Gary Null is still off the air

Vitamin entrepreneur, snake oil salesman, and AIDS Denialist Gary Null is void one media outlet. Thanks to the initiative of just a few people, Gary Null may not be broadcasting on New York’s WBAI radio again. Null has had access to a broad audience in the past and this effort helps constrict his reach. It is a great example of how informing reasonable people about the destructiveness of AIDS denialism can help rein them in.

Read below Null’s empty response. Plus an extra bonus – David Crowe’s attempt to rescue him.

For Moron Gary Null visit Quackwatch.com.

UPDATE 6/17/2009: “Gary Null Calling”: That’s right, Gary Null is calling AIDS scientists asking for a debate on whether HIV causes AIDS. This is yet more evidence that toxic hair dyes cause D-SBD (denialism-specific brain damage).
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Dear Distinguished Professors and Health Practitioners,

We are in receipt of correspondence sent to you by Dr. Seth Goldberg, a board member of WBAI in New York City, with respect to my return to that station. In response to the accusations raised by Aaron Boyle at Act UP and Dr. Goldberg, I am including at the end of this message a statement of referral for my return to WBAI by David Crowe, President of Rethinking AIDS in Canada, who eloquently outlines the scientific HIV/AIDS controversy.

My radio broadcasts, as well as my many award-winning documentary films, have strived to be open forums for constructive dialogue on the critical issues that affect our lives. To support my sincerity, on May 8, 2009, both Drs. Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier appeared together as guests on my program. The questions prepared were not my own but were submitted by leading scientists and dedicated scholars who you perhaps agree with Dr. Goldberg should be labeled as “Denialists.” In my opinion, and in the tradition of true scientific integrity, it is more accurate to perceive them as the “Denied.” They have been denied publication of their work in peer-reviewed medical journals. They have been denied participatory attendance at major scientific AIDS conferences. They have been consistently denied funding for their research. Some have been forced out of their teaching positions at their respective educational institutions or have been demoted to lesser roles within their departments, such as was the case with Prof. Peter Duesberg at University of California, Berkeley. Yet this is the very man who Dr. Gallo has publicly stated “knows more about retroviruses than any man alive” (Spin Magazine, 1992).

The huge amount of funding that goes into the pro-HIV/AIDS medical industry and research has, in my opinion, led to the creation of a rigid scientific arrogance now too self-righteous to accommodate dissenting opinions. During my interview with Dr. Gallo, he remarkably characterized this arrogance that now pervades many levels of the pro-HIV/AIDS community along with its strategy to simply remain silent and avoid those unanswered medical questions that challenge their pet views and personal agendas. Nevertheless, the sole purpose for inviting Drs. Gallo and Montagnier was to hear their responses to those same questions that a growing number of scientists find perplexing and unsatisfactorily answered. (You can listen to this interview under the May 8 date on our archives at http://garynull.org).

As physicians and researchers who signed Dr. Goldberg’s petition, I would like to invite you to be guests on one of my forthcoming broadcasts to address some of the questions about HIV and AIDS that have remained with us for a couple decades. Since Drs. Gallo and Montagnier generally avoided our questions, I would like to offer you the opportunity to share your insights and expertise about the same for my international audience without debate or interruption. Some of you do not list HIV/AIDS issues in your professional backgrounds that we have reviewed. Nevertheless, if you have solid scientific evidence, this will offer you an opportunity to share it with my audience. I host one of the few radio programs in America that accommodates leading scientists and researchers to present their points irrespective of how controversial they may be. Mainstream media has not been open to educating the public and allowing these types of debates and discussions to take place.

I wish for nothing more than to accommodate constructive scientific dialogue between the opposing views about whether or not HIV is the primary cause of AIDS and whether or not the dominant pharmaceutical drug protocol is the most advantageous means for tackling the problem if it is. I would also be pleased to forward you a copy of my award-winning documentary AIDS Inc. It will introduce you to the concerns being expressed by those who are “Denied” in addition to how they are being attacked by the inquisition of the AIDS industry. Yet these are but a sampling; since the documentary’s release I have heard many similar stories from other professors and scientists.

I do not arrive at my conclusions arbitrarily and hastily. Instead, I have taken a concerted and measured approach in reviewing the available medical, epistemological, and therapeutic literature. As an award-winning investigative journalist, I have had the opportunity to interview hundreds of medical professionals with impeccable scientific credentials and a deep commitment to rational, sound scientific standards. There are now well over 2500 professionals who all agree that the dogma surrounding HIV/AIDS deserves a new appraisal. That I can be held liable without the opportunity to dialogue and be slandered without the benefit to defend myself does not represent any kind of professionalism and proper behavior. If an individual feels they have the truth on their side, at the very least they should be permitted to engage in an open and non-confrontational discussion. There has been no open discussion. Inflammatory organizations, such as Act Up and its many supporters, have been completely insensitive to this dialogue. This is even more insidious because they have no expertise whatsoever in the medical science at the heart of the controversy. Nevertheless, they imagine themselves as the protectors of this very science. Any dissenting opinion is met with ridicule, dehumanization and vicious slander.

In the meantime my attorneys are actively pursuing my legal options, and we are heretofore placing you on notice about that.

I look forward to hearing back from you. If you would like to receive a copy of the AIDS Inc DVD, please include your mailing address and one will be sent to you.

Sincerely,
Gary Null, PhD.
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DAVID CROWE RESPONSE TO DR. SETH GOLDBERG
Dear Dr. Goldberg;

Why is it that 25 years after the world accepted that HIV was the cause of AIDS that many people, including highly credentialed scientists and academics, still question this? Why is it that those who ask questions are labelled with the hateful name "Denialist"? That scientists who question are cut off from research funding, publication and promotions? That journalists who question are banned?

When AIDS was first named (as GRID, Gay Related Immune Deficiency) at the start of the 1980s it was representatives of marginalized gay men who called for action on this new syndrome, although a syndrome can never really be new because it is just a name given to a collection of pre-existing diseases, in this case PCP pneumonia and the skin disorder Kaposi's Sarcoma. Putting these two diseases together under one umbrella only makes sense if there is a common cause. And there were two theories to explain this, use of drugs, especially "poppers" (nitrite inhalants), or a previously unknown virus. These people deserved support and action, but only support and actions that helped solve the health crisis that had been identified.

There was a lot going for the theory that AIDS could be caused by recreational drugs, as all the early cases were among poppers users -- the majority of gay men were unaffected. However, the virus theory won out and by the time Robert Gallo announced that he had discovered HTLV-III (HIV) at a press conference in 1984 (prior to any scientific publications, but after filing a patent), and called it the probable cause of AIDS, research on the drug theory by scientists like Harry Haverkos had been all but banned.

Leaders of the gay community essentially had a choice, they could recognize that some gay men, just like some heterosexuals, had a drug problem and help them deal with it. Or they could choose to believe that they were too promiscuous, and blame the problem on that. They chose the latter.

Financial considerations entered the picture early. Poppers manufacturers were big advertisers in gay publications (the drugs have long been marketed almost exclusively to gay men). The medical research establishment has always been biased towards germs (or occasionally genes) and away from chemical causes to illness, particularly in America where massive government funding allows much tighter coordination (and control) of medical research (including censorship of areas that might offend the chemical elite that is so powerful). And, finally, pharmaceutical companies, another huge source of funding, were only interested if there was a virus to kill, there was no role for them in getting people off drugs. There was an ironic twist too, because one of the big early manufacturers of amyl nitrite was Burroughs Wellcome which is now part of GlaxoSmithKline, the first and biggest AIDS drug manufacturer. They sold the compound in small glass vials that could be crushed and inhaled by angina patients to open the coronary arteries, hence the name "poppers".

Pharmaceutical companies have made it easy for AIDS organizations to secure funding. "The Body", for example, has credits at the bottom of their home page (http://thebody.com) to major AIDS drug companies. On the day I wrote this the list included GlaxoSmithKline (AZT, Combivir, etc.), Bristol-Myers Squibb (Sustiva, Serit, Videx etc.), Gilead (Atripla, Emtricitabine, Tenofovir), Merck (Crixivan, Raltegravir etc.), Abbott Virology (HIV Testing plus Lopinavir, Norvir etc.) and Roche (Saquinavir etc.). There were no other sponsors listed.

This has created a massive conflict of interest for AIDS organizations. Life is comfortable if you promote drugs as the main solution for AIDS, but gets very lonely and unfunded if you decide that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, or even simply that AIDS drugs are too toxic or that alternative health remedies are safer and more effective than the high tech products of modern pharmacology.

All that is allowed is faux-criticism of the drug companies for not producing drugs cheaply enough. This promotes drugs as "life-saving" but too expensive, and suppresses criticism of the drugs as unsafe and ineffective.

The major questions about the HIV=AIDS theory are whether HIV is the only cause of AIDS, whether HIV infection always leads to AIDS and AIDS to death, whether HIV tests are unambiguous, whether CD4 counts and Viral Load are accurate indicators of future health, whether HIV can be transferred sexually and whether the AIDS drugs are truly "life-saving", as so often repeated.

I could go into a detailed analysis of why each of these points can legitimately be questioned, complete with citations from the mainstream literature (see http://aras.ab.ca/test.html for the level of detailed analysis that is possible) however that would be a book, rather than a short message.

Perhaps a shortcut is to realize that there are thousands of scientists, MDs, academics, journalist, lawyers and other educated and accomplished people who question the HIV=AIDS=Death dogma, see:
http://www.rethinkingaids.com/quotes/rethinkers.htm

In closing I would like to address one specific point that ACT/UP made in their email, that rethinkers of the AIDS theory are genocidal, and have been the cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths. This claim published in JAIDS in October 2008, despite coming from Harvard, is absurd. The study is based on assumptions that, not surprisingly, tautologically support the beliefs of the authors. It is not based on real deaths, and the mathematical model that it used to produce the numbers does not include a single death from adverse events associated with the use of AIDS drugs despite the scientific literature being replete with such reports, and despite the fact that the leading cause of death among people with AIDS in America is now reported to be liver disease, a common side effect of AIDS drugs, but something that has never been added to the list of AIDS defining diseases.

What we need now is more discussion, not less. I hope WBAI puts Gary Null back on the air.

Regards,
David Crowe
President, Rethinking AIDS

Holocaust Deniers, AIDS Denialists, and Other Conspiracy Theorists

Just a few days after President Obama renounced Holocaust Denial, 89 year old white supremacist James Von Brunn opened gun fire at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington DC killing at least one person. Von Brunn apparently had quite a following and some of his Holocaust Dinier fans are also rather active AIDS Denialists.

There is a long history of racist and homophobic undertones to AIDS denialism which I discuss in Denying AIDS. Perhaps even more disturbing are the recent homophobic remarks made by some of the more outspoken AIDS Denialist bloggers. AIDSTruth.org has expressed concern about this trend with a post well worth reading. Of particular concern to all of us are comments posted online by AIDS Denialist Clark Baker regarding homosexual ‘lifestles’.

Members of Rethinking AIDS complain that they are mischaracterized as conspiracy theorists and are never happy when their parallels to Holocaust denial are pointed out. The evidence of course is in their rhetoric. (see post "What is HIV/AIDS Denialism")

If AIDS Rethinkers are not essentially a group of deconstructing conspiracy theorists, then why are they embraced by the most extreme of all conspiracy nut cases? There are several examples of extremists reaching out to Rethinking AIDS. For example, David Rasnick is well known among fellow conspiracy theorists. Rasnick’s theory “The AIDS Blunder” is singled out in discussions of 9/11 Truth Seeking, Secret Sterilizations, and CIA Mind Control Experiments. Rasnick is quoted by conspiracy theory extremist David Kay, where he discusses Rasnick’s views on “The AIDS-HIV Guinea Pig Kids” fiasco that baselessly caused the stop of pediatric HIV treatment trials in New York City.

Surprisingly even more repugnant is the link to Rethinking AIDS neo-Nazi hate group websites. First Light Forum has connected to Rethinking AIDS and AIDS denialist Janine Roberts’s homepage and her blog, by just clicking “The Great HIV/AIDS Hoax - reaping loot for Jew pharmaceutical cartels and killing Gentiles.” First Light Forum focuses on anything anti-Semitic and all conspiracy theories. You can read about the fabricated JFK assassination, the ‘Great Adolf Hitler”, refuting the Holocaust, how Jews brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11, and of course “Rethinkingaids.com - HIV/AIDS Scam exposed”.

Are the AIDS denialists a hate group? No.

Are AIDS denialists neo-Nazis? No.

The point is not that AIDS Denialists are even like Neo-Nazis. The point is that AIDS denialists are like Holocaust Denialists. Just as they are similar to 9/11 Truth Seekers, Global Warming Denialists, Creationists, and Flat Earthers. What connects them all is a shared constellation of personality characteristics, including paranoia, anti-government passions, mis-representation of history, manipulation of facts, and attention seeking. The similarities are undeniable.

"I have no patience for people who would deny history"

President Obama calls death camp 'ultimate rebuke' to Holocaust deniers

President Obama has already proven that he will not be making policy decisions based on denialism. He has appointed solid leaders to head up national and international AIDS policy. Unlike the previous Administration he has shown respet for science. It is not just that my politics are closer to his party. Objective observation tells us the Obama administration is public health minded.

The thing we are waiting for is The President to lift the federal ban on needle and syringe access. I thought this would have happened by now, but it has not. The political forces must be strong because the science is overwhelming. Perhaps it will be part of the national AIDS prevention strategy that the White House will release this year or perhaps part of health care reform. In the mean time, implementing a science-based intervention that we know saves lives is still being held up.
The President has taken a stand against Holocaust Denial. As we know, a stand against Holocaust Denial is a stand against AIDS Denial because they are peas in the same denialist pod. Read here the story on President Obama’s historic trip to the Nazi Concentration Camp Buchenwald and his rebuke of denialism.

From the Associated Press: President Barack Obama has arrived in Paris after meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany and touring the Buchenwald concentration camp, where tens of thousands of Jews perished during the Holocaust.

Obama is to meet Saturday with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and help commemorate the 65th anniversary of the Allies' D-Day invasion in France.

Obama is also reuniting with his family in Paris. First lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha flew to the City of Light on Friday to join him.

Obama witnessed the Nazi ovens of the Buchenwald concentration camp Friday, its clock tower frozen at the time of liberation, and said the leaders of today must not rest against the spread of evil.

The president called the camp where an estimated 56,000 people died the "ultimate rebuke" to Holocaust deniers and skeptics. And he bluntly challenged one of them, Iranian President Ahmadinejad, to visit Buchenwald.

"These sites have not lost their horror with the passage of time," Obama said after seeing crematory ovens, barbed-wire fences, guard towers and the clock set at 3:15, marking the camp's liberation in the afternoon of April 11, 1945. "More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished.

Buchenwald "teaches us that we must be ever-vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others' suffering is not our problem, and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests," Obama said.

He also said he saw, reflected in the horrors, Israel's capacity to empathize with the suffering of others, which he said gave him hope Israel and the Palestinians can achieving a lasting peace.

Obama became the first U.S. president to visit the Buchenwald concentration camp. It was, in part, a personal visit: His great-uncle helped liberate a nearby satellite camp, Ohrdruf, in early April 1945 just days before other U.S. Army units overran Buchenwald.

Earlier in Dresden alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Obama pressed for progress toward Mideast peace. The U.S. "can't force peace upon the parties," he said, but America has "at least created the space, the atmosphere, in which talks can restart."

The president also announced he was dispatching special envoy George J. Mitchell back to the region next week to follow up on Obama's speech in Cairo a day earlier in which he called for both Israelis and Palestinians to make concessions in the standoff.

Fresh from visits to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Obama said that while regional and worldwide powers must help achieve peace, responsibility ultimately falls to Israelis and Palestinians to reach an accord.

He said Israel must live up to commitments it made under the so-called "Road Map" peace outline to stop constructing settlements, adding: "I recognize the very difficult politics in Israel of getting that done." He also said the Palestinians must control violence-inciting acts and statements, saying that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas "has made progress on this issue, but not enough."

Merkel, for her part, promised to cooperate on the long-sought goal. She said the two leaders discussed a time frame for a peace process but did not elaborate.

"With the new American government and the president, there is a truly unique opportunity to revive this peace process or, let us put this very cautiously, this process of negotiations," Merkel said.

Elie Wiesel, a 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner, author and Holocaust survivor whose father died of starvation at Buchenwald three months before liberation, and Bertrand Herz, also a Buchenwald survivor; accompanied Obama and Merkel at the camp. Each laid a long-stemmed white rose at a memorial. They were later joined by Volkhard Knigge, head of the Buchenwald memorial.

"To this day, there are those who insist the Holocaust never happened," Obama said. "This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history."
It was a pointed message to Iran's Ahmadinejad, who has expressed doubts that 6 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis.

"He should make his own visit" to Buchenwald, Obama told NBC earlier Friday. He added: "I have no patience for people who would deny history."

Separately, the president told reporters: "The international community has an obligation, even when it's inconvenient, to act when genocide is occurring."

After the tour, Obama flew to Landstuhl, the U.S. military hospital for private visits with U.S. troops recovering from wounds sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan. He spent about two hours visiting the wounded.

Hey Professor, ignoring the nut next door is not helping

Are academics complicit in the proliferation of conspiracy theories, not least through reluctance to tackle 'truthers' head on?

Times Higher Education, 4 June 2009
By Matthew Reisz

Nothing is ever just an accident. Could the European Union be a front to restore the Merovingian dynasty and the bloodline of Jesus? Did George W. Bush stand aside and allow 9/11 to happen - or even, as the more extreme "truthers" argue, make it happen? Did a dastardly Duke of Edinburgh spearhead a plot to kill the lovely Diana, Princess of Wales? And were the Apollo moon landings all faked by Nasa - as 6 per cent of the US population believe?

We live, it is often argued, in an era of conspiracy theories - many of them as daft as those just related. "Sometimes it appears as if Western societies have regressed," suggests Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, "and we are now adopting a medieval attitude towards calamitous acts." Whenever something goes wrong, "a simplistic, conspiratorial world view emerges to blame small cliques of evil people". Sarah Churchwell, senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia, agrees. Conspiracy theories provide "a belief system in an age of uncertainty and unfiltered information that destabilises knowledge with so many 'facts' and possible interpretations. Conspiracies attempt to make order out of chaos."Churchwell is the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004), which examines - and explodes - the myths that have grown up around the film star's life and death. "The conspiracies are completely ongoing; they build and build and keep on proliferating. There's never a story to which Marilyn can't be attached," she says.

There are also a number of prominent revisionist claims about significant issues - that climate change is a fiction, that HIV has no connection with Aids, that the scale of the Holocaust has been greatly exaggerated - that are almost invariably linked to the suggestion that mainstream scholarship is inherently suspect and corrupted by political or material interests. Self-styled maverick researchers portray themselves as victims, sidelined or silenced by the powers that be. Even the process of peer review can be presented as part of a conspiracy to shut out critical voices, to police knowledge and to protect received wisdom.

Perhaps it hardly matters if a Dan Brown fan laps up every word of The Da Vinci Code and then proclaims on television that it had made him realise there had long been a cover-up of the fact that Mary Magdalen could have been one of the Spice Girls. Yet many conspiracy theories are libellous, dangerous and ultimately corrosive of serious intellectual debate.

Fortunately, help is at hand - from the academy. Who better than a sober historian to pour the cold water of reason and evidence on overheated conspiracy claims? If we really want to know whether there's been a plot to conceal who discovered America, or if the Ancient Greeks stole their best ideas from Africa, there are people in universities who can tell us.

Kathryn Olmsted, professor of history at the University of California, Davis, recently published Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. She believes that if conspiracy theories are the problem, most academics are part of the solution. "Almost by definition, conspiracy theories are simple ways of telling complicated stories, and academics are averse to oversimplifications. Historians have been especially active in knocking down conspiracy theories about the distant or relatively distant past" - such as the idea that President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew about or provoked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

So far, so good. Academics undoubtedly can and do play such a salutary role. But is this the whole story? Are academics always on the side of the angels, rallying to the cause of truth - or can they sometimes be part of the problem?

Definitely the latter, says journalist David Aaronovitch, who has recently published Voodoo Histories, a book on conspiracy theories, as part of what he sees as a wider "war against stupidity, designed to establish evidence-based foundations for thinking". He also hopes to help people "distinguish between the scholarly and the slapdash, the committed researcher and the careless loudmouth, the scrupulous and the demagogic".

When it comes to gullibility, Aaronovitch suggests, neither the academy nor his own profession should feel too complacent. "We are used to seeing gross prejudices as the product of peasant credulity, lumpen ignorance or provincial small-mindedness. People like us, this implies, would not be fooled." But it just ain't so.

We may not be surprised that in Nazi Germany, academics, journalists and other educated professionals queued up to heap praise on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the ridiculous but lethal forgery said to demonstrate the existence of a global Jewish conspiracy. But there has also been an eloquent and highly visible, though obviously small, minority of British and American academics who have played a major role in promoting conspiracies about Roosevelt, President John F. Kennedy and the events of 9/11, not to mention the idea that Jesus made a botched attempt to fake his own crucifixion.

When it comes to spinning conspiracy theories, Aaronovitch claims provocatively: "Academics, students and journalists are the most innovative sector. You need a pretension to knowledge without real knowledge. What better than academics talking outside their field?"

People working in disciplines such as theology and peace studies are said to be particularly susceptible, whereas "historians have to have a sense of how things don't happen - which makes conspiratorial thinking implausible. Few experts on structural physics and engineering have signed up for 9/11 theories," he notes, referring to claims such as the one that the World Trade Centre's Tower Seven was destroyed by a controlled explosion.

Ronald Fritze, professor of history at Athens State University, Alabama, who recently published Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions, is also concerned about academics who stray off their home turf.

"Some are prominent Holocaust deniers," he says, "but they tend to have posts in engineering and business faculties that have nothing to do with their ideas about the Holocaust. Barry Fell (1917-94) believed that Europeans reached North America during the megalithic era. He is put forward as a Harvard professor to bolster his credibility, but the problem is that his expertise was in marine biology, not archaeology, prehistory or ancient Celtic languages."

In other areas of conspiracy theory, however, it is only experts who are likely to be listened to. Any pub bore can acquire the basic knowledge of ballistics and grassy knolls needed to "prove" that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have shot Kennedy. But there is no such thing as robust common sense about retroviruses. Here too, alas, it is often argued that the academic record is far from perfect.

Seth Kalichman is author of the recently published Denying Aids: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy. He is also professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, which makes him, as he notes in an amusing introductory declaimer, "an employee of The State". He has never, he assures us, "taken financial support from any pharmaceutical company, although he has accepted pens and key chains from Pfizer sales reps at conventions".

Despite his jokey tone, the stakes could hardly be higher. Kalichman carries out Aids research in South Africa, where denialism - the claims that "the HIV = Aids myth is the product of a government conspiracy in cahoots with a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical scam" and that antiretroviral medicines are toxic - has had a huge and disastrous impact on government policy. A prominent biologist, Kalichman argues, must take a significant share of the blame for this disaster.

"There are only a handful of academics who are involved in spreading conspiracy theories," says Kalichman, "but they are quite destructive. I am not one for placing any limits on free speech or academic freedom, but these characters help to make the case.

"Those who are tenured are unstoppable. Tenure committees have to be more critical than ever in their scrutinising of journals, because pseudoscience now has outlets that would typically appear legitimate.

"The most destructive people linked to conspiracy theories and denialism are those with academic appointments - and those who can manipulate their backgrounds to appear as if they have had academic appointments."

Because many conspiracy theories are pernicious as well as absurd, their promotion by fringe groups of academics claiming the prestige of their universities is a source of concern. But what can others do to fight back?

It isn't always easy. Genuine scholars can be at a disadvantage in formats such as television's battle of the soundbites. Conspiracy theorists can put forward a simple, sensationalist and emotionally satisfying thesis that can be demolished only painstakingly, brick by brick. Unless academics are exceptionally skilled and quick-witted debaters, they can easily come across as pedantic killjoys as they labour to unpick conspiratorial ideas while also countering attempts to impugn their motives.

Such hazards, Kalichman suggests, explain why "scientists and other genuine academics are reluctant to enter into a 'debate' with conspiracy theorists and denialists. It is easy to get caught in a trap. The denialists will often walk away looking like righteous heroes standing up against the corruption of government, industry and the Establishment."

Fritze takes a similar line. "Academics tend to avoid controversies concerning pseudohistory and pseudoscience because they can get roughed up and dragged into quagmires of circular debate."
Churchwell has no doubt where the more conspiratorial biographers of Marilyn go wrong. "The more you read about her, the more you realise how little we know. There are all sorts of legitimate questions that we don't know the answers to. But there are some things we do know. I can unpick the lies. I can demonstrate falsity.

"You need to think sceptically about the role of evidence. Lots of stuff one can point to has its origins in gossip or hearsay but is taken seriously because it's 'in the record'. A mix of commerce and laziness drives most of the theories."

But although Churchwell has taken part in myth-busting documentaries and hopes her book "has convinced some who were willing to be convinced", she also knows that "getting involved in public debates would be an exercise in futility, because conspiracy theorists are unscrupulous and abusive and come with their minds made up".

Fortunately, however, conspiracy theorists don't always get things their own way. Popular Mechanics magazine and a number of websites have systematically addressed the "suspicious anomalies" noted by the self-styled "9/11 truthers". Mohamed Al Fayed's determination to have his day in court led to a public discrediting of his claims about Prince Philip's role in Diana's death.

Something similar occurred when David Irving unsuccessfully sued the academic Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books for libel in a UK court after she described him as "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial". This gave Richard Evans, now Regius professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge, the opportunity to submit a 700-page report that spelt out in detail the "knotted web of distortions, suppressions and manipulations ... the sheer depth of duplicity encountered in Irving's treatment of the historical sources".

Under cross-examination, Evans proved highly effective in dodging Irving's debating tricks and doggedly answering him point by minute factual point.

There was a moment when Irving asked Evans to clarify a comment in his report.

"Would you like to point me to the page?" Evans responded. "You see, I have a problem, Mr Irving, which is that, having been through your work, I cannot really accept your version of any document, including passages in my own report, without actually having it in front of me."

Perhaps a similarly robust approach is the best way of dealing with conspiracy theorists trying to prove that black is white.

AIDS & Autism: Nothing in Common Except Denialism

The parallels between AIDS Denialism and other denialism, such as Holocaust, 9/11, and Global Warming Denial are discussed at length here and elsewhere. Another fascinating connection exists with vaccine hysteria, especially in relation to Childhood Autism. I examined the mirror images of denialism and hysteria in Denying AIDS;

"And it is not just life-threatening diseases that must contend with medical denialism. In his 2008 book Autism’s False Prophets, Paul Offit describes pseudoscientists who have claimed that autism is caused by roteins leaking through the intestines (leaky gut) and by the toxic effects of mercury contained in childhood vaccines. The rogue scientist that Paul Offit credits with bringing credibility and media exposure to the theory that vaccines cause Autism is British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield. It is fair to say that Andrew Wakefield is to Autism as Peter Duesberg is to AIDS. Parents of autistic children, just like people who test HIV positive and those diagnosed with cancer, are desperate to understand how something so horrible could happen to them. As parents grasp for hope they are persuaded by factual sounding scams put forth by apparently reputable scientists.

And it was not just the parents of Autistic children who are harmed by claims that vaccines cause childhood neurological disorders; vaccine hysteria causes a decline in parents vaccinating their children and resurgences of childhood diseases. Amazingly, we still find more of the same characters who warn against anti-HIV medications and cancer chemotherapy fueling the hysteria against vaccines. Once again David Crowe warns about the hazards of flu vaccines stating in an online magazine article, ‘‘In addition to the health risks of mercury (nervous system damage, cognitive and visual effects), allergic reactions or sensitivities may also develop due to other components of the vaccine, including the eggs used to grow vaccines.’’

In his Nature review of Denying AIDS, John Moore calls attention to the link between AIDS Denialism and Vaccine Hysteria saying, “Paul Offit's tour de force, Autism's False Prophets, claims that pseudoscientists and quacks have used similar tactics to parasitize the suffering of desperate parents by persuading them that vaccines cause autism.” This similarities to AIDS denial are striking.

Now people who care about Autism and combat denialism are examining the AIDS denial connection. Posted at the autism news science and opinion website Left-Brain Right-Brian, the discussion is quite thought provoking. The post leads off…


“One of my big worries is that the public will someday turn against the autism community. We, and all segments of the disability community, all rely heavily on the public’s good will. One way we could lose that is if epidemics of infectious disease return and people point the fingers at “autism spokesperson” Jenny McCarthy. We as a group could be in for some real trouble.

One reason to blog and advocate against pseudoscience and dangerous celebrity advice is to make it clear that the autism community as a whole is not behind Jenny McCarthy and her crowd.

So you can imagine the dismay I feel when I search for autism related articles in the Nature journals and I hit upon this one, The dangers of denying HIV.
Why would that article come up using the search word “autism”, I wondered. AIDS denialism is a truly horrible movement in the world. It leads, quite clearly, to disease, suffering and death.”

What follows is an examination of AIDS denialism from people concerned about Autism. Recognizing the wide range of harm caused by various incarnations of denialism helps us understand the problem. It is also nice to see that we are not alone in our effort to expose the denialists for what they are.

denialism.blog Reviews Denying AIDS

Denying AIDS - A book by Seth Kalichman
Posted on: May 26, 2009 6:56 AM, by Mark Hoofnagle at denialism.blog

Seth Kalichman is a better man than me. Kalichman is a clinical psychologist, editor of the journal Aids and Behavior and director of the Southeast HIV/AIDS Research and Evaluation (SHARE) project, and he has devoted his life to the treatment and prevention of HIV. Despite a clear passion for reducing the harm done by HIV/AIDS, to research this book he actually met, and interviewed, prominent HIV/AIDS denialists. I confess I simply lack the temperament to have done this. To this day, when I read about HIV/AIDS denialists, and the the 330,000 people who have died as a result of HIV/AIDS denialism, I see red. I think violent, bloody thoughts.

The HIV/AIDS denialists, like Celia Farber, object to being called denialist, a quote from her in the book:

Those who wish to engage the AIDS research establishment in the sort of causality debate that is carried on in most other branches of scientific endeavor are tarred as AIDS "denialists," as if skepticism about the pathogenicity of a retrovirus were the moral equivalent of denying the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews.

To this I would reply that the HIV/AIDS denialists like Duesberg are worse than holocaust deniers. Holocaust deniers are anti-semitic bigots and horrible people sure, but the HIV/AIDS denialists are responsible for an ongoing campaign of death. Because people like Duesberg have convinced morons like Thabo Mbeki of their pseudoscience, hundreds of thousands of people are dead.

This is why I see red. Denialist is about the nicest thing you could call the likes of Farber and Duesberg.

Kalichman's book is well-written, timely, thoroughly researched, and to his great credit he uses my definition of denialism. Ha! How could I help but love this book? The fact that he pursues denialism from a psychological angle, and interacts directly with the critical denialists behind this story make it a profoundly important study and resource in understanding not just HIV/AIDS denialism, but all forms of denialist pseudoscience. This takes a very patient, very dedicated person. I would have lost my temper, lost my patience, or lost my mind to have delved so deep into this madness. Not to mention, I'm not very forgiving or nice to people I perceive as being so detrimental. It's a personality flaw, I recognize it. That's why we're lucky to have people like Seth Kalichman.

Let's discuss some of Kalichman's findings below the fold...

First off, in his introduction he describes what it was like interacting with denialists:

My relationships with denialists created some complicated arrangements that allowed me to experience denialism face-to-face. I often felt more like a journalist than a scientist, giving me a glimpse of how it must feel when denialist journalists delve into science. Still, it is important to say that the denialists who interacted with me did not seem evil. They are deeply skeptical of science and untrusting of government and big business. Some are surely misguided and others seem to foolishly believe that they understand everything there was to know about AIDS. But I did not find them evil in the sense they were intesnt on harming people, even though their actions surely are. Of course, those I have come to see as malevolent - the vitamin pushers con men, and angry academics are the ones who did not respond to my attempts to contact them.

Fascinating. I would be surprised if Kalichman had found them to be overtly sinister, like some disease-denying caricatures reminiscent of Mr. Burns on the Simpsons. I think in light of this description we must remember the phrase the banality of evil used by Hannah Arendt to describe Eichmann. Evil isn't always blocking out the son or stealing candy from infants, or always performed by the sociopaths and madmen of history. Sometimes evil is perpetrated by those who are operating without ill intent within a framework that is twisted and wrong, and this is one of the most important lessons of history. Ordinary people who are perfectly normal are capable of doing great harm under the authority of those with radical ideology. See also the Milgram experiment or the Stanford Prison Experiment as examples of this phenomenon. To find them ordinary, if anything, is what one would expect of foolish people who have adopted the warped and devastating ideology of the HIV/AIDS denialists. This does not exonerate them, it merely informs us of the work we need to do to fight against the thoughtless obeisance to ideology which causes so much human misery.

Kalichman starts with a definition of denialism, a description of HIV/AIDS denial and a justification for using the term. And here is my only criticism of the text. I believe that in defining denialism, he does not succinctly describe the critical elements. This is probably a result of my bias towards my own methods of describing the critical elements of denialism. He does cover them all, going into depth in the importance of conspiracy and suspicious personality traits endemic to denialists as a whole. His discussion was of the defining characteristics was of great value though, and I left feeling as though I learned a great deal about the psychological gray zone between simple denial that most people exhibit in the face of hard truth, the ignorant denial of followers, and the more malignant form of denial that is practiced by the leading pseudoscientists. His subsections on "Suspicious Minds" and "Why AIDS, Why Now" I think are truly novel contributions to the discussion of denialism and provide great information as to the motives and sources of denialist arguments.

His second chapter is an extensive discussion on Duesberg. I was also fascinated by his interaction with Duesberg, who not only sounds like he is fundamentally broken mentally, but ignorant of virology. Kalichman writes "Even knowing the complexity of HIV and the barriers it poses to vaccines, Peter Duesberg looked me dead in the eyes and said that failure to achieve and HIV vaccine means that an infectious agent cannot be the cause of AIDS". I immediately smacked my head and thought, does he also deny that the Hepatitis C virus causes Hepatitis despite antibody response? Or that herpes viruses cause a host of chronic infections despite the presence of antibody? Not every virus is easily vaccinated against, that doesn't mean they're non-infectious or can't cause disease. This is a stunningly stupid statement from a virologist. Duesberg is not just an HIV/AIDS denialist, but also denies the role of viruses in cancer, apparently rejecting the mountains of evidence that HPV causes cervical cancer, that any other virus causes cancer, or that cancer can be caused by gene mutation. I would point out again that he seems ignorant of virology despite extensive experience in the field. How about EBV and Burkitt's Lymphoma? There is no other cause of the disease. Or HHV-8 and Kaposi Sarcoma? Duesberg is a classic crank - incompetent and completely unaware of it, and Kalichman lays out his successive use of each of the denialist tactics from conspiracy, to utterly dishonest cherry-picking of data and quote-mining, to logical fallacies. The image emerges of a man who is just contrary, no matter what he refuses to accept any idea that is mainstream, even if it is true. Kalichman spends the rest of the chapter laying out Duesberg's case, which is laughable, and then smashing it, he even alludes to some nice crank magnetism from the cdesign proponentsists, radical libertarians and environmental extremists. Gems include Duesberg's denial that children or sex-workers die of AIDS. The ability of his delusion to protect him from the reality of AIDS is astonishing, and deadly. Somehow, Kalichman's final summary of Duesberg is ultimately too charitable:

Peter Duesberg's legacies will be that he both discovered the first cancer-causing gene and that he brought a sort of legitimacy to a band of sad denialists and wacky pseudoscientists. How one man could be the source of so many lives saved and so many lives lost is the greatest paradox and human tragedy in this whole contorted affair.

Kalichman has to stretch to say positive things about a man who ultimately comes across as a dishonest contrarian, and an insufferable self-aggrandizer. I also would disagree that he has saved any lives for his discovery of src, as it's not as if it would never be discovered if it wasn't for him. It's not like science is art, and only one artist can create some unique work. It's clear that Duesberg has only been a net negative for humanity and science.

Kalichman's description of pseudoscience in chapter 3 is spot on, but I think more or less synonymous with denialism. I believe denialism is the pseudoscientific method, or at least describes its components. He proposes pseudoscience is kind of an applied form of denialism by quasi-experts seeking legitimacy through a more precise mimicry of the trappings of science - fake journals, fake experts, fake peer review etc. I'm not sure one can say they are truly different, but his description of AIDS pseudoscience is great and more extensive debunking of the variety of denialist claims about the existence or non-existence of HIV and AIDS. Many things become clear, especially the tendency of anti-medical pseudoscientists to blame the victim. Almost all of the the denialist theories seem to find a way to make it the victims fault - their lifestyle, their diet, their genetics, etc. which may feed back on their need for control His close examination of their arguments is sometimes grueling for someone with a medical education, I think my forehead has developed a welt from how many times I smacked it. For instance, I hadn't heard about Celia Farber's theory on HIV and infants:

Journalist Celia Farber confuses HIV infection with antibody responses when she states that all babies born to HIV positive mothers are born HIV positive and that all babies born to HIV positive mothers are born HIV positive and that most become negative months later...In this respect Farber is suggesting that all babies born to women with HIV/AIDS have HIV infection.

Facepalm! In humans, there is a IgG transport system across the placenta that delivers maternal antibodies to the infant so that when it is born it enjoys protection from various infections until its own immune system gets its legs under it. This way infants have much of the same acquired immunity as their mothers for the first few months of life. Since the HIV test tests for the presence of antibodies, this gives a false-positive test until the maternal antibodies disappear and, if the infant is positive, they generate their own HIV antibodies. HIV doesn't readily cross the placental barrier, which is why AZT given before labor, not even during the whole pregnancy, is highly protective against transmission of the virus to the child as it is usually infected during birthing. Why are we even arguing with people so ignorant of basic biology? They don't understand human development, they don't understand immunology, they don't understand virology, they don't even understand how an ELISA assay works, but they'll propose their incompetent use of it discredits the work of every HIV/AIDS researcher in the world! It's maddening to hear these cranks assume the mantle of the likes of Galileo and Einstein - minds that may occur maybe once a century - when they are clearly so completely incompetent. The arrogance is astounding.

After icing my forehead...He forgets to mention Michael Fumento as a denialist for his promotion of the myth that heterosexual sex does not transmit HIV. He's a general-use infectious disease promoter who routinely uses the success of public health efforts as proof they're not needed. After all, if disease doesn't get transmitted, why should we think it has anything to do with public health interventions?

In his fourth chapter he summarizes the dominant conspiracy theories, again a thorough job, as well as an excellent sub-chapter on why denialists make people like me so crazy. In the fifth he makes sure not to let Reagan off the hook in a discussion of political elements of HIV/AIDS denialism. And the last chapter deals with the question of how to get people out of denial. Importantly he recognizes the nature of how denialism is spread, starting with a few sources and then expanding outwards through the echo chambers of the internet. There are few original ideas in denialism, and while good ideas come and go, bad ideas last forever. He has some good suggestions of intellectual shortcuts to avoid BS that I'm sure most of my readers are familiar with. He also recognizes the diverse ideological radicalism which contributes to the formation of these ideas. Whether it's anti-medical cranks, environmental cranks, libertarian cranks, they tend to come to the topic of HIV/AIDS with an ideological axe to grind, rather than truly caring for the victims of the disease. Thus I think their moral position deteriorates further, they use the death of millions and ongoing illness and death of innocent men, women and children to further their bigotry against modern medicine, or to promote their toxin paranoia, or their politics.

He also has inspired me to conduct a kind of experiment. Simply put, denialism is an outgrowth of a certain personality type that is dysfunctional. These people with suspicious/paranoid beliefs, a tendency towards conspiracism, and lack of critical reasoning skills are all over the country and all over the world. They interpret events in a predictable manner. I ask the readers to consider world events from this perspective. Let's see if, in the face of a crisis or other major event, we can predict what those with this conspiratorial mindset will come up with as an explanation. I'm curious to see if we can come up with their unique conspiracy theories before they do. Maybe the next time we see something big break in the news if we can successfully conduct this experiment here at denialism blog.

To sum up, this is a well-written engaging book that should serve as a resource for anyone interested in critical thinking, and just as a fascinating story of how things can go awry in the public understanding of science. It's also the best work I've seen so far in evaluating the psychology of the believers causing all the trouble. This is a subject which needs more attention, and I hope to write about it more in the future.

So buy it! All royalties go to the purchase of anti-retrovirals for people in Africa, so you not only help yourself but you help undo some of the damage done by denialists like Duesberg and Mbeki.

Mark Hoofnagle has a MD and PhD in physiology from the University of Virginia, and is now a general surgery resident. His interest in denialism concerns the use of denialist tactics to confuse public understanding of scientific knowledge.

Nature Reviews Denying AIDS

Nature 459, 168 (14 May 2009) doi:10.1038/459168a; Published online 13 May 2009

The dangers of denying HIV
by John P. Moore

BOOK REVIEWED :Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy
by Seth Kalichman
Springer: 2009. 205 pp. $25

Inadequate health policies in South Africa have reportedly led to some 330,000 unnecessary AIDS deaths and a spike in infant mortality, according to estimates by South African and US researchers. This carnage exceeds the death toll in Darfur, yet it has received far less
attention. Seth Kalichman, a US clinical psychologist, shows in Denying AIDS how words can kill. His marvellous book should be read alongside Nicoli Nattrass's Mortal Combat, covering similar ground but from the perspective of a South African.
UPDATE: Left Brain Right Brain Autism Blog picks up on the similarities of AIDS denial and autism denial/hysteria.

The tragic events in South Africa have been exacerbated by AIDS 'denialists' who, Kalichman alleges, assert that HIV is harmless and that antiretroviral drugs are toxic. The author discusses the psychology of denialism, which he says is "the outright rejection of science and medicine". He recounts the history of an HIV-infected US woman whose daughter died from an AIDS-related disease, and who recently died herself, to demonstrate the downward path from "ordinary psychological denial to malignant denial to denialism". Kalichman dismisses denialists' attempts to portray themselves as intellectually honourable dissidents who question accepted wisdom. He draws clear distinctions between dissidence and denialism; the latter, he says, is merely a destructive attempt to undermine the science.

These attitudes are not unique to HIV. Denialism, notes Kalichman, is "partly an outgrowth of a more general anti-science and antimedicine movement". Groups that support intelligent design, doubt global warming, claim that vaccines cause autism, argue that cigarettes are safe, believe that the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were an intelligence-agency plot or deny the Holocaust all use similar tactics.

Kalichman asserts that influential groups within the AIDS denialist movement include academics, pushers of 'quack' cures and supportive journalists. He describes the academics involved as "deranged and disgruntled university professors who turn to pseudoscience as a platform to gain attention", noting that pseudoscience may include "sightings of UFOs, alien abductions, astrology, psychic predictions ...[and] outlandish claims about the cause and cure of diseases".

Kalichman describes how quacks, like some of the academics involved, misrepresent their qualifications to create an illusion of authority. One, he claims, treats AIDS with hyperthermia, massage, oxygen, music, colour, gem, aroma, hypnosis, light and magnetic fields, each word followed by "therapy". Another allegedly distributed a product in Zambia called Tetrasil, a pesticide used in swimming pools, until the Zambian government intervened. Kalichman concludes that "taking money from the poor for bogus treatments is beyond criminal" and castigates journalist supporters of the denialist viewpoint for neglecting their professional obligations to verify facts and avoid sensationalist stories. In a powerful ending, Kalichman claims that extreme right-wing politics influences the AIDS denialist movement.

Professional institutions continue to tolerate the conduct of academic denialists, despite the suffering that has resulted. The standard excuse for inaction has been freedom of expression — the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. But free speech has recognized limits, and causing death is one. In 2006, as Kalichman records, a group of concerned scientists and activists created a website, AIDSTruth (http://www.aidstruth.org/new/), to provide evidence to counter the denialists' words. The international legal and human-rights communities should now investigate the deadly impact of AIDS denialism. Action might have widespread benefits: Paul Offit's tour de force, Autism's False Prophets, claims that pseudoscientists and quacks have used similar tactics to parasitize the suffering of desperate parents by persuading them that vaccines cause autism. As Kalichman says, denialism "will not break until the public is educated to differentiate science from pseudoscience, facts from fraud".

All Royalties from Denying AIDS are donated to buy HIV medications in Africa.

John P. Moore is professor of microbiology and immunology at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York 10021, USA.

Prof Moore's honorarium for this book review will be donated to the same charity that receives Seth Kalichman's royalties for the book – the Family Treatment Fund administered by the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University

POZ Magazine on Denying AIDS

(Un)deniable Evidence
A college professor takes on AIDS naysayers in his latest book
by James Wortman

June 2009

Despite overwhelming scientific findings, some people remain convinced that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS and that antiretrovirals are toxic poisons. Led by vocal skeptics such as former South African President Thabo Mbeki and the late Christine Maggiore, AIDS denialism continues to flourish, especially with the help of the Internet.

To counter this strengthening movement, Seth Kalichman, PhD, a social psychology professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy ($25, Copernicus Books), which examines AIDS denialism’s origin, agendas and potentially damaging influence on HIV prevention and treatment.Kalichman believes that the scientific community’s decision to stay quiet over the years has only fueled the denialists’ power. “[For too long] scientists have believed that if you ignore the denialists, they will go away,” he told POZ. “The HIV community really has a role in combating this misinformation.” All royalties will help the Family Treatment Fund provide AIDS meds for people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?

Excerpts from the article “Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?” by Pascal Diethelm, OxyGene`ve, Geneva, Switzerland and Martin McKee, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published in European Journal of Public Health, Vol. 19, 2009.

Black is white and white is black
HIV does not cause AIDS. The world was created in 4004 BCE. Smoking does not cause cancer. And if climate change is happening, it is nothing to do with man-made CO2 emissions. Few, if any, of the readers of this journal will believe any of these statements. Yet each can be found easily in the mass media.

The consequences of policies based on views such as these can be fatal. Thabo Mbeki’s denial that HIV caused AIDS prevented thousands of HIV positive mothers in South Africa receiving anti-retrovirals so that they, unnecessarily, transmitted the disease to their children. His health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, famously rejected evidence of the efficacy of these drugs, instead advocating treatment with garlic, beetroot and African potato. It was ironic that their departure from office coincided with the award of the Nobel Prize to Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre´-Sinoussi for their discovery that HIV is indeed the cause of AIDS.

The rejection of scientific evidence is also apparent in the popularity of creationism, with an estimated 45% of Americans in 2004 believing that God created man in his present form within the past 10 000 years. While successive judgements of the US Supreme Court have rejected the teaching of creationism as science, many American schools are cautious about discussing evolution. In the United Kingdom, some faithbased schools teach evolution and creationism as equally valid ‘faith positions’. It remains unclear how they explain the emergence of antibiotic resistance. Elsewhere, the hand of powerful corporate interests can be seen. It took many decades for the conclusions of authoritative reports by the US Surgeon General and the British Royal College of Physicians on the harmful effects of smoking to be accepted, while even now, despite clear evidence of rapid reductions in myocardial infarctions where bans have been implemented, there are some who deny that second-hand smoke is dangerous. In large part this was due to the efforts of the tobacco industry to deflect attention to other putative causes of smoking-related diseases, from stress to keeping pet birds. The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have suffered similar attacks from commentators with links to major oil companies.

All of these examples have one feature in common. There is an overwhelming consensus on the evidence among scientists yet there are also vocal commentators who reject this consensus, convincing many of the public, and often the media too, that the consensus is not based on ‘sound science’ or denying that there is a consensus by exhibiting individual dissenting voices as the ultimate authorities on the topic in question. Their goal is to convince that there are sufficient grounds to reject the case for taking action to tackle threats to health. This phenomenon has led some to draw a historical parallel with the holocaust, another area where the evidence is overwhelming but where a few commentators have continued to sow doubt. All are seen as part of a larger phenomenon of denialism.

Defining and recognizing denialism
The Hoofnagle brothers, a lawyer and a physiologist from the United States, who have done much to develop the concept of denialism, have defined it as the employment of rhetorical arguments to give the appearance of legitimate debate where there is none, an approach that has the ultimate goal of rejecting a proposition on which a scientific consensus exists. In this viewpoint, we argue that public health scientists should be aware of the features of denialism and be able to recognize and confront it.

Denialism is a process that employs some or all of five characteristic elements in a concerted way. The first is the identification of conspiracies. When the overwhelming body of scientific opinion believes that something is true, it is argued that this is not because those scientists have independently studied the evidence and reached the same conclusion. It is because they have engaged in a complex and secretive conspiracy. The peer review process is seen as a tool by which the conspirators suppress dissent, rather than as a means of weeding out papers and grant applications unsupported by evidence or lacking logical thought. The view of General Jack D Ripper that fluoridation was a Soviet plot to poison American drinking water in Dr Strangelove, Kubrick’s black comedy about the Cold War is no less bizarre than those expressed in many of the websites that oppose this measure.

In some cases, denialism exploits genuine concerns, such as the rejection of evidence on the nature of AIDS by African-Americans who perceive them as a manifestation of racist agendas. While conspiracy theories cannot simply be dismissed because conspiracies do occur, it beggars belief that they can encompass entire scientific communities.

There is also a variant of conspiracy theory, inversionism, in which some of one’s own characteristics and motivations are attributed to others. For example, tobacco companies describe academic research into the health effects of smoking as the product of an ‘anti-smoking industry’, described as ‘a vertically integrated, highly concentrated, oligopolistic cartel, combined with some public monopolies’ whose aim is to ‘manufacture alleged evidence, suggestive inferences linking smoking to various diseases and publicity and dissemination and advertising of these so-called findings to the widest possible public’.

Responding to denialism
Denialists are driven by a range of motivations. For some it is greed, lured by the corporate largesse of the oil and tobacco industries. For others it is ideology or faith, causing them to reject anything incompatible with their fundamental beliefs. Finally there is eccentricity and idiosyncrasy, sometimes encouraged by the celebrity status conferred on the maverick by the media.

Whatever the motivation, it is important to recognize denialism when confronted with it. The normal academic response to an opposing argument is to engage with it, testing the strengths and weaknesses of the differing views, in the expectations that the truth will emerge through a process of debate. However, this requires that both parties obey certain ground rules, such as a willingness to look at the evidence as a whole, to reject deliberate distortions and to accept principles of logic. A meaningful discourse is impossible when one party rejects these rules. Yet it would be wrong to prevent the denialists having a voice. Instead, we argue, it is necessary to shift the debate from the subject under consideration, instead exposing to public scrutiny the tactics they employ and identifying them publicly for what they are. An understanding of the five tactics listed above provides a useful framework for doing so.

Court Jester: Celia Farber’s New Libel Suit Against Treatment Action Group

Published in New York Post, May 9, 2009

UPDATE: also see Courthouse News Service, includes the time stamped County Clerk summons.

AFTER years of being attacked by a faction of the AIDS pharmaceutical/research community, journalist Celia Farber is fighting back with a libel suit. Farber's lawyers filed a 21-page libel complaint this week in Manhattan Supreme Court accusing Richard Jefferys, of the Treatment Action Group, of orchestrating a campaign against her last May when she was given the Semmelweis Clean Hands Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for an article she wrote in Harper's in 2006, "AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science."


The Harpers article gave credence to the work of Peter Duesberg, who believes HIV is a harmless "passenger" virus and not the cause of AIDS, and questioned the value of expensive antiretroviral drugs. Jefferys and his team blitzed the Semmelweis Society with e-mails claiming Farber had altered quotes and falsely misrepresented scientific papers.

The Semmelweis Society, in turn, launched its own investigation, and concluded the AIDS industry itself has all the characteristics of a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise that desperately needed whistleblowers. Farber, the daughter of talk legend Barry Farber, kept her award, though the battle to rescind it garnered fresh attacks, in which she was likened to Pol Pot, Stalin, Mengele, David Irving, David Duke and O.J. Simpson.

The former Spin columnist recently launched a new literary Web site called the Truth Barrier, with former New York Press editor John Strausbaugh. In appreciation for her work on AIDS, the artist Robert Crumb submitted an original drawing and a hand-written three-page letter expressing his despair over what he believes is the distortion of the AIDS story.

"Actually, Crumb's letter was too true even for the Truth Barrier," says Farber. "I redacted it. I don't want these pharma-bullies attacking him next."

AIDS Apathy is Fertile Soil for Denialism

Leading AIDS Denialist David Crowe once said “The world is getting bored with AIDS”.

And yet, as President of the Rethinking AIDS Society, Mr. Crowe refurbished the Rethinking AIDS website, hired a public relations person, and reinvigorated his propaganda campaigns. He also started daily updates on his other denialist website for the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society.

Why would David Crowe and Rethinking AIDS do all of this if the world is bored with AIDS?

Because AIDS apathy is good for AIDS Denialism.

AIDS apathy means less attention to AIDS science, reduced information seeking, less critical thinking about AIDS, and fewer quality information resources. AIDS apathy may explain why 45% of Gay men believe “HIV does not cause AIDS” and 51% believe that “HIV drugs can harm you more than help you.” Apathy may also help explain the rise in AIDS conspiracy theories, where one in five men and women in Houston believe that “AIDS is an agent of genocide created by the US Government to kill of minority populations” and 43% of African Americans in the US believe that “People who take the new medicines for HIV are human guinea pigs for the government”.

The Kaiser Family Foundation just released a new survey of Americans that shows the public sees AIDS as less of a threat than in the past, even as new infections are on the rise. The proportion of Americans who see HIV/AIDS as the most urgent health threat facing the country has plummeted from 44% in 1995 to 17% in 2006 and 6% today. AIDS apathy was also greatest among those most affected by AIDS and those at greatest risk.

The study showed that the number of people who say that they have heard, seen, or read “a lot” or “some” about HIV/AIDS in the US in the past year declined from 70% in 2004 to 45% in 2009. Those who said they saw “a lot” about HIV/AIDS was cut about in half from 34 percent to 14 percent.

Americans who say that we are losing ground on the problem of HIV/AIDS has decreased from 36% in 2004 to 22% in 2009.

Sadly, we are actually losing ground in the fight against HIV/AIDS. An estimated 1.7 million Americans have been infected with HIV and 580,000 have died of AIDS. New HIV infections in the US are occurring at a rate of 56,000 a year, that means that every 9 ½ minutes someone in the US is infected with HIV. The District of Columbia has the worst AIDS problem in the country, with HIV infecting 3% of the city it rivals countries in West Africa as one of the most AIDS afflicted places in the world. All of this is happening while Americans are caring less about AIDS and AIDS Denialists spew ever more misinformation.

AIDS denialism claims that HIV does not cause AIDS, that HIV tests are invalid, and HIV treatments are poison. If our greatest hope for defeating AIDS Denialism is an attentive and educated public, we have a lot of work to do.

AIDS 'Denialists' Jeopardizing Treatment For Sufferers

By WILLIAM WEIR
April 29, 2009

For about two decades, it has been considered as fact that HIV causes AIDS, but there continue to be activists who say otherwise.

They've been brushed off too often as crackpots, says Seth Kalichman, who teaches social psychology at the University of Connecticut and is the editor of the journal AIDS and Behavior. As a result, those in the small but vocal minority have been able to push their views to a dangerous level. In his recently published book "Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience and Human Tragedy" (Copernicus Books, $25), Kalichman looks at the loose community that continues to question years of scientific research that points to the human immunodeficiency virus as the cause of AIDS. They often refer to themselves as "AIDS dissidents," but Kalichman and other critics use the more charged term of "AIDS denialists."
One of the things that has allowed the denialists to gain traction, he says, are the few among them who have genuine science credentials on their résumés

Among the first to question the prevailing wisdom about AIDS was Peter Duesberg, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. He was among the first to identify and map the cancer-causing gene, though he may now be better known for his controversial views on AIDS treatment. He has stated that lifestyle and the very drugs used to treat AIDS are the cause of the disease.

Earlier this decade, Duesberg's theories had spread to the government of South Africa, where former health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang rejected conventional medicine to treat AIDS patients in favor of a nutritional program that included garlic and beets. A Harvard study last year concluded that the AIDS policies of South Africa's then-president Thabo Mbeki resulted in the premature deaths of about 365,000 AIDS sufferers in the country.

At its peril, Kalichman says, the medical establishment has refused to engage the denialists in debate. "We have figured that if we ignore them, they will go away," he says.

But that strategy doesn't work in the Internet era. For instance, if you do a Google search for "cause of AIDS," the first entry is an essay supporting Duesberg's theory, from a website that bills itself as "rethinking AIDS."

"They've disrupted charity auctions," he says of the denialists. "It's a real threat, and it's all happening at a time when there is a lot of real excitement, and Obama has reignited awareness about AIDS."

As a result of the AIDS denialists' persistence, he says, many infected with the virus — especially those less educated — have refused conventional treatment. Regardless of what kind of reaction "Denying AIDS" gets among AIDS researchers, he says his main priority is getting the right information "to the people who should be most aware."

Kalichman is donating all of the book's royalties to the Family Treatment Fund administered by Massachusetts General Hospital and be used for antiretroviral medications for people with HIV/AIDS in Africa.

For comments at the Hartford Courant website click here.