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On 28 October, Robert Willner held a press conference at a North Carolina hotel, during which he jabbed his finger with a bloody needle he had just stuck into a man who said he was infected with HIV. Willner is a physician who recently had his medical license revoked in Florida for, among other infractions, claiming to have cured an AIDS patient with ozone infusions. He is also the author of a new book, Deadly Deception: The Proof that SEX and HIV Absolutely DO NOT CAUSE AIDS. He insists that jabbing himself with the bloody needle, which he describes as "an act of intelligence," was not meant to sell books. "I'm interested in proving to people that there isn't one shred of scientific evidence that HIV causes any disease," Willner says.
Willner's unsettling self-injection is among the more bizarre manifestations of a phenomenon that many in the AIDS research and treatment community find increasingly troubling: a vocal group of skeptics who continue to grab headlines with their contention that HIV, the retrovirus identified as the cause of AIDS more than a decade ago, doesn't cause the disease. Like almost all "HIV dissenters," Willner relies heavily on the ideas of Peter Duesberg, a retrovirologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who in 1987 published a paper arguing that HIV is harmless. Duesberg has gone on to argue that, rather than HIV, factors such as illicit drug use and AZT, the anti-HIV compound, actually cause the disease. Willner dedicates his book to Duesberg for the California virologist's "courageous expose of the unconscionable deadly deception known as the AIDS epidemic."
Although mainstream AIDS researchers dismiss Duesberg's ideas as unsupportable, his challenge to the conventional wisdom is still winning converts. The "Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis," a loose-knit coalition of which Duesberg is a member, has organized an international symposium to be held in Buenos Aires in April. The London Sunday Times picked up Duesberg's cause and has run a series of articles questioning HIV's link to AIDS and calling the African AIDS epidemic "a myth."
Kary Mullis, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering the polymerase chain reaction, has joined in, saying he has seen "no scientific evidence" proving that HIV...