The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back

In this important book, Nattrass, an AIDS expert at Yale and Cape Town University, deftly examines widespread misconceptions about the origin, transmission, and health effects of AIDS. She compares the situation in South Africa, where AIDS denialism was institutionalized at the highest levels of government (leading to 333,000 unnecessary AIDS deaths), with a host of conspiracy theories circulating in the United States. Nattrass frames her thesis cogently: “The important issue here is not whether the ‘AIDS as genocidal bio-weapon’ claims are wrong (which they are), but rather why they were, and remain, thinkable for many people.” She asks the same question about other equally erroneous beliefs such as that HIV is harmless. Her analysis focuses on four symbolic figures responsible for promoting misinformation: the hero scientist (a dissident scientist taking on the medical establishment), the cultropreneur (someone hawking alternative and unproven therapies), the living icon (a person claiming to be living proof that AIDS cannot cause harm), and the praise-singer (a journalist who promotes the antiscientific view of the disease). The ways in which the scientific community has challenged each of these figures should help inform future scientific debates, such as the one over vaccines, which, as Nattrass so well demonstrates, is where the battle between science and myth is very similar. (Mar.)