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You can read a lot about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duesberg_hypothesis

The mainstream consensus is the he was wildly wrong about HIV specifically, that HIV causes AIDS, and that his influence in South Africa to not deploy anti-viral medications killed hundreds of thousands of people before the policy was reversed.

Part of his hypothesis was that viruses in general, not just retroviruses, were not connected to cancers, the consensus view is that this is completely wrong. We have a very large body of evidence on many virus caused cancers now.

Even at the time he was arguing this, it was clear that the retrovirus HTLV was disease causing in humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate_T-lymphotropic_virus

So, the two known human retroviruses both cause disease and retroviruses cause diseases in animals. Duesberg held on to and promoted this concept long after it should have been clear to him that there was zero empirical support for his idea.

To me the most convincing bit that weakens his "hypothesis" is that people who received blood transfusions from HIV-contaminated blood. Many of those people showed none of the risk factors.

See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/world/europe/britain-cont... for some recent discussion of the scope and scale of HIV contamination.

Influenced the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people?

Yet apparently to this day he draws over 200k/yr in salary from Berkeley. I believe they are not entirely funded by tuition/endowments which means California tax payers support him at least in part.

He has tenure and hasn't done anything that would force the dean to fire him. He hasn't published in ~7 years.

IIUC he's been isolated- doesn't get any real funding from NIH, or from the university (beyond the standard salary), and doesn't have an active lab.

It would likely cost the university more in legal fees to get rid of him than keep him until he goes away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duesberg#Consequences_of...

He was investigated but it was dropped as being protected by his academic freedom: https://www.science.org/content/article/berkeley-drops-probe...

He also, that I know of, still supports this position. To this day, you will find people getting into this particular conspiracy and rejecting treatment. It doesn't go well for them.

I do think that freedom of speech is important, and that many attempts to squash "misinformation" are misguided, but some speech has consequences. Personally I find Duesberg utterly reprehensible and morally culpable.

Cheers, I read the wikipedia article. It mentions Duesberg's claims without going into details about why it is wrong, or right.

Perhaps I found the article clearer because of familiarity with the subject.

On the "retroviruses must be harmless" virology: He's a denier of viral involvement in cancers in general, not just that HIV must be harmless. He is way outside mainstream consensus on all kinds of things.

For instance, he argues that Kaposi sarcoma, a very common AIDS related cancer was caused by drug use and not opportunistic infection. It is now very well established that all KS, which also affects (typically older) HIV- people, is caused by HHV-8 infection.

He claims that Hep-B/C can't cause liver cancer.

He claims that HPV doesn't cause cervical cancer (https://www.academia.edu/31617237/What_if_HPV_does_NOT_cause...)

The core thing he does on all of these topics is just to ignore or deny anything that doesn't agree with him, eg: Hemophiliacs treated with tainted blood get AIDS, HIV viral load directly corresponds to disease progression which is clearly halted by dropping HIV load with treatment, the HPV vaccine demonstrably prevents cervical cancer, etc. He is far off in quack territory.

I think I understand that retroviruses can cause disease, contrary to what Peter Duesberg seems to be claiming. What I'm wondering about is his claim that they should be harmless in order to survive. Is that something commonly accepted? If so, should it cause surprise that they aren't harmless, and still surviving? Is there an interesting scientific question somewhere in there?

That's the question I couldn't answer by reading the wikipedia article. But I think thanks to some of the comments here my question is at least partly answered: at least some retroviruses -including HIV- seem to not kill off their host immediately, which I guess gives them time to reproduce and infect more hosts.

I don't see any particular reason why retroviruses would be different in that regard: they need the cell they infect to live long enough to produce enough viruses, and it is advantageous to them that some cells they infect lay dormant and reactivate later (a trick not limited to retroviruses), but there's not particular reason why they should not overall act much like any other virus: keeping their host cell alive only long enough to produce enough new viruses to continue to propagate. It's an argument which you could extent to any pathogen: why would any disease kill its host?

> It's an argument which you could extent to any pathogen: why would any disease kill its host?

Moreover, why would a disease even 'care' about the host? As long as it can jump hosts quickly, it can afford to kill many of them. If achieving fast transmission is tough on the host, so be it. Other diseases may select for the opposite approach, of course.

Speculating about the shape of the potential energy surface of viral evolution is non-trivial.

I don't know enough (my retrovirus knowledge is out of date), but if you look at authoritative knowledge (IE, textbooks), you will see many non-harmless retroviruses:

- oncoretroviruses: as a side effect of how they integrate, they often cause cancer in patients. There is lots of time between infection and death for the virus to be transmitted.

- lentiviruses (this is also known as a "slow virus"). There is often lots of time between infection and death for the virus to be transmitted.

It's possible that scientists are avoiding directly attempting to argue with Deusberg's observations, but in general, the consensus seems to be that he brought nothing useful to the debate except irrational claims that were inconsistent with the evidence. We don't live in an ultrarational world where every fringe theory can be investigated.

As for Ioannidis... not sure what to say. I think his big mistake was going to the white house and trying to make Trump an ally and not shut down everything because he predicted the virus wouldn't spread and wouldn't be fatal at the rates that were later observed. Diseases like COVID are multidimensional problems with partial information and a high level of politics, corp, and media involvement. I think fauci and others have finally admitted that they may have made some mistakes in the specific details of the shutdowns, in particular, it took people a while to realize that the impact on children (who by and large are not at risk from COVID) was enormous.

If your goal is to affect public health policy, you have to be a truly 4D thinker, and even that's not enough dimensions.

Thanks.

You reminded me hat Ioannidis made very specific predictions that turned out to be false (about the number of deaths we could expect). And that, while measures were adopted that he claimed were useless. I agree Fauci saved lives - and last time I saw him in the news he was being attacked by Republican trolls, I don't have any other word for those people.

In reality HIV does have to deal with pressures described by Duesberg, but the virus found a workaround: extremely long "incubation period".

As you probably know, it can stay dormant for 10 years or more, but then gets into active stage, causes AIDS, and relatively quickly kills the host.