Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein Promote AIDS Denialism to an Audience of Millions – By Anna Merlan (Vice) / Feb 15, 2024
Weinstein repeated discredited theories to Rogan about HIV not being the cause of AIDS, alarming and infuriating public health experts.
Bret Weinstein, the evolutionary biology professor turned podcaster and ivermectin guy, repeated a series of discredited pseudo-theories about AIDS in a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Weinstein, a frequent guest, told Rogan that he found the theory that party drugs like poppers cause AIDS to be “surprisingly compelling.” (It is not.) Weinstein also told Rogan he came to these ideas by reading a recent book by anti-vaccine activist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, creating a sort of unholy turducken of misinformation passed onto an audience of millions.
There is, to be clear, no scientific debate whatsoever about the cause of AIDS, and the information Weinstein was repeating has been roundly discredited for decades. HIV can be spread through several means, including unprotected sex, sharing needles, or, in some cases, from a mother to a child while giving birth; if HIV is untreated, it can develop into AIDS. No one who has been through a basic sex ed class likely needs to hear this information re-stated, but nonetheless, AIDS denialism continues to exist in various forms. The specific idea that AIDS is spread through poppers—a party drug with a long medical and recreational history—first circulated as HIV began to spread in the 1980s. (A Los Angeles Times article from 1986 details the debate at the time over whether businesses should continue to sell poppers.)
This idea is often referred to as the Duesberg hypothesis, named after the Berkeley biologist who popularized it, and it’s been around—and ultimately discredited—for so long that it has a lengthy Wikipedia page, the gist of which is that correlation is not causation. Peter Duesberg, who was not an AIDS researcher, was given a chance to air his theories at a 1988 panel that convened some of the nation’s foremost AIDS experts; they pointed out that he had no real evidence for his theory and had ignored compelling evidence to the contrary. One of those questioning him was Anthony Fauci, then the coordinator for AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health.
