Farewell to Duesberg, a godfather of scientific disinformation

It can hardly be disputed that science and medicine today are awash in disinformation. It’s why respected scientists get physically assaulted and hauled before partisan committees in Congress to be smeared. It’s why childhood vaccine rates in some places are plummeting and measles is on the rampage across the country. Therefore, it behooves us to look at the origins of this outbreak of politically manipulated pseudoscience. Nature has given us a peg, with the death Jan. 13 of former UC Berkeley scientist Peter Duesberg, at 89. At the dawn of research into what is now known as HIV/AIDS, Duesberg took the heterodox view that HIV was a harmless virus that had nothing to do with AIDS.

“That virus is a pussycat,” he said. He maintained that the cause of AIDS had to be found elsewhere, notably the lifestyles and drug habits of same-gender loving men. His claim motivated a phalanx of AIDS deniers, the forebears of the anti-vaccine militants today. “Duesberg was a pioneer of disinformation on infectious disease,” says John P. Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College and the author of a devastating 1996 takedown in Nature of Duesberg’s claims. Duesberg’s embrace of a dangerously wrong hypothesis to the point that it destroyed his career is almost a Shakespearean narrative. The German native built a career in the US as a brilliant virologist with significant discoveries to his credit and long had been revered among his colleagues. But that ended when he entered the HIV wars. By 1996, Richard Horton, then the editor of the Lancet, the British medical journal, could marvel: “He is now perhaps the most vilified scientist alive.”

Some of the adversaries against whom he levelled ad hominem attacks — he accused Anthony S. Fauci, the respected immunologist and long-term director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, of committing mass murder by promoting the use of the highly toxic drug AZT against HIV — could barely hear his name without suffering apoplectic fits. AZT remains part of standard HIV therapies and is estimated to have saved or prolonged millions of lives.

Asked by science journalist William Booth to respond to a Duesberg statement, Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV, replied, “I cannot respond without shrieking.” Fauci derided Duesberg’s scientific claims as “absolute and total nonsense.” But it would be a mistake to think that Duesberg’s baleful influence on medical science will end with his death. Duesberg’s heirs are all around us. Actually, they’re more than that — they’re now in charge.

As secretary of Health and Human Services, Duesberg’s most highly placed follower, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is presiding over what has become an overtly anti-vaccination and anti-science agency with a stranglehold on government health policy and funding. “Peter Duesberg was an AIDS denialist,” says Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist who was active in the AIDS research community starting in the 1990s. “He is the precursor to contemporary denialists like RFK Jr., who brought AIDS denialism into the 21st century.” Indeed, Kennedy has embraced the denialist position that HIV is not the cause of AIDS: In a 2023 interview with New York magazine, Kennedy attributed the conclusion that HIV and AIDS were inextricably linked to “phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people,” referring to AZT.

In his 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy highlighted Duesberg’s depiction of Fauci as an all-powerful scientific panjandrum intent on blocking his grant applications because his findings might be costly for Fauci’s patrons, Big Pharma.

Kennedy also picked up Duesberg’s broader brief against government science agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Duesberg’s claim was that the CDC existed only to drum up medical emergencies so the NIH could solve them, ensuring the continued flow of taxpayer dollars into both agencies.

Starting in the mid-1970s, Duesberg asserted and Kennedy quoted, “’the CDC increasingly needed a major epidemic’ to justify its existence.” Kennedy added his own gloss: “Drumming up public fear of periodic pandemics was a natural way for NIAID and CDC bureaucrats to keep their agencies relevant.” One can draw a straight line from that statement to the unapologetic malevolence with which Kennedy treats the CDC and NIH, insinuating that they’re rife with corruption and conflicts of interest.

I sought a comment from Kennedy about Duesberg’s influence on his thinking, but received no reply. Because AIDS isn’t caused by a virus, Duesberg maintained, the antiviral drugs used as therapies were worse than the disease. He specifically targeted AZT, then as now a common component of AIDS therapies. The publicity his claims received encouraged untold patients to refuse AZT, causing a toll that may number in the millions.