Stories of getting hooked into AIDS Denialism have much in common. This is the latest addition to my series on how AIDS Denialism can kill you. have also updated previous posts from the series. Thank you again for sharing your experiences with me and for allowing me to share them on my blog.
"One too many" coincidences
I first learned about the AIDS dissident movement through a friend's "doctor" in around the mid 1990's. The doctor was a guy who had lived in China for many years and had been making a living as an acupuncturist. He was also an advocate for a myriad of other superstitious and odd points of view. I've always found unorthodox views interesting. Instead of just rejecting them flat out, I feel they are worth considering. I guess my nature is to be a curious person. At the time I just thought it was an interesting point of view. I wasn't even HIV positive, but being an AIDS dissident kind of fit my overall perception of the world back then.I borrowed plenty of literature from the doctor. Mainly articles by Stefan Lanka and Peter Duesberg, and some Continuum magazine issues. Truth is I was sold on it. I later did my own research on the Internet. I found websites like Alive and Well or Virusmyth, which found their way into my bookmark list. I thought they sounded believable. They were definitely saying the things you like to hear. The scientific dissidents were believable because they seemed very confident in their assumptions. And then there are (or were...) people like Christine Maggiore who I could relate to because she was just a lay person in apparent perfect state of health.
I can tell you that I have been harmed by my years of buying into AIDS denialism. First, I wasn't too careful about my sexual activities for many years, precisely because I believed HIV might not even exist.
In 2006 I had clear symptoms of syphilis and went to get tested. It came out positive, and because the HIV test is included in the work up, I got the surprise HIV positive result too. Because of my dissident beliefs, I didn't really care about the HIV diagnosis and ignored the doctor's advice to start a follow-up for CD4 counts, etc.
In 2008 I had bumped into the website aidstruth.org and, while reading it in a "yeah blah blah whatever" kind of attitude, I saw the "denialists who have died" and "who the denialists are" sections. Something clicked. And very soon after I paid one of my usual visits to the Alive and Well site and found the memorial text about Maggiore's death. It didn't mention the cause (of course) so I Googled away thinking "please, let it be a traffic accident or something" and bam! Pneumonia...
You know how denialists usually say it's just a coincidence, like "why not? Anybody can have pneumonia", but having recently read the list of dead denialists and wondering if those weren't too many untimely coincidences, for me Maggiore's death is where I drew the line. For me it was the "one too many" coincidence. That's where I secretly started to wonder if I had been wrong. But I still remained in denial.
It was just this year, 4 years after testing positive, I went to the doctor because I had these strange warts growing in my arm, and seemed to start reproducing in other parts of my body. Guess what... I had developed Kaposi's Sarcoma. That's what shook me out of denialism. I started on antiretrovirals, to my dismay because I've always hated pills, let alone those I had been indoctrinated to think of as pure evil.
I should point out that I have not taken poppers in my entire life, not once (and I'm 40), which seems to be one of the idiotic assumptions by the denialists.
I'm now taking antiretrovirals and I am in the middle of chemotherapy and seem to be doing well, but unfortunately I need more biopsies for yet more growths. All of this because I believed a bunch of quacks. Thanks for giving me this chance to help debunk their moronic theories.
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