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How covid conspiracies led to an alarming resurgence in AIDS denialism [MIT Tech Review]
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Several million people were listening in February when Joe Rogan falsely declared that “party drugs” were an “important factor in AIDS.” His guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, the former evolutionary biology professor turned contrarian podcaster Bret Weinstein, agreed with him: The “evidence” that AIDS is not caused by HIV is, he said, “surprisingly compelling.”
During the show, Rogan also asserted that AZT, the earliest drug used in the treatment of AIDS, killed people “quicker” than the disease itself—another claim that’s been widely repeated even though it is just as untrue.
Speaking to the biggest podcast audience in the world, the two men were promoting dangerous and false ideas—ideas that were in fact debunked and thoroughly disproved decades ago.
But it wasn’t just them. A few months later, the New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, four-time winner of the NFL’s MVP award, alleged that Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, had orchestrated the government’s response to the AIDS crisis for personal gain and to promote AZT, which Rodgers also depicted as “killing people.” Though he was speaking to a much smaller audience, on a podcast hosted by a jujitsu fighter turned conspiracy theorist, a clip of the interview was re-shared on X, where it’s been viewed more than 13 million times.
Rodgers was repeating claims that appear in The Real Anthony Fauci, a 2021 book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a work that has renewed relevance as the anti-vaccine activist makes a long-shot but far-from-inconsequential run for the White House. The book, which depicts the elderly immunologist as a Machiavellian figure who used both the AIDS and covid pandemics for his own ends, has reportedly sold 1.3 million copies across all formats.
“When I hear [misinformation] like that, I just hope it doesn’t get traction,” says Seth Kalichman, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy.
But it already has. These comments and others like them add up to a small but unmistakable resurgence in AIDS denialism—a false collection of theories arguing either that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS or that there’s no such thing as HIV at all.
The ideas here were initially promoted by a cadre of scientists from unrelated fields, as well as many science-adjacent figures and self-proclaimed investigative journalists, back in the 1980s and ’90s. But as more and more evidence stacked up against them, and as more people with HIV and AIDS started living longer lives thanks to effective new treatments, their claims largely fell out of favor.
At least until the coronavirus arrived.
Following the pandemic, a renewed suspicion of public health figures and agencies is giving new life to ideas that had long ago been pushed to the margins. And the impact is far from confined to the dark corners of the web. Arguments spreading rapidly online are reaching millions of people—and, in turn, potentially putting individual patients at risk. The fear is that AIDS denialism could once again spread in the way that covid denialism has: that people will politicize the illness, call its most effective and evidence-based treatments into question, and encourage extremist politicians to adopt these views as the basis for policy. And if it continues to build, this movement could threaten the bedrock knowledge about germs and viruses that underpin the foundation of modern health care and disease prevention, creating dangerous confusion among the public at a deeply inopportune time.
Before they promoted bunk information on HIV and AIDS, Rogan, Kennedy, and Rodgers were spreading fringe theories about the coronavirus’s origins, as well as loudly questioning basic public health measures like vaccines, social distancing, and masks. All three men have also boosted the false idea that ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug, is a treatment or preventative for covid that is being kept from the American public for sinister reasons at the behest of Big Pharma.
“The AIDS denialists have come from the covid denialists,” says Tara Smith, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and a professor at Kent State University’s College of Public Health, who tracks conspiratorial narratives about illness and public health. She saw them emerging first in social media groups driven by covid skepticism, with people asking, as she puts it, “If covid doesn’t exist, what else have we been lied to about?”
“Unlike HIV, covid impacted everybody, and the policy decisions that were made around covid impacted everybody.”
The covid pandemic was a particularly fertile ground for such suspicion, Kalichman notes, because “unlike HIV, covid impacted everybody, and the policy decisions that were made around covid impacted everybody.”
“The covid phenomenon—not the pandemic but the phenomenon around it—created this opportunity for AIDS denialists to reemerge,” he adds. Denialists like Peter Duesberg, the now-infamous Berkeley biologist who first promoted the idea that AIDS is caused by pharmaceuticals or recreational drugs, and Celia Farber and Rebecca V. Culshaw, an independent journalist and researcher, respectively, who have both written critically about what they see as the “official” narrative of HIV/AIDS. (Farber tells MIT Technology Review that she uses the term “AIDS dissent” rather than “denialism”: “‘Denialism’ is a religious and vituperative word.” )
In addition to the renewed skepticism toward public health institutions, the reanimated AIDS denialist movement is being supercharged by technological tools that didn’t exist the first time around: platforms with gigantic reach like X, Substack, Amazon, and Spotify, as well as newer ones that don’t have specific moderation policies around medical misinformation, like Rumble, Gab, and Telegram.
Spotify, for one, has largely declined to curb or moderate Rogan in any meaningful way, while also paying him an eye-watering amount of money; the company inked a $250 million renewal deal with him in February, just weeks before he and Weinstein made their false remarks about AIDS. Amazon, meanwhile, is currently offering Duesberg’s long-out-of-print 1996 book Inventing AIDS for free with a trial of its Audible program, and three of Culshaw’s books are available for free with either an Audible or Kindle Unlimited trial. Farber, meanwhile, has a Substack with more than 28,000 followers.
(Spotify, Substack, Rumble, and Telegram did not respond to requests for comment, while Meta and Amazon confirmed receipt of a request for comment but did not answer questions, and X’s press office provided only an auto-response. An email to Gab’s press address was returned as undeliverable.)
While this wave of AIDS denialism doesn’t currently have the reach and influence that the movement had in the past, it still has potentially serious consequences for patients as well as the general public. If these ideas gain enough traction, particularly among elected officials, they could endanger funding for AIDS research and treatments. Public health researchers are still haunted by the period in the 1990s and early 2000s when AIDS denial became official policy in South Africa; one analysis estimates that between just 2000 and 2005, more than 300,000 people died prematurely as a result of the country’s bad public health policies. On an individual level, there could also be devastating results if people with HIV are discouraged from seeking treatment or from trying to prevent the virus’s spread by taking medication or using condoms; a 2010 study has shown that a belief in denialist rhetoric among people with HIV is associated with medication refusal and poor health outcomes, including increased incidence of hospitalization, HIV-related symptoms, and detectable viral loads.
Above all, the revival of this particular slice of medical misinformation is another troubling sign for the ways that tech platforms can deepen distrust in our public health system. The same tech-savvy denialist playbook is already being deployed in the wider “health freedom” space to create confusion and suspicion around other serious diseases, like measles, and to challenge more foundational claims about the science of viruses—that is, to posit that viruses don’t exist at all, or are harmless and can’t cause illness. (A Gab account solely dedicated to the idea that all viruses are hoaxes has more than 3,000 followers.)
As Smith puts it, “We are not in a good place regarding [trust in] all of our public health institutions right now.”
Capitalizing on confusion
One reason AIDS and covid denialists have been able to build similar and interlocking movements that inveigh against government science is that the early days of the two viruses were markedly similar: full of confusion, mystery, and skepticism.
In 1981, James Curran served on a task force investigating the first five known cases of what was then a novel disease. “There were a lot of theories about what caused it,” says Curran, an epidemiologist who is now a dean emeritus at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and previously spent 25 years working at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, serving ultimately as the assistant surgeon general. He and his colleagues had all previously studied sexually transmitted infections that affected gay men and people who injected drugs. With that context, the researchers saw the early patterns of the disease as “indicative of a likely sexually transmissible agent.”
Not everyone agreed, Curran says: “Other people saw poppers or other drugs or accumulation of semen or environmental factors. Some of these things came from the backgrounds that people had, or they came from the simple denial that it could possibly be a new virus.”
The first wave of contrarian ideas about AIDS, then, was less true “denialism” and more the understandable confusion and differences of opinion that can emerge around a new disease. Yet as time went on, “the death rates were increasing dramatically,” says Lindsay Zafir, a distinguished lecturer in anthropology and interdisciplinary programs at the City College of New York who wrote her dissertation on the emergence and evolution of AIDS denialism. “Some people started to wonder whether scientists actually knew what they were doing.”
This led to the emergence of a wider round of more deliberate AIDS disinformation, which was picked up by mainstream publications. In the late 1980s, Spin magazine printed a series of stories that platformed denialist ideas and figures, including interviews with Duesberg, who’d already gained attention for his arguments that AIDS was caused by pharmaceutical drugs and not by HIV. The magazine also published pieces by Farber, a journalist who has described herself becoming progressively more sympathetic to the AIDS denialist cause after interviewing Duesberg. In 1991, the Los Angeles Times published a piece that asked whether Duesberg was “a hero or a heretic” for his “controversial” arguments about AIDS.
The tides began to turn only in 1995, when the first generation of antiretroviral therapies emerged to treat AIDS and deaths finally, mercifully, began to drop across the United States.
“Mbeki famously said, Your scientist says this, mine says that—which scientist is right? When that confusion exists, that’s the real vulnerability.”
Still, the denialist movement continued to grow, with next-generation leaders who were, like Duesberg and Farber, publicity savvy and (perhaps unsurprisingly) quick adopters of the earliest versions of the internet. This notably included Christine Maggiore, who was HIV-positive herself and who founded the group Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives. Long before social media, she and her peers used the internet to foster community, offering links on their websites to hotlines and in-person meetings.
Kent State’s Smith and Steven P. Novella, now a clinical neurologist and associate professor at Yale, wrote a paper in 2007 about how the internet had become a powerful force for AIDS denialism. It was “a fertile and unrefereed medium” for denialist ideas and one of just a few common tools to make counterarguments in the face of the widespread scientific agreement on AIDS that dominated medical literature.
Around this time, Farber wrote another big piece, this time in Harper’s, on the so-called AIDS dissidents, which in turn generated a firestorm of criticism and corrections and revived the debate for a new era of readers.
“It’s hard to quantify how much influence those types of people had,” Smith says. She points out that Maggiore was even promoted by Nate Mendel of the Foo Fighters. “It’s hard to know how many people followed her advice,” Smith emphasizes. “But certainly a lot of people heard it.”
In a devastating turn, one of those people was Thabo Mbeki, who became the second democratically elected president of South Africa in 1999. Mbeki was skeptical of antiretrovirals to treat AIDS, and as the Lancet points out, both Mbeki and his health minister promoted the work of Western AIDS skeptics. In the summer of 2000, Mbeki hosted a presidential advisory panel that included denialists like Duesberg; Farber tells MIT Technology Review that she was also present. Just a few weeks later, the South African president met privately with Maggiore.
Curran, the former CDC official, visited South Africa during this era and remembers how officials “said they would throw doctors in jail” if they provided AZT to pregnant women.
“Mbeki famously said, Your scientist says this, mine says that—which scientist is right?” Kalichman says. “When that confusion exists, that’s the real vulnerability.”
Mbeki left office in 2008. And while AIDS denialism didn’t exactly disappear by the 2010s, it did largely recede into relative obscurity, beaten back by clear evidence that antiretroviral drugs were working.
There were also meticulous fact-based campaigns from groups like AIDSTruth, which was founded following Farber’s 2006 Harper’s article. This group gained traction online, systematically debunking arguments from denialists on a bare-bones website and using hyperlinks to guide people quickly to science-based material on each point—a somewhat novel approach at the time.
By 2015, the decline of denialism was so complete that AIDSTruth stopped active work, believing that its mission was complete. The group wrote, “We have long since reached the point where we—the people who have in one way or another been involved in running this website—believe that AIDS denialism died as an effective political force.”
Of course, it didn’t take too long to see the work was far from complete.
Growing the “beehive”
Kalichman, from the University of Connecticut, has compared the world of AIDS denial to a “beehive”: It looks like a chaotic mix of people pursuing bad science and debunked ideas for their own particular ends. But if you look closer, what appears to be a swarm is actually “very well organized.” The modern, post-covid variety is no different.
The new wave of denialists often don’t count their theories on AIDS as their sole pseudoscientific interest; rather, it’s part of a whole bouquet of bad ideas.
These individuals seem to have arrived at revisionist and denialist ideas through a broad-based skepticism of public health, a rejection of what they see as Big Pharma’s meddling, and a particular, visceral disgust toward Fauci. Kennedy, specifically, attributes almost superhuman powers to Fauci, claiming in one 2022 tweet—referencing the Mafia code of silence—that he “purchased omertà among virologists globally with a total of $37 billion in annual payoffs in research grants.” The tweet has been liked more than 26,000 times.
Kennedy’s book “changed everything,” Celia Farber says. “I answered his questions … and was included and quoted in the book. This led to a chance for me to once again be a professional writer, on Substack.”
The new guard has also been comfortable reviving the oldest debunked ideas. Both Rogan and Kennedy, for instance, have claimed that poppers could be the cause of AIDS. “A hundred percent of the people who died in the first thousand [with] AIDS were people who were addicted to poppers, which are known to cause Kaposi sarcoma in rats,” Kennedy told an audience in a speech whose date isn’t clear; a video of the remarks has recently been circulating widely. “And they were people who were part of a gay lifestyle where they were burning the candle at both ends.” (Kennedy’s presidential campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
Some have even given fresh life to the old guard. Duesberg is now 87 and is no longer active in the public sphere (and his wife told MIT Technology Review that his health did not allow him to sit for an interview or answer questions via email). But the basic shape of his arguments—obfuscating the causes of AIDS, the treatments, and the nature of the disease itself—continue to live on. Rogan actually hosted Duesberg on his podcast in 2012, a decision that generated relatively few headlines at the time—likely because Rogan hadn’t yet become so popular and America’s crisis of disinformation and medical distrust was less pronounced. Rogan and Weinstein praised Duesberg in their recent conversation, asserting that he’d been “demonized” for his arguments about AZT. (Weinstein did not respond to a request for comment. Several attempts to reach Spotify through multiple channels did not get responses. Attempts to reach Rogan through Spotify and one of his producers also did not receive responses.)
The support seems to largely go both ways. Culshaw has written that even critical stories about Rodgers are helpful to the cause: “The more hit pieces are published, the more the average citizen—especially the average post-covid citizen—will become curious and begin to look into the issue. And once you’ve looked into it far enough, you cannot unsee what you’ve seen.”
Culshaw and Farber have also been empowered by the new ability to command their own megaphones online. Farber, for instance, is now primarily active on Substack, with a newsletter that is a mix of HIV/AIDS content and general conspiracy theorizing. Her current work refers to HIV/AIDS as a “PSY OP” (caps hers); she presents herself as a soldier in a long war against government propaganda, one in which covid is the latest salvo.
Farber says she sees her arguments gaining ground. “What’s happening now is that the general public are learning about the buried history,” she writes to MIT Technology Review. “People are very interested in the HIV ‘thing’ these days, to my eternal astonishment,” she adds, writing that Kennedy’s book “changed everything.” She says, “I answered his questions about HIV war history and was included and quoted in the book. This led to a chance for me to once again be a professional writer, on Substack.”
Culshaw (who now uses the name Culshaw Smith) strikes a similar tone, though she is a less prominent figure. A mathematician and self-styled HIV researcher, she published her first book in 2007; it claimed to use mathematical evidence to prove that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.
In 2023 she published another AIDS denial book, this one with Skyhorse, a press that traffics heavily in conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, and which published Kennedy’s book on Fauci. She gained some level of notoriety when the book was distributed by publishing giant Simon & Schuster, leading to protests outside its headquarters from the LGBT rights advocacy groups GLAAD and ACT UP NY. Though Simon & Schuster appears to continue to distribute the book, that pushback has provided the basis for her new act: life after “cancellation.” She produced a short memoir last year that describes the furor—a history Culshaw presents as a dramatic moment in the suppression of AIDS truth. This is one of the books now available for free on Amazon through a Kindle Unlimited trial. (Simon & Schuster did not respond to a request for comment. Culshaw did not respond to a request for comment sent through Substack.)
The argument that she’s been “canceled” by the scientific establishment holds tremendous sway with disease denialists online, who are always eager to seize on cases where they perceive the government to be repressing and censoring “alternative” views. In May, Chronicles, an online right-wing magazine, approvingly tied together Rodgers with the broader web of AIDS denialists, including Culshaw, Duesberg, and others—holding them up as heroic figures who’d been unfairly dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” and who’d done well to challenge medical expertise that the magazine denigrated as “white coat supremacy.” (A request for comment for Rodgers through a representative did not receive a response.)
Platforming denial
AIDS denialism and revisionism are resurging in the midst of bitter ongoing arguments over what kinds of things should be allowed to exist on online platforms. Spotify, for instance, has clear rules that prohibit “asserting that AIDS, COVID-19, cancer or other serious life threatening diseases are a hoax or not real,” and specific rules against “dangerous and deceptive content” that are both thoughtful and clearly articulated. Yet Rogan’s program seems to be exempt from these rules or manages to skirt them; after all, he and Weinstein did not suggest that AIDS isn’t real, per se, but instead promoted debunked ideas about its cause.
While Amazon and Meta have misinformation policies of some kind, they clearly do not prevent AIDS denial books from being sold or denialist arguments from being shared. (Amazon also has content guidelines for books that ban obvious things like hate speech, pornography, or the promotion of terrorism, but they do not specifically mention medical misinformation.)
The difficulty of policing false or unproven health information across all these different platforms, in all the forms it can take, is immense. In 2019, for instance, Facebook allowed misleading ads from personal injury lawyers claiming that PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis drugs, can cause bone and kidney damage; it took action only after a sustained outcry from LGBT groups.
“It’s one of those things that either plants seeds of doubt or encourages those to grow if they’re already there.”
In a sign of how entrenched some of these things can be, there’s a YouTube channel originally called Rethinking AIDS—now known as Question Everything—that has been active for 14 years, sharing interviews with denialists. The channel has 16,000 subscribers, and its most popular videos have upwards of half a million views. Another page, devoted to a conspiratorial documentary about AIDS, has been active since 2009, and its most popular video has nearly 300,000 views. (A YouTube spokesperson tells MIT Technology Review it has “developed our approach to medical misinformation over many years, in close alignment with health authorities around the world” and that it prominently features “content and information from high-quality health sources … in search results and recommendations related to HIV/AIDS.”)
Meanwhile, on platforms like the Elon Musk–owned X, formerly known as Twitter, there is little moderation happening at all. The company removed its ban on covid misinformation in 2022, to almost immediate effect: misinformation and propaganda of all kinds has flourished, including HIV/AIDS denial. One widely circulated video depicts the late biochemist Kary Mullis talking about the moment he first “really questioned” the predominant HIV narrative.
Complementing these more established spaces are newer, more niche platforms like Rumble and Telegram, which don’t have any moderation policies to address medical misinformation and proudly tout a commitment to free speech that means they do very little about any kind of misinformation at all, no matter how noxious.
Telegram, which is one of the most popular messaging apps in Russia, does have a general “verified information” policy. The statement of this policy links to a post by its CEO, Pavel Durov, that says “spreading the truth will always be a more efficient strategy than engaging in censorship.” Discussions of HIV among Telegram’s current and most active misinformation peddlers often compare it to covid, characterizing both as “manufactured” viruses. One widely shared post by the anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny claims that covid-19 was created by “splicing” HIV into a coronavirus to “inflict maximum harm,” a bizarre lie that’s also meant to strengthen the unproven idea that covid was created in a lab. Telegram is also a fertile ground for sharing phony HIV cures; one group with 43,000 followers has promoted an oil that it claims is used in Nigeria.
When YouTube began to crack down on medical misinformation during the height of the pandemic, conservative and conspiratorial content creators went to Rumble instead. The company claims it saw a 106% revenue increase last year and now has an average of 67 million monthly active users. A clip of Rogan talking about Duesberg’s AIDS-related claims has racked up 30,000 views in the last two years, and an interview with Farber by Joseph Mercola, a major player in the natural-health and anti-vaccine worlds, has gotten more than 300,000 views since it was posted there earlier this year.
The concern with these kinds of falsehoods, Smith says, is always that patient populations, communities at high risk for HIV, or populations with real histories of medical mistreatment, like Black and Native people, “think there might be a grain of truth and start to doubt if they need to be tested or continue treatment or things like that.” She adds, “It’s one of those things that either plants seeds of doubt or encourages those to grow if they’re already there.”
But it’s far more concerning when people like Rogan, who have a massive reach, take up the cause. “They just have such a huge platform, and those stories are scary and they spread,” Smith says. “Once they do that, it’s so hard for scientists to fight that.”
The offline impact
For all the work AIDS denialists are doing to try to grow their numbers, Kalichman remains hopeful that they’re unlikely to make significant inroads. The most profound reason, he believes, is that many people now know someone living with HIV—a friend, a family member, a celebrity. As a result, many more people are directly familiar with how life-altering current HIV treatments have been.
“This isn’t the ’90s,” he says. “People are taking one pill once a day and living really healthy lives. If a person with HIV smokes, they’re much more likely to die of a smoking-related illness [than HIV] if their HIV Is being treated.”
Even the much stranger and more esoteric “terrain theory” seems to be making a modest comeback in alternative online spaces; the idea is that germs don’t cause illness in a healthy person whose “terrain” is sound thanks to vitamins, exercise, and sunlight.
Yet the risk doesn’t necessarily hang solely on how many people buy into the false information—but who does. Among people who have been studying AIDS denialism for decades, the biggest concern is ultimately that someone in public office will take notice and begin formally acting on those ideas. If that happens, Curran, the former assistant surgeon general, worries it could jeopardize funding for PEPFAR (the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), the enormously successful public health program that has supported HIV testing, prevention, and treatment in lower-resource countries since the George W. Bush administration.
The current political environment further exacerbates the risk: Donald Trump has said that if he is elected again, he will cut federal funding to schools with mask or vaccine mandates, and Florida’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, allowed parents to continue sending unvaccinated kids to school in the midst of a measles outbreak.
All it takes, Kalichman says, is for “someone who’s sitting in a policymaker’s chair in a state health department” to take AIDS denial arguments seriously. “A lot of damage can be done.” (He expresses relief, however, that Trump and his wing of the Republican Party have not yet taken up the particular cause of AIDS denialists: “Thank goodness.”)
Then there is the fact that the same kind of denialist campaign is already being deployed with other diseases. Christiane Northrup, a former ob-gyn and a significant figure in natural health and related conspiratorial thinking, has recently been on Telegram sharing an old lie that a German court ruled the measles virus “does not exist.” (Northrup did not respond to a request for comment.)
On its own, if it were just bunk HIV theories recirculating, “I wouldn’t be as worried about it,” Smith says. “But in this broader anti-covid, anti-vaccine, and everything about germ theory being denied—that’s what worries me.”
By trying to effectively decouple cause and effect—claiming that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, that measles isn’t caused by a virus and is instead a vitamin deficiency or caused by the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine itself—these movements discourage people from treating or trying to prevent serious and contagious illnesses. They try to sow doubt about the very nature of viruses themselves, a global gesture toward doubt, distrust, and minimization of serious diseases. Even the much stranger and more esoteric “terrain theory” seems to be making a modest comeback in alternative online spaces; the idea is that germs don’t cause illness in a healthy person whose “terrain” is sound thanks to vitamins, exercise, and sunlight.
These kinds of false claims, Smith points out, are resurging at a particularly inopportune time, when the public health world is already trying to prepare for the next pandemic. “We’re out of the emergency mode of the covid pandemic and trying to repair some of the damage to public health,” she says, “and thinking about another one.”
Curran also has a larger, more existential concern when he considers the lessons of the AIDS and covid pandemics: “The problem is, if you bad-mouth Fauci and his successors so much, the next epidemic people come around and they say, ‘Why should we trust these people?’ And the question is, who do we trust?
“When bird flu gets out of cows and goes to humans, are we going to go to Joe Rogan for the answers?”
Anna Merlan is a senior reporter at Mother Jones and the author of the 2019 book Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power.