{"id":46518,"date":"2026-02-04T11:55:52","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T19:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=46518"},"modified":"2026-02-04T11:55:53","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T19:55:53","slug":"hiv-denialist-peter-duesberg-is-dead-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2026\/02\/04\/hiv-denialist-peter-duesberg-is-dead-good\/","title":{"rendered":"HIV denialist Peter Duesberg is dead. Good."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With his influential lies about the cause of AIDS, the quack left a trail of death and doubt that continues to this day.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

ByBruce Mirken<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

February 1, 2026 (48hills.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the title of this piece seems impolite, I\u2019m in good company. When Bette Davis learned that her arch-nemesis Joan Crawford had died, she famously said, \u201cYou should never say bad things about the dead, only good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.\u201d At least Joan Crawford never killed anyone, so far as I know. That\u2019s better than you can say for Peter Duesberg. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond question, Peter Duesberg left a trail of death\u2014not with bullets or knives, but with lies about AIDS, HIV and the treatments that still keep many of my friends alive. As outlined in his 1995 book, \u201cInventing the AIDS Virus,\u201d he insisted that HIV was harmless and AIDS was caused by use of drugs\u2014both recreational drugs and the pharmaceuticals used to treat HIV, like the early anti-HIV drug AZT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Duesberg often lied about safer sex and AIDS treatment efficacy.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I first began paying serious attention to Duesberg when Spin<\/em>, the music magazine that for years was enthralled by AIDS denialism, published a bizarre interview<\/a> with him in its September 1993 issue. In it\u2014which I wrote about in a column for the gay press\u2014he claimed that gay men couldn\u2019t possibly have as much sex as they do without heavy drug use. In denouncing AZT, which he called \u201cAIDS by design,\u201d he got both the dose and the then-current recommendations for its use wrong. He offered no data to prove that the drug caused illness or death, just a couple of anecdotes about people who took it and eventually died. As a real scientist once told me, \u201cThe plural of anecdote is not data.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Duesberg also claimed that the much higher number of US AIDS cases among gay and bisexual men than among women proved it couldn\u2019t be sexually transmitted, and when confronted with the fact that cases were indeed rising among women, he simply lied and said they weren\u2019t. He seemed unable to grasp, or maybe acknowledge, that a sexually transmitted disease that first took root in the gay male community would likely spread primarily among gay men. He lied again when asked about data showing that safer sex campaigns were reducing AIDS incidence among gay and bi men. He lied yet again when asked about research indicating that certain HIV mutations led to more virulent and damaging strains of the virus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so it went. He dismissed Kaposi\u2019s sarcoma, a once-rare type of skin cancer that became vastly more common with AIDS, as an indicator for an AIDS diagnosis, claiming, \u201cCancer has nothing to do with immune deficiency.\u201d That\u2019s nonsense, as research even then was beginning to show. The role of the immune system in fighting cancer<\/a> has become even clearer in recent years, and a whole class of immunotherapy treatments<\/a> for cancer has emerged, as scientists have learned how to enhance helpful immune responses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A recurring them in Duesberg\u2019s book boils down to, \u201cWe\u2019ve never seen a virus that does what they say HIV does, therefore HIV can\u2019t possibly be doing it.\u201d That\u2019s about as baldly unscientific as you can get. Science discovers new, previously unknown stuff every day. In 1600, no one had ever seen a microbe, much less knew that they caused disease, and yet they existed and caused disease. In 1900, no one had ever seen a drug that could quickly cure an infectious disease, but a few decades later penicillin was doing just that. Can you imagine the reaction if you showed a smartphone to someone in 1940? To treat \u201cwe\u2019ve never seen this before\u201d as meaning \u201cthis can\u2019t exist\u201d is plain dumb, but that\u2019s where Duesberg dropped his rhetorical anchor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actions have consequences, and Duesberg\u2019s hypothesis proved fatally attractive to many, including gay men who at times had good reason to be wary of what the government told them. After all, this avuncular, German-accented scientist was telling them they didn\u2019t have to worry about safer sex, even if they were HIV-positive, and certainly didn\u2019t have to take expensive and sometimes unpleasant anti-HIV drugs, which in fact might kill you. He and other \u201cAIDS dissidents\u201d who echoed his views grew a considerable following in San Francisco and elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of those who were HIV-positive did not survive, choosing to shun the new and effective combination therapies that began to be available in the mid-1990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I\u2019ve written before<\/a>, the movement developed a decidedly cult-like quality. I spent a lot of time observing and talking to denialists, and their ability to dismiss any facts that challenged their belief system was astonishing. I vividly remember hearing a member of the denialist clique that took over and eventually destroyed ACT UP San Francisco responding to a question about the \u201cLazarus syndrome\u201d\u2013people who had been desperately ill with AIDS starting the new drugs, recovering their health and returning to work\u2013by saying that the new drugs must be magically undoing the toxicity of AZT. He had no data supporting that theory nor an explanation for why such people\u2019s rebounding health corresponded directly with the drop in the level of HIV circulating within them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It continues today. When I wrote in these pages<\/a> a while back that half a dozen people I knew who had fallen into the denialist trap had subsequently died of AIDS, a reader wrote in to claim that one of them had actually been killed by having been given a brief course of AZT while hospitalized and too ill to refuse treatment. Even Duesberg didn\u2019t claim that a few days of AZT would kill you, but accepting the reality of HIV\u2014and the reality that they\u2019d been duped\u2014was and is too much for some.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did Duesberg know what he was doing? Did he intentionally mislead people, knowing he was leading them to a likely death? I can\u2019t prove it, of course, not being privy to his private thoughts. But I watched him speak in person and interviewed him once at length. He was many things, but he was not stupid and did have real scientific training. To not have understood that he\u2019d gotten it wrong, especially by the late 1990s and beyond, would require a staggering level of delusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So goodbye, Peter Duesberg, and good riddance. Rot in hell. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bruce Mirken is a longtime health journalist<\/a> who specializes in HIV coverage.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With his influential lies about the cause of AIDS, the quack left a trail of death and doubt that continues to this day. ByBruce Mirken February 1, 2026 (48hills.org) If the title of this piece seems impolite, I\u2019m in good company. When Bette Davis learned that her arch-nemesis Joan Crawford… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46518"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46518"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46519,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46518\/revisions\/46519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}