A PI once confided in me that he didn't believe in the big bang. I was startled because creationism was on the rise, and I knew that he was Catholic. However, I also knew he was a natural empiricist, and after taking a quiet moment to think things through, I realized I was being tested to see if I could think critically and ask the right questions as a scientist.
He didn't deny the big bang, and he wasn't replacing it with a worse theory. After a few questions, he demonstrated that his understanding of the evidence and his tools to evaluate it were far better than mine, and that while it was the most probable and best supported explanation, because it was not observed and was not currently reproducible, it wasn't anything that warranted "belief".
Reality doesn't require our consent to exist.
OK? That doesn’t change the massive weight of evidence in favor of HIV causing AIDS.
Moreover, PCR testing during the covid epidemic, which he was not alive for, has clearly been working well. High cases later correspond to high hospitalizations and high covid-19 deaths and high excess deaths across many different countries.
Frankly I don’t put much trust in his Nobel, any more than Michael Levitt who is also a Nobel laureate and has repeatedly made falsified predictions about the Covid-19 pandemic.[2] It seems pretty clear that Nobel prize winners can later lose touch with reality.
There is no correlation between COVID health outcomes and levels of testing.
In the case of Covid, "hospitalizations" are largely defined as "in the hospital with a positive PCR test", so this is a truism. Deaths are predominantly downstream of "hospitalizations", so again, this is a truism.
Any pathology in PCR testing would equally affect "hospitalizations" and "confirmed deaths".
It turned out Mullis had written an introduction to a book called "Inventing the AIDS virus" by a (former?) virologist called Peter Duisberg. This introduction laid out his case quite clearly and the book went into great detail, elaborating a theory about why AIDS and HIV are not in fact linked.
I ended up not developing any strong opinions about the merits of the theory, but I will say that it is a scientific theory and not easily dismissed. To do so would require a lot of detail because the people arguing that HIV isn't the cause of AIDS are scientists and have many scientific arguments.
Here is a brief tl;dr summary of Mullis' argument:
1. In the 1980s when AIDS was newly discovered, he was writing a paper about the use of PCR in the detection of HIV. He wrote "HIV is the cause of AIDS" and decided he should provide a citation for this claim, but he wasn't sure which paper actually established this. To his surprise, when he asked around, nobody else seemed to know which paper he should cite for this either, despite it being a by-then standard belief.
2. As he broadened his enquiries and did more research, he came to realize that nobody knew what paper to cite for this claim because none existed.
3. When he tried to find out why there was no paper proving the link between HIV and AIDS, he concluded the whole thing was built on groupthink and a strong desire by certain researchers for it to be caused by a virus, as the field of virology was at that point in deep distress due to the apparent lack of any serious viruses on the scene after the defeat of polio and the lack of any meaningfully sized link between viruses and cancer.
The Duisberg book then elaborated on exactly what was going wrong in a lot of detail, most of which I've now forgotten. But a few claims really stood out to me and I double checked them after reading the book. My fact checks passed, increasing my confidence in Duisberg's claims:
1. That the gender ratio of AIDS victims is radically different between Africa and the west. In the west, AIDS victims are predominantly men and always have been. In Africa there is no gender skew. This makes no biological sense because HIV is a very small virus and cannot know the gender of its host, let alone know/care whether the host is in Africa or not, at least not according to any current theory of genetics or biology. Duisberg provides a much simpler explanation: once AIDS hysteria reached a high enough point, western aid agencies started handing out money in proportion to reported AIDS incidence in a region, and handing it directly to doctors. Combined with the vague nature of AIDS symptoms (it's a syndrome, so the symptoms are the symptoms of whatever disease your broken immune system can't fight off), this gave a strong incentive for doctors to mis-label cases as AIDS in order to get more cash for their clinics.
I verified this claim against a database held by ourworldindata, if I recall correctly. Although the book is old, the claim is still correct.
2. That at some point people started cropping up who had AIDS but were not HIV+. This posed a major problem to the theory, but it was fixed by inventing a new disease with an incredibly long and technical name that had identical symptoms to AIDS but differed only in not testing HIV+. In other words, at some point having a positive HIV test became a "symptom" of the disease, and cases where it was missing were retroactively redefined as "not AIDS", thus making the theory unfalsifiable.
I verified this claim was true by looking up the Wikipedia page and a scientific paper talking about the "AIDS without HIV" disease and confirming the description. Unfortunately I can't remember now off-hand what it was called. I'd have to dig through the book. I recall Duisberg asserting that the name appeared to have been chosen to be very difficult to remember, and I'm inclined to agree.
Note: the same thing has happened with COVID, in which having COVID requires you to have a positive COVID test rather than any specific symptoms.
3. That (western) AIDS never broke out into the heterosexual population in the way that was predicted. That should have happened if AIDS was in fact caused by a virus and AIDS researchers therefore routinely predicted that it would happen ... but it never did. That makes no sense for a disease caused by a virus.
After reading the book I went looking for debunkings of it. The only ones I could find were very poor and mostly concerned with whether Duisberg should be allowed to speak at all. Of the remainder they made arguments that Duisberg had already successfully tackled in his book, so I wondered if there might have been multiple editions. At any rate, it's clear that "mainstream" AIDS science had chosen to simply ignore the problems flagged by Mullis and Duisberg. Given the behavior of health researchers with COVID science I can easily believe the same problems existed back then too.
If I recall correctly, the gist of his argument is like this:
1. When AIDS was new scientists confidently predicted that everyone who caught HIV would die within a year or so. But then people who were HIV+ kept living longer than a year. Rather than treat this as evidence against the link, 'the science' as we call it these days kept being retroactively changed to stretch the supposed incubation period of HIV. This kept going until HIV was claimed to be able to hide non-active for a decade or more.
2. At some point AZT and other anti-retrovirals were developed. These were extremely toxic treatments because they work by stopping cells dividing. They're more like a form of chemotherapy. The drug trials didn't follow the rules of good trials and became hopelessly corrupted, e.g. patients were able to unblind themselves as to whether they were in the placebo group or not and then started trading with others who weren't. They had been told they were guaranteed to die without treatment, so obviously everyone in the process was highly incentivized to get their hands on this supposed miracle drug via fair means or foul. There were many other problems with the trials but that's the one I remember.
3. Not surprisingly given the nature of AZT, people put on it frequently ended up dead even though they hadn't previously been sick. This was interpreted as a failure of the treatment to treat the finally appearing AIDS, rather than the treatment itself killing the patient. The picture was muddied by admissions that of course this therapy had extreme side effects, but it was justified by the guarantee of death that came with HIV.
4. Nonetheless, they kept decreasing the dosages and mixing it with other drugs to reduce the toxicity of the treatments. This was then written up as improvements in the treatment. Duisberg argues they merely kept making a treatment known to be toxic less so. Because (in his theory) HIV wasn't killing the people in the first place, this then led to improving life outcomes which were interpreted as a success for medicine.
5. At this point the HIV/AIDS theory became unfalsifiable. Because HIV was claimed to be a special virus that might kill you very quickly, or might wait decades to do so, everyone with it was given treatment. If they survived a long time, the treatment was the cause. If they died, HIV was the cause. Regardless of what happened the data was interpreted in such a way as to reinforce the theory. Any evidence that disagreed with it was swept under the carpet or fixed via redefinitions, like the addition of HIV positivity to the required symptoms list for AIDS that I previously mentioned.
If you'd like more background then this article by a former science journalist who worked at the Sunday Times might be interesting. At first he believed what he was being told about AIDS, but eventually decided he was being misled and came to feel guilty about his role in promoting AIDS hysteria. He wrote about his experiences here:
I can't really speak to the arguments you've presented. Frankly, they seem totally explicable for any number of reasons, but it's not my field. My feeling is simply that tons of people who work in the field believe that HIV causes AIDS (it also totally makes sense to me you could have an immune deficiency without some specific virus, but whatever). So I believe it. If tomorrow, it's discovered not to be the case, I'll probably believe that too. It's not my field, so why would I have a strong opinion? What's the point of even reading a book about it, unless you're working in microbiology?
Science is often said to be self correcting. I no longer believe this. Rather it's ridden with groupthink, politics and power games. I watched in 2020 as the scientific "consensus" about COVID models became defined by whichever factions were most aggressive, most shameless and most willing to lie, despite the evidence right in front of my face. Like I said, I never developed a strong opinion on the "HIV not the cause of AIDS" theory, partly because I don't really care. COVID is far more important. But could scientists end up collectively believing something that just isn't true at all for decades? Yeah, absolutely. I totally believe that's not only possible but quite likely. Scientists will still be claiming that COVID models worked well when we're all in care homes.
As to why anyone should care: because how do you know who to listen to, if you don't evaluate their past reliability? You say that you'll believe anything academics tell you because it's "not your field". Sounds like you might be a scientist? I think a lot of us would like to know what's true even in fields that aren't our own, especially because governments have a habit of making the pronouncements of scientists everyone's problem.
I guess part of my feeling is, sure, science has problems (every scientist will tell you that) but are there better institutions to give us actionable information in the middle of a pandemic? My feeling is no. So, even if I accept your diagnosis of science as "groupthink, politics and power games", I'd say that's just humans. All institutions, all fields are like that. Nonetheless, science has a pretty good record for delivering more or less solid consensus assessments, so even if it does need some reform, I think it's a pretty reasonable bet that the consensus is more or less on the money.
On the topic of consensus specifically, I don't believe that's actually true. Science is full of people claiming there's a consensus but often when investigated it turns out not to be true, and instead there is an ongoing attempt to cover up or suppress disagreement. A claim of scientific consensus always needs to be checked, unfortunately, although that check can often be quite an easy one of the form "does someone make some well functioning technology requiring this belief to be correct".
There is no requirement that information come from institutions, let alone that it be actionable. If you look at where the most accurate information has been coming from throughout it's been bloggers, skeptics, bands of anonymous researchers like DRASTIC and so on. It's not good and it's not better than having trusted institutions, but all such institutions have been hopelessly destroyed from within, largely thanks to ideology. I see no reason to continue genuflecting at their feet of their smoking hulks. Perhaps better institutions will arise, or perhaps people will learn how to filter information and make decisions without being told what to do. Or perhaps both.
We're at a point where scientific work is the sum of an enormous number of specialists, most of whom are only marginally able to judge the work of those outside their field.
That implies that, to engage with a scientific fact (say, global warming) you are always engaging with a gigantic aggregate of facts from an enormous variety of disciplines.
It's just not realistic for a layperson to absorb all the literature that leads to a consensus and come to an informed conclusion. Sometimes, people who are experts in their fields can do something on that level, but ultimately, they're making those summary judgements at the mercy of implicit or explicit consensus, hierarchy, reputation - all the elements of group-think that make up institutions.
I think what you're describing in regards to consensus is just what a consensus is. Take evolution for example: you can't imagine a more starker difference in views between like, Dawkins or Lyn Marguiles over what that word means. So there's a 'consensus', in that both of them are evolutionary biologists, but a dissensus insofar as what they mean by that. People, in a vacuum, have an infinite variety of opinions, many of which are superficially similar, but are different on a ton of subtle points.
There are a lot of problems in this kind of setup, but I feel if you're going to call institutions in western society 'smoking hulks' when it comes to trust or credibility, mainstream science is one of the last ones you should come to.