RFK Jr.'s Buckwild Belief That HIV Doesn't Cause AIDS
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What is AIDS denialism and why does it matter?
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. Oh,
that's good.
Thank you. I'm Michael Humps.
I'm Aubrey
Gordon. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase, or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content. Michael.
Aubrey, today we are talking about AIDS denialism. We are giving this episode some sort of clickbait title, but we're basically going to be talking about AIDS denialism, what it is, where it comes from, and where it is now. So do you know what it is?
So I am coming in pretty fresh on this concept. I'm so excited. But I really do believe that the like core thing that people quibble with is the like HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Yes. Tends to be the like 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. The most
high profile AIDS denier is Will Smith. We have a clip later. It's really weird.
Oh, no, wait. I do know this about, um, there's a similar thing about Dave Grohl, no?
Yeah, the Foo Fighters held a benefit concert. Man. But specifically, we are talking today about the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS. Boy, oh boy, oh boy. Correlation does not equal causation, Aubrey.
What do they think the effects of HIV are?
Nothing. The inventor of this theory describes it as one of the most harmless viruses known to man.
Dude, shut your fucking mouth. Are
you kidding me? 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 Kallikman and another called Impure Science by Stephen Epstein. Everyone agrees that in the early years of AIDS, there was a lot of like debate over what was causing it. So the first reports appear in 1981 of men who have this, like, very strange cancer. And then you start getting more and more reports of, like, gay men dying of this weird thing, and it presents very differently. Is this when they named it GRIDS? Yes, Gay Related Immune Deficiency. Although even earlier than that, it was literally called, like, gay cancer in the press.
Yeah. Holy Jones. So there's lots of theories on what was causing it, basically because it was just so mysterious and weird. One of the theories was that sperm in your butt reduces immune function. We've all been there. Another explanation was poppers, which are these inhalants that men take for muscle relaxant. It makes anal sex better. This was like one of the like fairly prominent early explanations because a lot of the people that got AIDS had been using poppers. Apparently poppers do have like a slightly immunosuppressing effect. And I guess they're like really bad for you. I was like reading the Cleveland Clinic website this morning. But because they're a vasodilator, they had been given to heart disease patients for years and none of them got AIDS.
So that gets discarded pretty quickly. It is, I will say, very funny to think about. Poppers, for example. I actually didn't know that they had any like legitimate use. They were like just for gay men because they sell them as room deodorizers in other countries because you can't sell them for like what people are selling them for. But then there was also a theory basically that it was psychosomatic. So there is a gay psychiatrist named Casper Schmidt who writes an article proposing that like it's a response to to the 1980s. So here is this. This is from an article called The Man Who Thought AIDS Was All in the Mind.
Jesus Christ. The man who gaslit an entire community. I know. Schmidt believed that AIDS was a psychosomatic disease, that it was caused by an outbreak of quote-unquote mass hysteria, and that AIDS patients were, in some sense, thinking themselves ill.
Mm-hmm. According
to Schmidt, the trigger for AIDS was the rise of right wing ideology in America following Ronald Reagan's election as president in 1980.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is AIDS denialism and why does it matter?
0:11–9:56
2
How did early 1980s research shape the debate over what causes AIDS?
9:56–20:04
3
Who was Peter Duesberg and how did his 1987 paper revive the HIV‑doesn’t‑cause‑AIDS claim?
20:04–29:34
4
Why did the gay press and activist groups help popularize AIDS denialism in the late 1980s?
29:34–41:17
5
How did mainstream scientists and journals finally debunk the denialist arguments?
41:17–52:50
6
What role did South African politics and policy play in the resurgence of AIDS denialism?
52:50–1:03:05
7
How are modern figures like RFK Jr. using the old denialist narrative today?
1:03:05–1:10:55
8
What lessons does the rise and fall of AIDS denialism teach about science, media, and public health?
1:10:55–1:19:34