Wide World of Stupid – HIV/AIDS Deniers
This is a post from my old “Squidworld” blog which I thought I should transfer here for your reading enjoyment:
HIV/AIDS deniers. Yes, they exist. And guess who their good celebrity buddies are? None other than Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters. I shit you not my friends. Look at their causes on their website and you’ll see they support the group Alive and Well which is a group founded my their insane leader Christine Maggiore. Maggiore’s own idiocy contributed to the death of her 3 year old daughter which she transferred HIV to through her pregnancy and refusal to take any antiretroviral medication.Take a look at their website. It looks like any other organization’s website with articles about HIV and references, nice and neat little graphics, some graphs…unfortunately this is probably just enough to sway your average Joe. Not everyone in the populace has a substantial enough biology background let alone a decent knowledge of virology or of HIV to critically analyze their claims. Sadly, most people are also too apathetic or lazy to check their information or even care at all. You have it all, distortion of information, pseudoscience, bad science, citation of references that don’t even support their contentions…hmmm, who does that sound like? You got it, those wacky creationists.
The journal Science has a few articles rebutting the silly claims of the HIV deniers which shouldn’t even have to exist. The vast collection of scientific knowledge about this virus since the 1980’s speaks for itself. A PubMed search for “HIV” brings back nearly 215,000 entries.
In recent news, a new medication developed by Pfizer has been approved by the FDA. It is a CCR5 inhibitor – the a co-receptor protein the HIV virus utilizes to gain entry into cells (along with the CD4 receptor and sometimes the CXCR4 receptor). In 2001 a study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which found that a particular variant known as the CCR5-Delta-32 (a 32 base pair deletion variant) confirmed a homozygous carrier with effective resistance to HIV infection. Studies of the medication have found success and in preclinical and clinical trials in reducing the patient’s levels of the virus.
What do the deniers offer those suffering with HIV? Nothing but propaganda, misinformation and outright lies. These people have utilized their ignorance to affect the lives of others and thereby endangering them. Please, please, whatever you do think before you accept the kinda of crap people like Maggiore and her ilk spew out. Learn about the virus for yourself and how it causes AIDS. If that seems too much of an undertaking, ask a physician or biologist to explain it to you. Don’t do like so many and simply align yourself with a group because of some ridiculous reason such as they like similar things to you or their website is flashy or something equally dumb. People’s lives are at stake in this instance. This is not like the loony creationists claiming the earth is less than 10,000 years old – because of the idiocy of these people and their groups, people will not get the medical attention they need and will needlessly die. In my mind that is evil.
Excellent, SolidSquid! I am glad that you reprised it.
Staying open minded in an information age is hard enough. Marginalizing people that disagree with the prevailing belief isn’t that different from bigotry and doesn’t answer any of the scientific challenges. It obscures them even more. Perhaps you could help us understand where it is you disagree with Dr. Deusberg’s views specifically?
One of the most obvious ridiculous claims is that HIV does not fulfill Koch’s postulates which is a recurring claim within the denier circles. This is not true, O’Brien and Goedert in Current Opinion in Immunology showed how HIV fulfill’s Koch’s postulate as the viral causative agent of AIDS. It’s one thing to be open-minded, it’s another thing to be blinded by one’s own personal ideology. This is seen in many people such as other deniers like Holocaust deniers, creationists railing against evolutionary biology as well as modern geology, cosmology and physics in the process. They have their ideology set in stone and look for the information to support that view. They do not look at the evidence as say, “what does this tell us?” or “is my view supported by the evidence?”. Their view is static and unchanging and is the antithesis of science.
I see.
I use to believe the brain was my favorite organ until I realized who it was that was telling me this.
May all sentient beings be free of suffering,
Signing-off, over-and-out.