Friends of Denial

Always eager to help like-minded people get together, I thought I might point our Eli's post on the AIDS/HIV denialists. Oddly enough, their arguments are more or less isomorphic to those of the climate denialists that are, the tobacco causes cancer denialists that were, and the evolution denialists that always will be.
[Peter] Duesberg, if you will, is the Richard Lindzen of AIDS denialism. A member of the US National Academy of Science he did important early work on retroviruses. According to Duesberg

HIV is harmless, a mere "passenger" virus ..."To pretend to think that HIV causes AIDS is politically correct, socially attractive and very,very fundable"... even in "the freest of all countries, as George Bush calls the US, nonconformists are excommunicated at all social and scientific levels"

These guys could trade lines

Duesberg argues that recreational drugs are what destroy the immune system, not a retrovirus.

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