It’s why respected scientists get physically assaulted and hauled before partisan committees in Congress to be smeared. It’s why childhood vaccine rates in some places are plummeting and measles is on the rampage across the country.
Therefore, it behooves us to look at the origins of this outbreak of politically manipulated pseudoscience. Nature has given us a peg, with the death Jan. 13 of former UC Berkeley scientist Peter Duesberg, at 89.
At the dawn of research into what is now known as HIV/AIDS, Duesberg took the heterodox view that HIV was a harmless virus that had nothing to do with AIDS.
“That virus is a pussycat,” he said. He maintained that the cause of AIDS had to be found elsewhere, notably the lifestyles and drug habits of gay men. His claim motivated a phalanx of AIDS deniers, the forebears of the anti-vaccine militants today.
“Duesberg was a pioneer of disinformation on infectious disease,” says John P. Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College and the author of a devastating 1996 takedown in Nature of Duesberg’s claims.
Duesberg’s embrace of a dangerously wrong hypothesis to the point that it destroyed his career is almost a Shakespearean narrative.
The German native built a career in the U.S. as a brilliant virologist with significant discoveries to his credit and long had been revered among his colleagues. But that ended when he entered the HIV wars. By 1996, Richard Horton, then the editor of the Lancet, the British medical journal, could marvel: “He is now perhaps the most vilified scientist alive.”
Some of the adversaries against whom he leveled ad hominem attacks — he accused Anthony S. Fauci, the respected immunologist and long-term director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, of committing mass murder by promoting the use of the highly toxic drug AZT against HIV — could barely hear his name without suffering apoplectic fits. AZT remains part of standard HIV therapies and is estimated to have saved or prolonged millions of lives.
Asked by science journalist William Booth to respond to a Duesberg statement, Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV, replied, “I cannot respond without shrieking.” Fauci derided Duesberg’s scientific claims as “absolute and total nonsense.”
But it would be a mistake to think that Duesberg’s baleful influence on medical science will end with his death.
Duesberg’s heirs are all around us. Actually, they’re more than that — they’re now in charge.
As secretary of Health and Human Services, Duesberg’s most highly placed follower, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is presiding over what has become an overtly anti-vaccination and anti-science agency with a stranglehold on government health policy and funding.
“Peter Duesberg was an AIDS denialist,” says Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist who was active in the AIDS research community starting in the 1990s. “He is the precursor to contemporary denialists like RFK Jr., who brought AIDS denialism into the 21st century.”
Indeed, Kennedy has embraced the denialist position that HIV is not the cause of AIDS: In a 2023 interview with New York magazine, Kennedy attributed the conclusion that HIV and AIDS were inextricably linked to “phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people,” referring to AZT.
In his 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy highlighted Duesberg’s depiction of Fauci as an all-powerful scientific panjandrum intent on blocking his grant applications because his findings might be costly for Fauci’s patrons, Big Pharma.
Kennedy also picked up Duesberg’s broader brief against government science agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Duesberg’s claim was that the CDC existed only to drum up medical emergencies so the NIH could solve them, ensuring the continued flow of taxpayer dollars into both agencies.
Starting in the mid-1970s, Duesberg asserted and Kennedy quoted, “‘the CDC increasingly needed a major epidemic’ to justify its existence.”
Kennedy added his own gloss: “Drumming up public fear of periodic pandemics was a natural way for NIAID and CDC bureaucrats to keep their agencies relevant.”
One can draw a straight line from that statement to the unapologetic malevolence with which Kennedy treats the CDC and NIH, insinuating that they’re rife with corruption and conflicts of interest. I sought a comment from Kennedy about Duesberg’s influence on his thinking, but received no reply.
Because AIDS isn’t caused by a virus, Duesberg maintained, the antiviral drugs used as therapies were worse than the disease. He specifically targeted AZT, then as now a common component of AIDS therapies.
The publicity his claims received encouraged untold patients to refuse AZT, causing a toll that may number in the millions. Duesberg met with South African President Thabo Mbeki and chaired a South Africa conference on alternative AIDS theories in 2000, and influenced Mbeki to deny AZT treatments for South African patients. That policy contributed to more than 300,000 deaths from AIDS in that country alone.
“That’s his biggest legacy in terms of the death toll,” Moore says.
Duesberg’s intellectual journey points to an eternal question in science: At what point does a theory become so discredited and the empirical evidence against it so strong, that its advocates should be ignored?
For Duesberg, that point may have come in 1989, when he published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences outlining his position in detail. The article was filled with with so many assertions about virus science that experienced virologists knew to be false that it “closed the book on him,” Moore told me.
But as Jon Cohen of Science magazine would observe, “the press was less skeptical.” Journalists saw Duesberg as an iconoclastic truth-teller because he carried “visible credentials,” as Gallo put it — after all, he was a professor at a leading research university and a member of the elite National Academy of Sciences.
The press feasted on Duesberg’s self-portrayal as the victim of ostracism arising from professional jealousies — a target of cancel culture before that was a thing. But it rang as false then as do those of RFK Jr.’s anti-science appointees who claim today to have been silenced for their unorthodox views while proclaiming their victimhood at university-sponsored symposiums and appearances on Fox News.
Duesberg’s position also appealed to “the unwary, desperate or gullible” with “twisted facts and illogical lines of argument,” Moore wrote in 1996.
He attracted followers eager to make their name by challenging the scientific consensus on HIV and AIDS.
One was Robert Willner, who had lost his medical license in Florida for claiming to have cured an AIDS patient by administering ozone. Willner went on the road with presentations that included his injecting himself with blood from an AIDS sufferer, as if to show that there was nothing to be feared from HIV. (Willner died in 1995 of a heart attack.)
In his 1989 article, Duesberg had insisted that the true cause of AIDS was drug use by abusers and nitrite poppers favored by homosexuals. AIDS had only been discovered and named, he wrote, because “the particular permissiveness toward these risk groups in metropolitan centers encouraged the clustering of cases that was necessary to detect AIDS.”
His advice was that AIDS prevention efforts should be “concentrated on AIDS risks rather than on transmission of HIV,” which — if followed — would have set AIDS research inexorably down the wrong path.
Duesberg kept making his argument well after evidence that the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, causes AIDS became incontestable. It’s on that evidence that AIDS treatment is based today, with spectacular success — with proper treatment, an AIDS patient can live about as long as an uninfected individual. In the old days, an infection was a death sentence.
The memorial page posted by UC Berkeley after Duesberg’s death walked a tightrope in acknowledging his descent into infamy. In its first sentence, it labeled him as a “public controversialist,” a term new to me. It recounted, “In his later years, Peter enjoyed being a maverick and the center of controversy.”
But it candidly addresses the controversies he triggered by noting that his unorthodox stance “was amplified by political leaders to the detriment of public health.”
And it delivers a final verdict that “the scientific consensus is that HIV is indeed the primary cause of AIDS, and that the current suite of anti-retroviral agents is very effective in slowing or halting the progression of the disease and its spread in the population.”
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