Customer Reviews

Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy

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While I had known about HIV/AIDS denialists for quite a while, I was unaware just how widespread and ghastly denial of HIV/AIDS is. This book gives a fairly concise history of how denialism came to be -- the history of HIV/AIDS research, a rundown of denialist arguments, and the major denialist players; an unlikely marriage of homophobes and people in literal denial of their own HIV status, containing precious few scientists, no clinical AIDS researchers, and a good number of frauds selling vitamins and CAM remedies. To get an idea of how bad the problem really is, even outside of Africa, see the data from a fairly recent CDC research project published in JAIDS:

"Our data provide some insight into issues that could have an impact on the effectiveness of HIV prevention in minority MSM populations. The belief that HIV does not cause AIDS was more likely in all 3 minority groups (48% to 54%) than in whites (27%) and was common among HIV-positive persons."

Those numbers are disastrous. And unlike holocaust denial, climate change denial and 9/11 "truthers", these people are actually contributing to the deaths of HIV-infected people with their reckless promotion of pseudoscience. Previously, I had thought vaccine denial was about as bad as it could get.

In summary: Not perfect, but well worth a read, largely well constructed, and sheds light on a fairly unknown, yet crucial topic.

The one problem I do have is that the proofreading of this book is utterly atrocious. I counted well over 40 grammatical, spelling and typographical errors, in what is a fairly small book; nearly 10 in the introduction alone. This makes the book a lot less readable and damages its credibility somewhat. I would have expected better from Springer.

My favorite subject is: myself. So I was thrilled to discover that Kalichman has written a book all about me, an AIDS denialist. He has never met me but that doesn't matter because all of us denialists are the same anyhow.

I used to call myself an AIDS dissident because of my, as I learned from this book, "crusading religious and political overtones" and not as I thought previously, because this word means dissenting, having a different opinion from most people. Kalichman explains that what characterizes my opinions is not dissent but sameness. True, some denialists deny the existence of a disease called AIDS, some accept that AIDS exists but deny the existence of HIV, some accept that both AIDS and HIV exist but deny that HIV causes AIDS, some accept that HIV causes AIDS but deny that HIV is sexually transmittable, some deny only that the HIV test is reliable, and some don't deny any of these things but reject the drugs. All of us who hold such opinions are "'suspicious thinkers' prone to conspiracy theories and other wacky beliefs." We are no different from holocaust denialists like "Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

Like them, I have "encapsulated delusions ... conspiracy-theory-prone personality style ... and ... tend to be overly independent in [my] thinking." Furthermore, I am "characterized by a fear of homosexuality, or even homophobia." It is understandable that Kalichman thinks this of me. I live in the Netherlands, where different-sex marriages are still legal, though who knows for how long. That's why my spouse (male) and I (female) grabbed our chance while we still could and married although we realized that by doing so we would arouse suspicion of being homophobes. What surprises me is that Kalichman seems to be saying the same thing about my dissi-- I mean denialist friends, some of whom are men married to men. Are they, too, homophobic? Perhaps they are closet heterosexuals who married only to deflect gossip?

In any case all of us denialists have "paranoiac personalities ... It is no wonder that a widespread sexually transmitted virus that is prevalent in gay communities would attract the interest of the paranoid personality." Some of us have "a form of mental illness" which is identifiable by the fact that we disagree with our doctors.

Kalichman even knows my political views. I am on "the extreme socially conservative right" and my favorite targets are "the most marginalized, including gay men, racial minorities, drug users, and the inner-city poor." I do wonder whether Kalichman has ever been to the Netherlands.

All this I read about myself in Chapter One. To my disappointment, Chapter Two is not about me but about denialist Dr. Peter Duesberg, an acclaimed scientist who is, however, a "contrarian" and likes to contradict all reputable scientists including himself. This "character flaw" is derived from his being German-born and his father having served as a doctor in the German army during WWII, explains Kalichman.

In Chapter Three the author restates denialist positions from the angle of different medical specialties, namely virology, immunology, pharmacology, and epidemiology. Chapter Four is about denialist journalism, "Bla-Blah-Bloggers" and the conspiracy theories our paranoid personalities conjure up. Thankfully there are also good scientists like Canada's AIDS campaigner Mark Wainberg who puts our wild fears of persecution to rest by stating "I think that people like Peter Duesberg belong in jail."

Chapter Five is again not about me but about presidents. "Ronald Reagan's silence about AIDS is shamefully legendary." What was the matter with Reagan, did he think a person's health is his own private business or something? President Bush who "intentionally appointed underqualified individuals to his AIDS Advisory Council" was no better. (Note that this overtly suspicious statement is quoting not the denialists but the mainstream Union of Concerned Scientists.) Clinton was just a little better, having vastly increased AIDS spending, but still not enough, of course Furthermore Clinton did not repeal a federal ban on access to clean needles, not that any other president did. Worst of all, though, were Africa's presidents Mandela and Mbeki who felt their nation's money could be better spent on food, clean water, and housing than on USA-patented drugs.

In Chapter Six, the last one except for appendices, Kalichman states that his trust in mainstream medicine is based on "credibility, contemporaneousness, and common sense." As a paranoid denialist, I don't understand that. Credibility means choosing whom to believe. His choice is different from mine. So what? Contemporaneousness means according to him "if a scientific article was published before 2000, I would say it can be considered dated, perhaps even ignored." We might as well ignore all of the tens of thousands of articles that he claims support the existence of AIDS, because a decade after publication every one of them will be dated. As to sense, apparently mine is as common as his, because we both agree that "No one research finding ever proves anything" and "Do not purchase a medical treatment without digging deeper to learn more about it." Perhaps he himself is a closet denialist?

Too bad that Kalichman says he is not planning to write more about denialism, although he does maintain a blah-blah-blog of his own on this subject. The book does not answer all of my questions. How is it that I know people who tested positive for HIV in the late eighties and early nineties, who don't take antiviral drugs, and yet they are alive and well, though some are graying somewhat at the temples? In spite of low T-cell counts and soaring viral loads they are living active, productive lives. According to the Durban Declaration of 2000 they were destined to die within five to ten years of the test. Surely I'm not deluded that by being acquainted with me they have attained immortality, or even longevity? I know plenty of people who passed away young though most did not happen to be seropositive. Even Kalichman confesses that "Everybody dies eventually." How does he explain that these people haven't so far?

They can't be just visions or voices in my delusional mind. I shake their hands and sometimes even hug and kiss them. I was not born in Germany but in the Netherlands (admittedly not a big difference to some Americans). My father did not serve with the German army during WWII, he was on the other side. And what about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, being as delusional as I am, does he hug and kiss my relatives who were gassed and incinerated at Auschwitz and Sobibor? No? Then what about these long-term non-drug taking AIDS-test survivors? The reality of their existence, not the opinions of AIDS-denialists, exposes AIDS propaganda for the sham that it is.

Copyright © MeTZelf

AIDS denialists deny reality: that HIV is a virus or that HIV causes AIDS. In "Denying AIDS," author Seth Kalichman examines how and why a person might regress from healthy, constructive criticism of scientific "paradigms" to vehement, and all too often deadly, denial of reality. For Kalichman, the answer cannot be found in the science of HIV. The science is sound. Legitimate questions about what HIV is (it's a retrovirus) and whether it causes AIDS (it does) were answered by comprehensive scientific studies many years ago. So Kalichman feels no need to defend HIV/AIDS science by countering the denialists' ill-informed criticisms in detail. Instead, he finds his answers by probing the psychology of the denialist.
What he finds is informative and sobering.
Kalichman draws disturbing examples from a bizarre cast of denialist characters. Loch Ness Monster fanatics, crazed hey maaaaan psychedelics, right-wing extremists, these are the people who pass themselves off as "experts" and tell HIV patients to stop taking their medicine, that they don't have a virus and won't get sick. These characters would not seem out of place in a Dan Brown novel. Yet they are all too real, and, as Kalichman demonstrates, despite the red flags their behavior should raise, they've managed to deceive many people, including most tragically a former president of South Africa. They can deceive others, Kalichman shows, because they've already managed to deceive themselves. They urgently know the Loch Ness Monster exists, they fervently know the government is out to kill us all with artificial sweeteners, and they absolutely know HIV is a fake. They're not lying, because they believe it themselves.
While the result of believing in the Loch Ness Monster is at worst a lifetime of summers spent scanning the surface of a lake, the results of HIV denial can be fatal, for individual denialists and for others who are denied treatment or exposed needlessly to the virus as a result of denial.
Ultimately Kalichman does not blame the denialists or call them evil, with the possible exception of people who profit financially by selling quack cures. Their denial, he writes, is rooted in their psychology. I feel that Kalichman is being too generous on this point. Can it be true that the most famous denialists, the ones who have caused the most death around the world, are simply mentally ill? Isn't there some component of irresponsibility involved, especially when a once-respected scientist like the AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg twists science to deceive others? Isn't there some moral transgression involved when a denialist calls Africans "schwarzes" and gay people "homos" and snidely refers to Africans as "those people we all love so much?"
Whether AIDS denialists are mentally ill, a little evil, or some of each, they are a public health problem that is not going away. Kalichman has done a great service by exposing the roots of this fatal phenomenon.

Seth Kalichman has written an excellent, well-reasoned, well-argued book in which he systematically dismantles the arguments of the conspiracy theorists who deny AIDS or deny that HIV causes AIDS. Unfortunately, as the author points out (and as some of the negative reviews reflect) once people have staked out extreme denialist territory, they become completely unresponsive to logic or information that counters their beliefs. As a result this book will not have any effect on the hard-core denialists, but it may prove helpful to those who may otherwise be inclined to listen to denialists.

Seth Kalichman tackles a subject that should have far more public awareness. He exposes the dangerous and misguided people who deny that HIV causes AIDS or assert that the drugs used to treat the associated illnesses actually exacerbate them. These people include scientists, both real and spurious, journalists, and AIDS sufferers who have bought into the idea that anti-retroviral medicines harm rather than help and who try to cure their illness with vitamins and the like.

Kalichman opens with a telling observation about the links between AIDS denialists and groups that deny evolution, the Holocaust, global warming and so forth. What these people have in common, of course, is that they do not base their conclusions in fact. Instead, they cherry-pick information from legitimate resources, or they use old research. Then they launch personal attacks on anyone who draws attention to the deficiencies in their arguments. Kalichman has of course exposed himself to these attacks as one look at his blog demonstrates.

Since explaining irrationality is an impossible task, he cannot, as I'd hoped, reveal how Nobel laureate Peter Duesberg came to reject his own findings, nor can he explain how an obviously brilliant scientist has decided that HIV does not cause AIDS. The entire issue was outside Duesberg's area of expertise, so it is even more of a wonder that he became involved. Based Kalichman's profile of the man, I suspect Duesberg had a breakdown of some sort, which would also explain why he thinks the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health are out to get him. He may have also come up against an evolving social scene in Berkeley. It is amazing that in 2010 someone can still refer to black people as "schwartzes" and gay men as "homos."

If Duesberg is the brains of the denialist movement then the former South African president Thabo Mbeki is the brawn on whose head rests the greatest number of deaths. Untold numbers have died and hundreds of thousands of family members have suffered because of his refusal to allow anti-retroviral drugs into the country during his regime. The most chilling aspect of his position involved the deaths of infants who could probably have survived if their HIV-positive mothers had received medication.

At about page 45 I put the book down for a minute and thought, why am I reading this book? Why did Seth Kalichman have to write it? Of course the answer to the latter question lies within the pages. And I kept reading because I think it is the obligation of every thoughtful person to educate herself on a subject that has caused so much death and devastation. It is beyond tragic that people dying of AIDS are being so misled.

Denying AIDS makes a valuable contribution, but I do have a few quibbles. Kalichman objects to the presentation of denialist views in publications such as Harper's Magazine and The Sunday Times of London. These publications print stories about the Loch Ness monster and Big Foot, too. It's not the fact of the publication that's objectionable; rather it's how the claims are presented. Unfiltered acceptance of spurious claims degrades the quality of the publication. Kalichman makes the valid point that "serious" newspapers and magazines should not offer these narratives without challenge. The cynical side of me says no one reads those periodicals any more, so what difference does it make?

My biggest problem with the book was the daunting scientific terminology. Kalichman generally does an expert job of writing for the non-scientist, but his refutations of denialism result in such sentences as these: "... antibody tests can produce false positive results when the antibodies cross-react with antibodies to some other antigen." [p. 63] And I never did understand Aneuploidy. I made note after note saying this doesn't make sense.

But in the end the comments had nothing to do with the author or his writing. He was climbing the Mount Everest of disinformation. He summited where the rest of us would have gone blind on the ascent and stopped at base camp or quit long before.

Dr. Seth Kalichman's book presents an objective, thorough, critical and insightful look at the consequences of HIV denialism. Kalichman, a psychologist, is one of the most well published and highly regarded researchers in the field of HIV behavioral research. Kalichman gives us a unique behind-the-scenes glimpse at the ways that denialists think and work to advance their point of view.

Kalichman makes the very real and tragic point that HIV denialism kills, by, for example, persuading people with HIV not to take medications, as well as by influencing state (e.g., South African) policies around HIV prevention and treatment. HIV denialism discussions in the academic world and on internet blogs are not friendly philosophical debates among intellectuals. Denialists prey on the vulnerable and misinformed who are grasping for truth in the face of an HIV diagnosis.

It is hoped that Kalichman's book will open people's eyes about the extent of denialism in communities and denialism's harmful effects. Community mobilization is needed to counteract denialism in the US and around the globe.

The book is accessible to the lay reader as well as the academic researcher.

This book gives a fascinating insight into the minds of AIDS denialists as well as the history of their movement. AIDS denialism like other forms of denialism including Holocaust denialism, flat earth denialism, moon landing hoaxers, and evolution denialism, all depend on pseudoscience and twisting of science and history to achieve their goals. Unlike some of the other forms of denialism, HIV denialism is the most dangerous to the very people it claims to help; HIV+ individuals who are lured to the movement through the false hope it promises. Although most members of the denialism movement are not at all biologists and NONE have ever done any work with HIV, they believe themselves to be the sole bearers of truth in a very complex field of virology. This book takes apart many of the myths spread by denialism and looks at them point by point for validity. Included in this book are in-depth looks into:

1) The myth that a press conference determined that HIV caused AIDS.
2) The myth that HIV was never isolated.
3) The myth that HIV is only found in 80% of AIDS patients.
4) The myth that AIDS is somehow different in Africa versus the US.
5) The myth that drugs, lifestyle, poverty, malnutrition but not HIV cause AIDS.
6) HIV positive denialists who died of AIDS, despite refusing to believe in the existence or validity of HIV.
7) The who's who among HIV denialists.

While the author is a PhD in psychology, not an HIV biologist, he has turned to numerous renowned AIDS researchers to ensure the accuracy of the book. His background in psychology allows a unique insight in to the mind of denialists and other denialism-related conspiracy theorists including the fascinating link between psychological denialism as the first step in the grieving process, and denialism as a movement. Overall this is a very thorough and well written book that anyone who known someone afflicted with HIV should read in order to avoid falling into the very real and self-destructive trap of denialism. Readers of this book end with an understanding not only of the errors of denialism and why the false hope it offers the victims of HIV, but also why this page will inevitably be flooded with pseudoscientific and history-twisting reviews by denialists everywhere.

Overall, I give it a 10 out of 10.

Seth Kalichman has written an outstanding and insightful book that exposes the personal pathologies and collective follies of those misguided, and in some cases evil, individuals who deny that HIV causes AIDS. These people are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of South Africans, and many others in the USA and elsewhere. Kalichman reveals how insane many of the AIDS denialists truly are - for example, several are shown to be members of other notorious "conspiracy theory" groups on the internet (e.g., the 9/11 nutjobs), and some of them to act because they personally profit from the sales of quack "remedies". There is no scientific basis to any of the AIDS denialist "arguments", just sheer, unadulterated pseudoscience, as Kalichman nicely shows. Of note is that one of the case histories Kalichman uses to illustrate his major points - the descent of Christine Maggiore from personal denial of her HIV+ status into a more pathological condition in which she caused others to make the same fatal mistakes she did - is now incomplete: Maggiore died of AIDS a few months after Kalichman's book was finished, thereby joining her 3 year-old daughter as yet another victim of AIDS denialism.

It should also be noted that the hostile (one star) reviews this book has received on this site come from people who are members of the same AIDS denialist groups that Kalichman exposes. They clearly do not like the light to be shone on their insane and lethal activities. Hence readers of these reviews should ignore the rather silly comments these people have made, and simply buy and read the book.

I have written a longer review of the book that will be published in 'Nature' next week. An additional review will be posted on the AIDS Truth web site, which is an outstanding source of additional information on the AIDS denialists that Kalichmaan has written about.

It is difficult for most of us to imagine not believing in HIV or believing that it is a harmless passenger virus. However, a small fringe group of people, who work outside of any credible scientific community, continue to bolster their dangerous ideas about HIV. Normally, education is power and the truth shall set you free, however, these bits of wisdom do not hold true for AIDS denialists. As such, it's nearly impossible to rationalize with AIDS denialists because they believe what they want to believe, no matter what evidence they are presented with. Case in point, many AIDS denialists themselves have died of AIDS.

In general, AIDS denialists have been ignored, and rightly so. Unfortunately, AIDS denialists do occasionally rear their misguided minds and influence unsuspecting others to follow their crazy suggestions and beliefs. Here's where Kalichman's book provides a much needed reality check on the distorted micro-world created by AIDS denialists. If you have ever come across AIDS denialism nonsense, it's confusing and perplexing; fortunately, Denying AIDS provides insight and answers to how this group got so far off track and exposes them for what they are.

This book is an absolute MUST read if you are questioning established, common knowledge about HIV/AIDS. On the other hand, if you're the type of person who enjoys watching "Ripley's believe it not", reading about conspiracy theories, or finds insanity amusing, this book is a sure winner!

Dr. Kalichman has done a remarkable job of attempting to understand the phenomenon of AIDS denial. We all understand why it is human nature to wish away bad things. It is completely expected for someone facing a serious problem, whether it is cancer, bankruptcy, or divorce, to go through a phase of denial. The more difficult factor to understand is what drives men, such as Peter Duesberg and Henry Bauer, who have no direct connection to HIV or AIDS, to make false claims, such as AIDS being caused by "the gay lifestyle", or malnutrition. In the end, Dr. Kalichman has no good answer for that, but he did a monumental job of attempting to find the answers.