RFK Jr.'s Buckwild Belief That HIV Doesn't Cause AIDS

Aubrey Gordon (0:11)

Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that's been spending too much time with people who think vaccines cause autism, and not enough time with people who think HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

Michael Hobbes (0:23)

Oh, that's good.

Aubrey Gordon (0:24)

Thank you.

Michael Hobbes (0:26)

I'm Michael Humps.

SPEAKER_3 (0:27)

I'm Aubrey Gordon.

Aubrey Gordon (0:28)

If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase, or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content. Michael.

Michael Hobbes (0:39)

Aubrey, today we are talking about AIDS denialism. We are giving this episode some sort of clickbait title, but we're basically going to be talking about AIDS denialism, what it is, where it comes from, and where it is now.

So do you know what it is?

Aubrey Gordon (0:57)

So I am coming in pretty fresh on this concept.

Michael Hobbes (1:01)

I'm so excited.

Aubrey Gordon (1:01)

But I really do believe that the like core thing that people quibble with is the like HIV doesn't cause AIDS tends to be the like thing that people really grab on to. But I couldn't tell you who like some high profile AIDS deniers are. I couldn't tell you who AIDS denial organizations are.

Michael Hobbes (1:23)

The most high profile AIDS denier is Will Smith. What? We have a clip later. It's really weird.

Aubrey Gordon (1:30)

Oh, no, wait. I do know this about... There's a similar thing about Dave Grohl, no?

Michael Hobbes (1:35)

Yeah, the Foo Fighters held a benefit concert.

Aubrey Gordon (1:37)

Man.

Michael Hobbes (1:37)

But specifically, we are talking today about the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS.

Aubrey Gordon (1:44)

Boy, oh boy, oh boy.

Michael Hobbes (1:45)

Correlation does not equal causation. Aubrey.

Aubrey Gordon (1:47)

What do they think the effects of HIV are?

Michael Hobbes (1:51)

Nothing. The inventor of this theory describes it as one of the most harmless viruses known to man.

Aubrey Gordon (1:56)

Do shut your fucking mouth. Are you kidding me?

Michael Hobbes (1:59)

It's like Buckwild. The whole fucking thing is nuts. So to tell the story of AIDS denialism, we have to tell a little bit of the story of AIDS. This is mostly based on two books, one of which is called Denying AIDS by Seth Kalikman and another called Impure Science by Steven Epstein.

Everyone agrees that in the early years of AIDS, there was a lot of debate over what was causing it. So the first reports appear in 1981 of men who have this very strange cancer, and then you start getting more and more reports of gay men dying of this weird thing, and it presents very differently.

Aubrey Gordon (2:36)

Is this when they named it GRIDS?

Michael Hobbes (2:38)

Yes, Gay Related Immune Deficiency. Although even earlier than that, it was literally called gay cancer in the press.

Aubrey Gordon (2:45)

Holy Jones.

Michael Hobbes (2:46)

So there's lots of theories on what was causing it, basically because it was just so mysterious and weird. One of the theories was that sperm in your butt reduces immune function.

Aubrey Gordon (2:57)

We've all been there.

Michael Hobbes (2:58)

Another explanation was poppers, which are these like inhalants that men take for muscle relaxant. It makes anal sex better. This was one of the fairly prominent early explanations because a lot of the people that got AIDS had been using poppers.

Apparently, poppers do have a slightly immunosuppressing effect, and I guess they're really bad for you. I was reading the Cleveland Clinic website this morning. But because they're a vasodilator, they had been given to heart disease patients for years, and none of them got AIDS. So that gets discarded pretty quickly.

Aubrey Gordon (3:30)

It is, I will say, very funny to think about. Poppers for your heart.

Michael Hobbes (3:34)

I actually didn't know that they had any legitimate use. They were just for gay men because they sell them as room deodorizers. In other countries, because you can't sell them for what we're selling them for.

But then there was also a theory, basically, that it was psychosomatic. So there is a gay psychiatrist named Casper Schmitt who writes an article proposing that it's a response to the 1980s. So here is this. This is from an article called The Man Who Thought AIDS Was All In The Mind.

Aubrey Gordon (4:09)

Jesus Christ.

The Man Who Gaslit An Entire Community. I know. Schmitt believed that AIDS was a psychosomatic disease, that it was caused by an outbreak of quote unquote mass hysteria, and that AIDS patients were, in some sense, thinking themselves ill. According to Schmitt, the trigger for AIDS was the rise of right-wing ideology in America following Ronald Reagan's election as president in 1980