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"While Duesberg’s work was, rightly, cast into the trash bin by all serious policy-makers, he found an unexpected fan: Thabo Mbeki, the prime minister of South Africa from 1999 to 2008. Mbeki appointed Duesberg and other denialists to an official government task force. He ran programs to encourage South Africans to ditch their antiretrovirals and take vitamins instead, like Duesberg recommended."

"Zimbabwean doctor Pride Chigwedere calculated the cost of Mbeki’s — and, by extension, Duesberg’s — policies. In a peer-reviewed paper, Chigwedere estimated that “more than 330,000 lives…were lost because a feasible and timely ARV [anti-retroviral] treatment program was not implemented in South Africa.” What’s more, he found, because Mbeki’s government did not encourage these drugs to pregnant HIV-positive mothers “thirty-five thousand babies were born with HIV.”"

"The human toll of Duesberg’s AIDS denialism is heartbreaking, and it is recent. It has been enabled by people like Rogan and RFK Jr. And now, thanks to our short collective memory, they’re at it again."