[BRIEF NOTE] Has Harper's Magazine jumped the shark?
I ask this because the latest issue of this venerable magazine includes AIDS denialist Celia Farber's article "Out of Control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science." This article makes use of a sort of rhetoric that I first encountered on reading Erich von Daniken as a credulous adolescent, combining partially accurate explanations of potential anomalies with a barely suppressed tone of outrage at the lies invested by the relevant authorities in their false picture of the world. Farber uses the space in Harper's to repeat many of the same claims that she made here, starting by identifying people who responded badly to HIV medication, going on to identify dodgy-sounding research programs, and then going from this ill-reported and contentious issues to make a claim that Peter Duesberg is in fact right about AIDS having no correlation to HIV at all. In Farber's article, AIDS is just a collection of unrelated diseases given a common label by pharmaceutical companies out to make money.
Others have dissected these claims. HIV causes AIDS. The cases of people who received HIV-tainted blood transfusions and medical workers who suffered needlestick accidents, went on to become HIV positive, and eventually developed AIDS seem particularly confirmatory in this context. Though I hasten to add that my judgement is only that of the moderately informed layman, I feel comfortable in accepting the medical authorities' word on this. As for Farber's contentions that the bad side-effects from anti-HIV drug regimens prove the pharmaceutical companies' malign intents, all that I can say is that I, too, would like to live in that wonderful world where drugs never cause any side-effects.
I hope that Harper's fact-checking simply slipped up on this one. For the time being, all I can say is that this wonderful magazine has taken the fight against big business rather too far.
Others have dissected these claims. HIV causes AIDS. The cases of people who received HIV-tainted blood transfusions and medical workers who suffered needlestick accidents, went on to become HIV positive, and eventually developed AIDS seem particularly confirmatory in this context. Though I hasten to add that my judgement is only that of the moderately informed layman, I feel comfortable in accepting the medical authorities' word on this. As for Farber's contentions that the bad side-effects from anti-HIV drug regimens prove the pharmaceutical companies' malign intents, all that I can say is that I, too, would like to live in that wonderful world where drugs never cause any side-effects.
I hope that Harper's fact-checking simply slipped up on this one. For the time being, all I can say is that this wonderful magazine has taken the fight against big business rather too far.