Queer Progress by Tim McCaskell

Author:Tim McCaskell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Between the Lines
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

HIV Denialism

An article in Rites’ conference coverage introduced another element into the debate. Was HIV actually the cause of AIDS? In “Challenging the AIDS Establishment over HIV,” Colman Jones extensively quoted Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, a microbiologist and primary-care physician in New York, and his patient, musician Michael Callen. Both decried the conspicuous absence of “alternate hypotheses” to the growing consensus that HIV was the cause of AIDS.

This was not just an academic debate. If HIV did not cause AIDS, then all our work around access to HIV treatment was wrongheaded. Sonnabend was categorical: “The HIV hypothesis has consumed all our resources and yet hasn’t saved a single life.” Callen was a little more circumspect: “While many who question the HIV hypothesis are clearly misguided and without scientific foundation, there is nonetheless a serious critique of HIV, and there are alternate explanations that are at least as plausible.”18

Callen may have been referring to Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Duesberg had gained public notoriety with a March 1987 article in Cancer Research proposing that AIDS was caused by long-term consumption of recreational drugs and that HIV was harmless.19 He had later gone on to suggest that HIV medicines themselves caused AIDS.

At the beginning, AAN! gave some attention to the question, publishing a piece by Jones in AIDS ACTION NEWS! and, in October 1990, organizing a screening and panel discussion of Jones’s new video The Cause of AIDS: Fact and Speculation. Jones presented his work as an investigative documentary, but there was little doubt that his sympathies lay with the denialists. Most of us tried to keep an open mind, but as time went on, the various streams of HIV denialism seemed ever more irrelevant, even potentially dangerous, since they discouraged people from taking medications. Jones continued to be prolific and published in Rites, Xtra, and NOW, even as the consensus around HIV solidified and anti-HIV drugs showed more promise and fewer side effects.

The attraction of the HIV denialist position seldom seemed to be based on a cool weighing of the evidence. But that evidence was difficult for all but the most adept to evaluate. Rather, denialism resonated with a distrust of anything that was seen as establishment, a suspicion common among gay men after years of establishment homophobia.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.