We know more about the diversity and origins of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) than perhaps about any other human pathogen.
—Nathan D. Wolfe and Tony Goldberg,“HIV-1 Origins: What We Don’t Know”1
Rush Limbaugh headlined his radio show for April 28, 2009, with the extraordinary claim that “AIDS was going to get really bad, but it didn’t”2 —a medical judgment that’s on a par with his April 24, 2008, claim: “Polio is not a virus.”3
Limbaugh is part of a larger syndrome. It seems that in the US conservatives largely dismissed the AIDS epidemic as yet another liberal conspiracy. Ronald Reagan was nearly five years in office before he thought this enormous threat to US public health worth mentioning (September 17, 1985), and even then only in answer to a direct question at a press conference. Five months passed before he alluded to the subject in public again, in his address to Congress on February 6, 1986. His first substantive public discussion of AIDS did not come until May 31, 1987, when he finally admitted there was an epidemic underway. By then, thirty thousand Americans had been diagnosed with the condition and an untold but very much larger number had been infected by the HIV retrovirus but didn’t yet know it.
A lot of this reluctance on the part of the US Right to face the reality of AIDS may have been due to the fact that, in the early days, AIDS was assumed to be a “gay plague”; not only were gays a minority but the “gay lifestyle” was regarded as immoral and debased by the fundamentalists upon whose votes the GOP depended. Over a decade later, faced with the unpalatable facts that the number living with HIV/AIDS in the US was approaching ten million and that the single most effective way of curtailing the disease’s spread among the young—the promotion of sex education and in particular the use of condoms—was anathema to the christian Right, the George W. Bush administration opted instead to put all its efforts behind abstinence-only sex education, even though this approach had been repeatedly demonstrated not to work. Through its reluctance to support any endeavor, at home or abroad, that was connected to the promotion of condom use or needle exchange, and through its dissemination of misinformation on these subjects and indeed most matters sexual, the Bush administration grossly weakened the fight against AIDS worldwide. Although the denialism of the Mbeki administration in South Africa (see pages 135ff.) was indubitably more extreme, at least it was based on genuinely held—albeit nonsensical—convictions about medical science. The Bush administration’s denialism on the subject of AIDS was ideological—or, perhaps even worse, not ideological at all but tailored to ensure the continued electoral support of the christian Right.
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In the opening of their “Statement on National HIV Vaccine Awareness Day” (May 18, 2010) Anthony S. Fauci, Margaret I. Johnston, and Gary J. Nabel wrote:
More people today have access to life-saving antiretroviral therapy for HIV/AIDS than ever before. Yet for every person who begins treatment for HIV infection, two to three others become newly infected. Treatment alone will not curtail the HIV/AIDS pandemic. To control and ultimately end this pandemic, we need a powerful array of proven HIV prevention tools that are widely accessible to all who would benefit from them.
Vaccines historically have been the most effective means to prevent and even eradicate infectious diseases. They safely and cost-effectively prevent illness, disability and death. We at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, have been working for more than two decades with our colleagues worldwide to develop an HIV vaccine, and this research continues to rank among our top priorities.4
They pointed to one encouraging piece of research done during the preceding year. In a major clinical trial in Thailand, a prime-boost regimen of the two particular vaccines had been shown to have a 31 percent effectiveness rate in preventing HIV infection. At less than one in three, this may not seem much of an improvement; yet it’s a striking advance on anything achieved before. The three authors were nonetheless pragmatic as they assessed the situation:
As we recognize recent progress in HIV vaccine research and hope for continued advances, we must remember that a vaccine alone will not end the HIV/AIDS pandemic. If an HIV vaccine is developed, it will need to be used in concert with multiple other scientifically proven HIV prevention tools . . . including pre-exposure prophylaxis with antiretroviral drugs, microbicides, and expanded HIV testing and treatment with linkage to care.
Naturally, such hopes for the future will be dismissed by many AIDS denialists as yet another example of Big Pharma aiming to cash in on the vaccine and drug market. As in the campaigns of the antivaxers, it’s a recurring theme in AIDS denialism that Big Pharma has corrupted governments, the NIH, and indeed the entirety of the biomedical establishment. There is little doubt that Big Pharma will corrupt where it can, but the sort of conspiracy the deniers are here claiming beggars belief.
Even without the paranoia about Big Pharma, the lethal recommendation of the AIDS pseudoscientists is that those diagnosed with HIV infection refuse antiretroviral drugs like AZT,5 which are used in combating the development of the disease. They claim that
Saddest are the cases of HIV-infected pregnant mothers who are deceived by this nonsense into rejecting medication, with the consequence that their children are born with, and very likely die painfully and young from, HIV infection. A tragic example concerned the HIV-denying activist christine Joy Maggiore, who founded the denialist organization Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives.6 Maggiore herself died in 2008 in her midthirties; but the real horror was earlier. Although Maggiore was HIV-positive at the time of daughter Eliza Jane’s conception, she refused to take anti-HIV medication during the pregnancy and to allow Eliza Jane, during the child’s brief life, to be tested for HIV. The consequence was that Eliza Jane died of untreated AIDS in 2005 aged just three and a half. Even then, Maggiore denied what had happened, hiring an AIDS-denialist vet to produce a rival autopsy report.
The deniers do not reserve their venom solely for the drugs used to mitigate the effects of AIDS. Another myth concerns HIV testing. The reality is that HIV testing is approximately 99.99 percent accurate—that is, it can throw up a false positive or a false negative just once in ten thousand instances. This makes it one of the most accurate tests in modern medicine. Yet some deniers produce figures that “prove” the inaccuracy of the test. It’s worth looking for the dates on the sources they cite for those figures. When medical science first became aware of the HIV retrovirus, tests were a bit chancy. Obviously, these were then progressively refined until today’s standard of accuracy was achieved; that’s the way science functions. Presumably those who keep trotting out the 1980s figures are perfectly well aware they’re outmoded.
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Despite the strength of the science concerning AIDS and the efforts to combat it, a few contrarians are qualified scientists although, as we see in other instances of scientists bucking the consensus, their qualifications are almost always in unrelated fields. Casper Schmidt, for example, was a psychiatrist. In his oft-quoted 1984 paper “The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS”7 he claimed the already burgeoning AIDS epidemic was merely a sort of social hysteria, a reaction to conservative moral strictures regarding homosexuality. A decade after publication of his paper, Schmidt died of social hysteria. Similarly lacking in relevant qualifications are the primary members of the Perth Group, a set of Australian scientists who claim the HIV retrovirus does not exist: biophysicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, pathologist John Papadimitriou, and ER physician Valendar Turner. According to Michael Specter in his 2007 essay “The Denialists,” the members of the Perth Group “insist that AIDS in gay men results from drug abuse and repeated exposure to semen.”8
And sometimes the matter of scientific qualifications is a little cloudy, as in the case of David Rasnick, a member of South African president Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS Advisory Panel. In a 2006 op-ed in the South African newspaper The Citizen, Rasnick claimed to be a visiting scholar in the department of molecular and cell biology at Berkeley. Alas for Rasnick, Richard Harland, professor and chair of that department, publicly disputed this claim.9
By far the most influential scientist to deny the HIV–AIDS connection is US molecular and cell biologist Peter Duesberg. His early work on cancer, done in the 1970s, rightly gained him international acclaim. What he has never done is any research on HIV/AIDS; his views on the subject are theoretical. Similarly, the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, set up by Duesberg and other denialists in 1991, has never soiled its hands by doing any hands-on AIDS research.
In Denying AIDS (2009; p. 39) Seth Kalichman sums up Duesberg’s hypotheses concerning the causes of AIDS thus:
Duesberg’s explanation for AIDS is actually far more complex and convoluted than how HIV actually causes AIDS. . . . For gay men, drug use causes AIDS. For gay men who do not use drugs, HIV medications cause AIDS. In Africa, malnutrition causes AIDS. If you are a wealthy African, AZT causes AIDS. If you are a hemophiliac, treatments for hemophilia cause AIDS.
The frequent claim that Duesberg lost NIH funding because of his AIDS theorizing seems as ill founded as his denialist views; he lost the funding long before he began to pontificate on AIDS because, having done sterling work on the role of retroviruses in and the genetic underpinning of cancer, he suddenly changed his mind, deciding that instead cancer was caused by the cellular condition aneuploidy (excess chromosomes) and that retroviruses were harmless. Since this flew in the face of the vast body of cancer research, not least his own, it seemed—and seems—a less than promising line to pursue; not unnaturally, NIH declined to put its precious dollars into it. And, since NIH has never funded Duesberg to do AIDS research, another oft-repeated allegation, that NIH cancelled his funding for AIDS research, is obviously likewise false.
Similarly, much has been made in denialist circles of the rejection by NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse) in 1993 of a grant application made by Duesberg for research into the possibility of AIDS-like reactions in mice subjected to nitrites inhalation. In reality, this was because another study of the effects of nitrites inhalation on the immune system was already being funded by NIDA.
Some of Duesberg’s claims go beyond the outrageous to the bizarre. One is that there’s no evidence of an HIV/AIDS epidemic among female prostitutes—despite the fact that numerous studies show a high rate of HIV/AIDS among sex workers. Clearly needle-sharing plays a large part in the HIV epidemic among the world’s sex workers, but to say the epidemic doesn’t exist is crazy—and promoting the denial seems cruelly counterproductive.
Another strange claim of Duesberg’s is that there’s no real AIDS problem among children. To the contrary, the WHO estimated for 200810 that about 430,000 children worldwide were born with HIV in that year, bringing the total for children under fifteen living with HIV to about 2.1 million, while some 270,000 died of HIV-related illness. It is difficult, faced with such data, not to describe this as an epidemic. Of course, because Duesberg believes the HIV virus isn’t responsible for AIDS, he can argue that these figures are irrelevant. Yet that’s a quibble: the WHO may call it “HIV-related illness” as an acknowledgement of the role of the retrovirus, but the rest of us call it AIDS.
After Duesberg’s 1988 presentation in Washington, DC, at the scientific forum sponsored by the American Foundation for AIDS Research, Anthony Fauci, the US government’s top AIDS expert, had had enough. “This is murder!” he exploded. “It’s really just that simple.”11
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Several other scientific and quasiscientific memes that do the rounds of AIDS-denialist circles are worth noting. One challenge often hurled at orthodox medicine is that it must explain its claim that such an array of diseases could be caused by a single virus. This reveals a fundamental ignorance of the workings of the HIV retrovirus. The virus’s assault does indeed cause a single condition: the collapse of the immune system. Thereafter, the body is vulnerable to an array of diseases, one or other of which is likely to prove fatal. It’s almost impossible to credit that the pushers of HIV/AIDS denialism don’t know this.
Another denialist challenge is to produce a “pure” form of the HIV retrovirus—one “uncontaminated” by cell proteins. Without the ability to do this, they say, HIV testing is meaningless. They’re quite right to say science has never achieved the feat of isolating the retrovirus without those proteins . . . for the very good reason that the way viruses function involves hijacking cell proteins to use as their own. If you found a virus “uncontaminated” by cell proteins it wouldn’t be a virus.
Perhaps the most startling notion is that HIV cannot be transmitted via heterosexual vaginal sex. Many such diehards refer to a single landmark paper of AIDS research. The paper’s misrepresentation in the denialist literature typically takes the form of stating that this decade-long study of heterosexual couples found only a 0.1 percent rate of transmission through heterosexual sex—a rate so low it could well be explained as a statistical anomaly or by, say, an unadmitted act of gay infidelity. In fact, as the paper’s chief author, Nancy Padian, explained in the official statement on the subject she eventually felt impelled to issue, the conclusions of the study were that safe sex and condom use worked, not that heterosexual HIV transmission was a myth.12
Hank Barnes’s rabid denialist blog You Bet Your Life produced one of the more moronic retorts to Padian’s statement: “Then, these jokers trot out ditzy Nancy to pontificate a bit. . . . Well, that’s because infectivity for HIV is low. You estimated 1/1000 sex acts for a woman to get it from an infected man, and 1/10,000 for a man to get it from an infected woman.”13
“Ditzy”? Barnes and his commenters then go into an extensive exercise in cherry picking to demonstrate they know better than Padian the meaning of her research.14 This reaction was, alas, fairly typical of the denialists.
Among other odd claims about AIDS is that it’s a consequence of polio vaccination. According to this notion, certain chimpanzees in the Democratic Republic of Congo suffered from simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV); when tissues from these chimps were used in oral polio vaccine (OPV), the SIV mutated in its new hosts to become HIV. It’s a clever hypothesis. The idea fails because “the circulating [SIV] virus is phylogenetically distinct from all strains of HIV-1, providing direct evidence that these chimpanzees were not the source of the human AIDS pandemic.”15 As the medical blogger Orac sums up, “Basically, testimony by eyewitnesses, documents from the time, epidemiological analysis, as well as phylogenetic, virologic and PCR [polymerase chain reaction] data all converge to reject as false the hypothesis that HIV/AIDS was derived from this polio vaccine.”16
Even despite its having been repeatedly proven false over a period of many years, the hypothesis still turns up—and not only among AIDS cranks. Orac’s comment was made in connection with an article that had appeared on the antivaxer site Age of Autism a few days earlier, “How Vaccine Damage Deniers Threaten Us All” by Jake Crosby.17
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During the first part of the last century the US suffered a plague of quacks who, like Ruth Drown and John R. Brinkley, sold “cures” for cancer and other diseases. Through persuading people to forgo the options offered by conventional medicine, they caused an untold but likely enormous toll of premature deaths. Their spiritual descendants today are all too eager to sell you means of protecting yourself from HIV/AIDS, or of curing you of the disease should you be unfortunate enough to catch it. Once again, the bodies have been piling up, not because the “cures” are in themselves dangerous but because gullible people are persuaded to reject effective treatments. Further casualties arise because these individuals, in their willful denial of their own toxicity, infect others before they die. Through their success in persuading political leaders like President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa that AIDS is not caused by the HIV retrovirus and that the alternative “cures” are effective, these AIDS opportunists (some of whom are quite genuine in their beliefs, others less so) are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, maybe more.
The “cures” can be bizarre. Writing in 2003, Meera Nanda told of the Indian government, then controlled by the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), “investing in research, development and sale of cow urine, sold as a cure for all ailments from the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) to tuberculosis (TB).”18 In South Africa, the AIDS “cure” known as ubhejane, marketed from his “clinic” in downtown Durban by Zeblon Gwala, was invented not by the ex-trucker himself but by his long-dead grandfather, who appeared to him in a dream and gave him instructions on how to produce two herbal stews that would cure AIDS; Gwala does a roaring trade, and was supported by prominent members of the Mbeki administration.19 And in the US the lab technologist Roberto Giraldo not only claims the HIV retrovirus doesn’t exist but offers “cures” based on this rationale, including acupuncture, aromatherapy, color therapy, digitopuncture, homeopathy, hyperthermia, orthomolecular medicine, and even yoga—approaching the full quack spectrum.20
Some of these “therapists” have a bully pulpit. Becoming president of The Gambia after a bloodless coup in July 1994, Yahya Jammeh has been persistently linked with human rights abuses and press muzzling. Although his declaration on homosexuality was overshadowed by the international outcry from 2009 onward over Uganda’s proposed new legal crackdown on gays, the policy Jammeh announced in The Gambia on May 15, 2008, was even more draconian.21 In January 2007 he stunned the world by claiming his ancestors had revealed to him in a dream the true, nonviral cause of AIDS and a means of curing it, an herbal concoction comprising “a green herbal paste, a bitter yellow liquid and eating bananas”22 that would effect a cure in a mere three to ten days, the herbal medicines being both taken orally and smeared on the body. Side effects were noticeable but not serious: “[T]hey should be kept at a place that has adequate toilets facilities because they can be going to toilet every five minutes.”
The UN development program’s representative in The Gambia, Fadzai Gwaradzimba, disagreed strongly, pointing out the therapy was nonsense and that the promise of such an easy and relatively mild “cure” would surely encourage people to engage in behavior likely to increase their chances of catching and spreading HIV/AIDS. Her reward was to be expelled from The Gambia.23
In the UK one of the most prominent denialists of the science concerning HIV/AIDS is the popular “nutritional therapist” Patrick Holford (see page 119), who in 1984 founded the Institute for Optimum Nutrition, a “not for profit educational charity whose purposes are to advance education of the public and health professionals in all matters relating to nutrition [and] to preserve and protect the health of the general public by giving advice, assistance and where necessary treatment through nutritional therapy” (from its website24). The institute dishes out a diploma, the DipION, to would-be nutritionists who complete a moderately expensive three-year course. The DipION is not recognized as an academic qualification; in the UK any amateur, with or without a DipION, can hang his or her shingle as a nutritionist. In fact, Holford himself is one such. Although he has a BSc in experimental psychology from the University of York, his sole qualification in the field of nutrition is a DipION awarded by his own institute.
His claim in The Optimum Nutrition Bible (1997) that “AZT, the first prescribable anti-HIV drug, is potentially harmful, and proving less effective than Vitamin C” (p. 208) was checked out by the journalist Ben Goldacre, whose “Bad Science” column for the Guardian has become required reading for many in the field.25 The claim was based on a paper called “Suppression of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Replication by Ascorbate in chronically and Acutely Infected Cells” by S. Harakeh, R. J. Jariwalla and L. Pauling, published in the September 1990 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper (in fact a laboratory report rather than a clinical study), which nowhere mentions AZT, describes experiments dosing HIV-infected cells with large quantities of vitamin C; while it seems to indicate the vitamin might inhibit various HIV-related activities in isolated cells, it tells us nothing about whether vitamin C doses would have any effect on HIV-infected humans.
Although his specialty is in the denial of climate change, christopher Monckton (see pages 293ff.) has not been silent on the subject of AIDS. His early contribution to the field is characterized by a 1987 article for the American Spectator’s January 1987 issue called “AIDS: A British View.” Its oft-quoted paragraph (p. 30) reads:
For there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life to halt the transmission of the disease to those who are uninfected. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month to detect the presence of antibodies against the disease, and all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.
More recently Monckton has disavowed these views, although characteristically he has done so while declining to admit there might be anything . . . well, wrong with them. Because his advice wasn’t heeded, you see, there are now so many cases of AIDS in the world that quarantine is no longer a viable option. At the moment, according to an e-mail posted on November 13, 2009, he is “working on a cure for infections including HIV”26 —so we await the published results with eagerness. In fact, we’ve been waiting for some while now . . .
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Although there is not a country in the world unaffected by the scourge of AIDS, in a very real sense the AIDS tragedy is an African tragedy. All the records for rates of HIV infection, and for AIDS deaths, are held by African countries. International assistance has been hampered by, in some instances, doctrinal shackles on the donor countries and in others by governmental corruption, stupidity, or ideological obstinacy on the part of potential recipient nations. Nowhere on earth, however, has the tragedy been greater—because it could so easily have been ameliorated—than in South Africa during the years 1999 to 2008, when the country was governed by the administrations of President Thabo Mbeki.27
In Pretoria on May 6, 2000, Mbeki addressed the panel he had assembled to advise him on AIDS. Among its members were a number of prominent AIDS denialists, including Peter Duesberg, Harvey Bialy, Roberto Giraldo, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, and David Rasnick. This is somewhat as if Congress had called an advisory panel on climate change and included among its “experts” people like christopher Monckton and Michael Crichton. What a ridiculous thought. Oh, wait a minute . . .
When Mbeki spoke before this motley band he was, of course, addressing the broader public:
There is an approach which asks why is this President of South Africa trying to give legitimacy to discredited scientists, because after all, all the questions of science concerning this matter had been resolved by the year 1984. I don’t know of any science that gets resolved in that manner with a cut-off year beyond which science does not develop any further. It sounds like a biblical absolute truth and I do not imagine that science consists of biblical absolute truths.28
This plays well to the gallery, of course, making it sound as if hidebound establishment scientists are attempting to stifle dissent—and, besides, science certainly isn’t in the business of “absolute truths.” Science does, however, declare some things to be established beyond all sensible doubt in the light of current knowledge, and one of these is that AIDS is not the result of aneuploidy, biochemical imbalance, social hysteria, malnutrition, the displeasure of God, or any of a hundred other crank explanations . . . That these hypotheses are false is as near to an “absolute truth” as you’re ever likely to find. It has also been established beyond all reasonable doubt that AIDS is a consequence of HIV infection. Even so, according to widespread news reports, Mbeki was in that same year, 2000, openly speculating that the claim of a link between HIV and AIDS might be a dastardly plot by the CIA, and that the medicines being offered to South Africa by the West might be designed not to counter HIV but for a far different purpose: harming innocent Africans.29
A few weeks later, in July 2000, an International AIDS Conference was held in Durban. Alarmed by Mbeki’s support for AIDS denialists, and that of his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, over five thousand relevant scientists, including eleven Nobel laureates, signed a statement that was published in the scholarly journal Nature to coincide with the event. To ensure there could be no accusations of conflict of interest (they came anyway, of course), the organizers requested that scientists who worked for pharmaceutical and other relevant commercial companies refrain from participating. In part the document reads:
A Declaration by Scientists and Physicians Affirming HIV Is the Cause of AIDS. . . . The evidence that AIDS is caused by HIV-1 or HIV-2 is clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous, meeting the highest standards of science. The data fulfil exactly the same criteria as for other viral diseases, such as polio, measles and smallpox. . . .30
The Mbeki administration was upset, and made disparaging and dismissive comments in the media. The most ludicrous reaction was Tshabalala-Msimang’s: She called it “elitist”—an accusation that’s the last refuge of the scoundrel.
A denialist document of import in South Africa was Castro Hlongwane, Caravans, Cats, Geese, Foot & Mouth and Statistics, a long tract circulated at the 51st National Conference of the African National Congress in 2002; it is rumored that Mbeki, even if he had no hand in its writing, was in contact with its author while it was being written—and certainly he has said he agrees with its stance. The Castro Hlongwane Document, as it’s often called for short, claimed that a number of prominent South Africans who’d died of AIDS had, rather, been poisoned by the antiretroviral drugs they’d been taking. Its primary claim was that AIDS is really a cluster of traditional African diseases exacerbated by poverty and malnutrition.
In due course the sheer logical unsustainability of the Castro Hlongwane Document would backfire, forcing Mbeki to moderate his stance; but in the shorter term the president and his political allies took full advantage of the situation. Resources were withdrawn from the relevant public health programs, so the antiretroviral drugs that might have controlled their illness became effectively unobtainable to South African AIDS victims. In their place appeared all sorts of “traditional remedies,” usually herbal, as opportunists, presumably unable to believe their luck, cashed in. The death toll, and infection rates, inexorably mounted.
Not content with making it difficult for South African AIDS sufferers to gain access to the antiretroviral drugs they desperately needed, Mbeki threw his political clout behind the development of a drug called Virodene, whose main active ingredient is the industrial solvent dimethylformamide (DMF). Virodene was the brainchild of Olga Visser, who claimed once to have been head of the department of new technologies in medicine at Moderna University in Lisbon, Portugal (no such department exists at the university), and who, while more recently working as a medical technician at Pretoria Hospital, discovered in 1995 that dimethylformamide had antibacterial properties. Since AIDS is not a bacterial disease, this might not seem relevant; however, Visser and her entrepreneur ex-husband, Jacques Siegfried “Zigi” Visser, conducted unauthorized small-scale trials in South Africa. When the regulatory clamps came down in South Africa, they shifted their experimental locale to Tanzania; trials of Virodene were declared illegal there, too, but the Tanzanian army was prepared to allow the experiments to go ahead in military hospitals.
Visser reported to the world that tests of Virodene had produced “magnificent results,” and she gained the ear of Mbeki. He pushed for further investigation of the drug, even though as early as 1998 South Africa’s Medicines Control Council had declared the substance potentially harmful and likely useless. “The agency also noted a test-tube study published in 1997 in the journal AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses by University of Washington researchers that suggested that DMF could actually inflame HIV.”31 And there has been little evidence since that Virodene is anything more than a quack nostrum. Its cruelest effect was to divert South African resources and energies away from a realistic approach to the country’s AIDS crisis, at the cost of untold lives.
Perhaps the most important figure on the South African AIDS scene after President Mbeki and his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, has been the German-born vitamin seller Matthias Rath, who claims huge doses of his products can be substituted for antiretroviral drugs. He has achieved his eminence in South African society through a campaign not so much of justification for his pseudoscientific claims as of vilification of orthodox medicine, and in particular Big Pharma. To audiences away from his home territory some of his rhetoric may seem immediately risible; but then we’re not living in communities terrorized beyond the realms of reason by a plague killing nearly a thousand people a day. Here’s a sample entry, dated May 13, 2005, from Rath’s website, Dr. Rath Health Foundation Africa:
THE PHARMACEUTICAL DRUG CARTEL
LAUNCHES WORLD WAR III TO PREVENT
THE CONSTRUCTION OF A HEALTHY WORLD
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 multibillion-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 multibillion-dollar marketplace for the pharmaceutical drug cartel.
Never before in history was there a larger, more profitable and bloodier fraud than that perpetrated by the pharmaceutical drug cartel. . . .
Never before were the accomplices to this global drug-genocide more desperate about hiding this fraud and their crimes against humanity. . . .
Never before were the drug cartel and its stakeholders in medicine, the media and their storm troopers in the streets more eager to silence those who expose this global fraud and genocide. That is the background of the attacks against the Dr. Rath Health Foundation, against traditional medicine and against the government of South Africa.
Now, we, the people, must build a world without diseases!
This is not exactly the sort of marketing spiel you’d expect to find on the website of a Merck or a Pfizer. The approach obviously works for Rath, though, because for many years he’s enjoyed the kind of market dominance in South Africa that the average corporation can only dream about. It hardly needs pointing out that Rath, a hugely wealthy globetrotting Westerner, is not, so far as the poor South African communities most ravaged by AIDS are concerned, in any communal sense a member of “we, the people.”
A good short account of Rath’s activities can be found in chapter 10 of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science (2009; see pages 70–71).
The success of Mbeki’s policies can be gauged from the fact that in 1990 the rate of HIV infection in South Africa was approximately zero. By 2004 the number of the infected had risen to about one person in three. According to an estimate by the country’s Medical Research Council, in 2005 and 2006 no fewer than 336,000 South Africans died of AIDS.