Mel Gibson on health: what the evidence says · JRE #2254

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Gibson directs listeners to Peter Duesberg, a University of California, Berkeley molecular biologist who since the late 1980s has argued that HIV does not cause AIDS. The scientific and medical consensus that HIV causes AIDS was established by the late 1980s and has been reaffirmed by decades of subsequent virological, epidemiological, and clinical research; Duesberg's hypothesis has been reviewed and rejected by mainstream researchers, and a non-peer-reviewed paper in which he continued to dispute HIV causation was later retracted. Duesberg-influenced AIDS denialism had real-world consequences: it shaped South African government health policy under President Thabo Mbeki from 1999, delaying rollout of antiretroviral treatment; a peer-reviewed 2008 epidemiological study estimated that more than 330,000 lives, or roughly 2.2 million person-years, were lost in South Africa because a feasible antiretroviral treatment program was not implemented during that period. Current status: false, thoroughly refuted, with documented public-health harm attributed to the denialist position Gibson recommends investigating.