The New Yorker’s March 12 issue carries an article entitled “The Denialists–AIDS mavericks and the damage they do” about folks, mostly in Africa, who say that HIV does not cause AIDS and is in fact basically harmless. The article tries to cover all sides of the issue, but leaves out what to me is the most powerful evidence that HIV is something you don’t want to have in your system.
If you know that HIV is harmless and most people think HIV is deadly, that opens up an opportunity to make near-infinite money. You simply write life insurance policies for the HIV-positive, a group that other insurers shun. If an African politician says “HIV doesn’t cause AIDS”, all you need to ask is “How come you’re not investing in life insurance for HIV-positive folks?”
Funny you should mention that, as I was discussing it a couple weeks ago. There are people that created an investment fund the reverse of what you suggest, but it was at the beginning of the crisis and there wasn’t enough data for the life insurance industry to be properly risk-averse for HIV+ clients. So people HIV+ were being offered some up-front money to get a policy where the beneficiary was the fund.
Turns out the treatments advanced faster than the fund managers predicted and they didn’t score as well as they thought they would.
It’s so ethically twisted that it’s hard to know who the winners were, although I think the insurance companies did okay.
I just finished that article and found myself wondering why no one has asked Peter Duesberg whether he is willing to be deliberately infected with the “harmless” HIV. Or, more to the point, why some activist hasn’t already done so with a hypodermic, especially since Duesberg presumably couldn’t argue that it would be in any way dangerous.
If you read the critiques more carefully (that is, outside the _New Yorker_ piece), you will find that the chief objection is not that the AIDS of African PWAs wasn’t caused by HIV, but that they may never have had any form of HIV or AIDS in the first place. Some official definitions of AIDS do not require an HIV test; tests may be unreliable in Third World countries (not true across the board); and HIV diagnoses are sometimes applied posthumously without medical or serological examination.
Hence, the discussion in that case is not chiefly “Does HIV really cause AIDS?” but “Did these people you say had AIDS really have it?”
Duesberg was indeed asked back in 1996.
At least some of the less obnoxious deniers in this area are only claiming ‘correlation does not imply causation’, so the correlation (which they admit to) would still preclude this as a viable financial strategy.