Death of Kary Mullis used as opportunity to attack Peter Duesberg for questioning HIV.
Peter Duesberg |
Comment on the Washington Posts obit for Kary Mullis:
Dead? Boo hoo. Let's talk about this jerk's body count. His insane HIV denialism, fueled no doubt by fellow delusional Berkeley biologist Peter Duesberg was at least partially responsible for the death of my best friend Paul, who wasted away from AIDS in 1996 with an untouched bag of the newly developed protease inhibitors an arm's length away. Not to mention the horror of an estimated 300,000+ Africans who died because Thabo Mbeki and his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, bought what the likes of Mullis and Duesberg were selling.
Paul seroconverted in the early '90s. Terrified from years of watching the AIDS pandemic unfolding, and being of a magical thinking bent, he dug into Duesberg's denialist tome Inventing The AIDS Virus with gusto. We went to talks by HIV denialist activists who introduced us to Duesberg himself. He didn't seem crazy, and he was a specialist in biology, he surely knew more than we did. So telling us what we wanted to hear, we listened. Paul also spent hours online in the early days of the internet, corresponding with Duesberg, Mullis, Christine Maggiore and other denialists to reinforce his desperate belief that HIV was "a harmless passenger virus," and that it was Big Pharma and it's evil poisons that had been killing all our friends for the previous decade. It was the Fallacy from Authority writ large. Horrified by Paul's death and my own credulousness, I've been an activist against alt-med quackery ever since.
To see this loon (however brilliant he may have been) lauded with only the most cursory, glib mention of his delusional, destructive belief that HIV was not the cause of AIDS (we won't even mention the deep irony that it was his invention that allowed for accurate viral load measurements) is just infuriating.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/kary-mullis-unconventional-nobel-laureate-who-unlocked-dna-research-dies-at-74/2019/08/12/e6391612-bbed-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html
Read why Duesberg and Mullis inadvertently helped expose the truth about the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome epidemic.