HIV is a deadly virus. It causes AIDS. If you contract HIV, unless you are prescribed antiretroviral drugs, you will likely progress to AIDS within a decade and die shortly thereafter. This is not, however, how certain guests on Joe Rogan’s show see it.
The other day on the nation’s number one podcast on Spotify, Rogan had on a frequent guest, Bret Weinstein, a former professor of evolutionary biology. Weinstein spoke about arriving at the view that HIV doesn’t play a causal role in AIDS.
In an exchange, Rogan countered the fact that HIV causes AIDS, saying “this ignores an important factor in AIDS, the party drugs,” to which Weinstein responded in the affirmative by asserting that he found the theory that party drugs like poppers cause AIDS to be “surprisingly compelling.”
No stranger to being contrarian, on Rogan’s podcast during the Covid-19 pandemic Weinstein took the highly controversial stance of advocating use of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin to prevent or treat Covid. And now he’s entering the realm of HIV/AIDS denialism, which argues that HIV and all other retroviruses are harmless and that the disease is caused by illicit drug use, poverty, malnutrition and the use of antiretroviral medications. The HIV virus is simply considered an innocuous “fellow traveler.”
As one of the world’s most studied infectious diseases ever, with hundreds of thousands of publications and conference proceedings since the 1980s, there’s a solid scientific consensus on the etiology of HIV and AIDS. HIV is the virus that causes the disease.
And while substance abuse, poverty and malnutrition can worsen a person’s disease state, in and of themselves they don’t cause AIDS. Moreover, millions of people worldwide who didn’t abuse drugs and weren’t poor or malnourished have died of AIDS. They contracted HIV, didn’t have access to antiretroviral medicines (or didn’t take them) and eventually succumbed to the AIDS disease.
HIV can be spread through several means, including unprotected sex, sharing needles, or, in some cases, from a mother to a child while giving birth. Patients with AIDS have a severely deficient immune system and are therefore at an increased risk of developing a constellation of (opportunistic) infections as well as cancers.
One of the earliest published studies on banked blood samples from patients who had AIDS showed the presence of antibodies against HIV as early as 1978, which supported the role of HIV as a cause of AIDS despite the lag between infection and the onset of AIDS symptoms.
Of the HIV/AIDS denialists Rogan has invited to his show, none is more infamous than Peter Duesberg. A professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, for nearly four decades he has propagated the myth that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. He’s also been at the forefront of making claims that recreational drug abuse and sexual promiscuity lead to AIDS, not HIV, and that people shouldn’t be prescribed antiretroviral drugs.
Duesberg’s contentions regarding HIV and AIDS have been addressed and rejected repeatedly by the scientific community. But this is probably why Rogan invited him to his show in 2012, to be a heretic and recite his decades-long assertion that HIV “one of the most harmless type of viruses we know.”
Notably, he was a member of a “scientific panel” advising the government of South Africa on AIDS policy in the early 2000s. Influenced by Duesberg’s fanciful theories, the South African government decided not to provide its citizens with antiretroviral drugs.
In many countries across the African continent, including South Africa, heterosexual people make up the vast majority of HIV and AIDS cases. And women comprise a disproportionate percentage, 57%, of cases, according to the United Nations. This includes pregnant women who can pass the virus to their babies.
In and of itself the fact that so many women and children were infected with HIV and dying of AIDS should have called into question Duesberg’s conspiracy theories about “poppers” or male “gay lifestyle” being the causal agents of AIDS.
Researchers publishing in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes calculated that more than 330,000 unnecessary deaths occurred as a result of the HIV/AIDS denialism and misinformation in South Africa during this time.
It’s not as if Mbeki wasn’t forewarned. Thousands of scientists from around the globe signed the Durban Declaration. It was written several weeks before the July 2000 International AIDS Conference, held in Durban, South Africa, and was published in the journal Nature to coincide with the meeting. The declaration was unequivocal, calling the evidence that HIV causes AIDS “clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous.” It further stated the “evidence meets the highest standards of science,” with signatories adding that it is “unfortunate that a few vocal people continue to deny the evidence. This position will cost countless lives.”
Today, thanks to tremendous strides in science over the last three decades HIV infection is a chronic but manageable condition so long as ART are taken as indicated. It can also be prevented through safe sex practices, pre-exposure prophylaxis and proper screening of blood prior to transfusions.
Researchers estimate that ART averted 9.5 million deaths worldwide in the 20 year period between 1995 and 2015. Seen in this light, one can see how perilous it is to question in 2024 both the role of HIV in causing AIDS and the lifesaving capacity of ART.
Tossing around discredited theories on Rogan’s show may seem innocuous if it weren’t for the deadly consequences of people actually believing these baseless notions and acting upon them.
