Viewpoint: HIV doesn’t cause AIDS? Joe Rogan’s COVID conspiracies spark surge in AIDS denialism

Several million people were listening in February when Joe Rogan falsely declared that “party drugs” were an “important factor in AIDS.” His guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, the former evolutionary biology professor turned contrarian podcaster Bret Weinstein, agreed with him: The “evidence” that AIDS is not caused by HIV is, he said, “surprisingly compelling.”

During the show, Rogan also asserted that AZT, the earliest drug used in the treatment of AIDS, killed people “quicker” than the disease itself—another claim that’s been widely repeated even though it is just as untrue.

[These claims appear] in The Real Anthony Fauci, a 2021 book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a work that has renewed relevance as the anti-vaccine activist makes a long-shot but far-from-inconsequential run for the White House. The book, which depicts the elderly immunologist as a Machiavellian figure who used both the AIDS and covid pandemics for his own ends, has reportedly sold 1.3 million copies across all formats.

…

Before they promoted bunk information on HIV and AIDS, Rogan, Kennedy, and Rodgers were spreading fringe theories about the coronavirus’s origins, as well as loudly questioning basic public health measures like vaccines, social distancing, and masks. All three men have also boosted the false idea that ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug, is a treatment or preventative for covid that is being kept from the American public for sinister reasons at the behest of Big Pharma.

“The AIDS denialists have come from the covid denialists,” says Tara Smith, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and a professor at Kent State University’s College of Public Health

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here