A high-up worker in the pharma industry sent me a video from last month showing biologist Bret Weinstein apparently denying to Joe Rogan that AIDS is cause by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). (That claim starts about three minutes in, but watch the whole video below.)
Apparently Weinstein subscribes to Rogan’s “competing hypothesis” that AIDS is simply group of symptoms caused not by a virus, but by taking “party drugs” (3:53). Weinstein finds that explanation “surprisingly compelling.” He also suggests darkly that Nobel laureate Kary Mullis—also an HIV denialist—died “strangely” (there were conspiracy theories about Mullis’s death). Then the video stops, but you can hear the whole 3½-hour episode here.
The first several minutes of the video below, which you’ll have to scroll back to see, show Weinstein expressing doubt that a virus also causes Covid-19.
You may remember that Weinstein and his partner, biologist Heather Heying, touted the antiparasitic drug ivermectin as a treatment and preventive for the “syndrome” known as Covid-19, even though there was no evidence that the drug was effective (see also here). In other words, Weinstein seems fond of heterodox and discredited causes of and treatments for diseases: he’s a medical conspiracy theorist.
The pharma guy who wrote me said this:
I don’t mean to obsess about BW, but after the Evergreen debacle and getting a modicum of credibility, he went crazy about COVID and the efficacy of ivermectin so much so that Sam Harris ripped him for conspiratorial thinking and now they’re enemies. I was livid because people like him were giving horrible medical advice to the public as a biologist-who-claims-to-be-an-authority and may have really harmed people who were listening to his claptrap. 3 weeks ago, he was on Joe Rogan’s show (which I don’t watch but saw a link) wherein he’s now giving airtime to the ‘AIDS is not caused by HIV’ conspiracy theory.As a member of Pharma industry who watched colleagues like myself craft thousands of molecules to become specific drugs tailored to fit and inhibit the active sites of HIV protease, reverse transcriptase, integrase, and to antagonize HIV binding to the chemokine receptor CCR5 that the virus uses to enter T-cells, I know for a fact that these drugs prevent AIDS by stopping HIV viral replication and entry. All were approved in Phase 3 with data and are used in various combinations to make drugs like the Quad pill that have suppressed HIV to undetectable levels, allowing HIV-infected individuals to lead pretty normal lives. Ergo, AIDS IS caused by HIV! QED.
There were then some words not suitable for a family-friendly site, but among them were the claims that Weinstein is “a conspicuous troll who is hurting people.”
VICE News has a summary of Weinstein’s appearance on Rogan and on their shared and bogus theory of AIDS. An excerpt:
Weinstein’s “evidence,” he made clear, is partially drawn from reading about this theory as outlined by Robert F. Kennedy in his book The Real Anthony Fauci, published in 2021. (One review of the book noted that Kennedy managed to misrepresent numerous scientific studies he cites, which does not make a strong case for its scientific rigor; nor does the fact that it was written by Robert F. Kennedy.)
“I came to understand later, after I looked at what Luke Montagnier had said and I read Bobby Kennedy’s book on Fauci, was that actually the argument against HIV being causal was a lot higher quality than I had understood, right?” Weinstein told Rogan. “That it being a real virus, a fellow traveler of a disease that was chemically triggered, that is at least a highly plausible hypothesis. And with Anthony Fauci playing his role, that was inconvenient for what he was trying to accomplish.”
. . .The conversation generated substantial outcry from scientists and public health researchers on Twitter; David Gorski, an oncologist who frequently writes about the anti-vaccine world and pseudoscience, identified the conversation as an example of “crank magnetism,” writing, “Once you go down the rabbit hole of pseudoscience, quackery, and conspiracy theories in one area (e.g., #COVID19), it is nearly inevitable that you will embrace fractal wrongness in the form of multiple kinds of pseudoscience (e.g., antivax, AIDS denial, etc.).”
And this is, of course, indisputably part of a larger pattern. Rogan and Weinstein regularly repeat discredited scientific ideas, mainly around their promotion of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID and Rogan’s constant promotion of anti-vaccine ideas. The AIDS conversation makes clear that COVID denialists are branching out, using their forms of pseudo-inquiry to draw other bad ideas back into the public discussion.
And from Wikipedia:
Appearing on a Joe Rogan podcast in February 2024, Weinstein erroneously stated that some people with AIDS were not infected with HIV and that he found the idea that AIDS was caused by a gay lifestyle, rather than the HIV virus, “surprisingly compelling”. The American Foundation for AIDS Research reacted to the podcast, saying “It is disappointing to see platforms being used to spout old, baseless theories about HIV. … The fact is that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), untreated, causes AIDS. … Mr. Rogan and Mr. Weinstein do their listeners a disservice in disseminating false information …”.
As for Weinstein’s implication that Karry Mullis’s death may have involved his “maverick” view that HIV didn’t cause AIDs (shades of Karen Silkwood!), Michael Shermer responded on February 16 with a tweet:
Dear @bretweinstein
On @JoeRogan you suggested that there was something mysterious about Kary Mullis’s death, and that since he was critical of Anthony Fauci you hinted that perhaps there was something nefarious about his death.I knew Kary, and I am still in touch with his wife…
— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) February 16, 2024
I’m especially distressed by this kind of quackery, which in the end can cost lives, by a man who started out in my own field, evolutionary biology. Now, having left Evergreen State far behind him, Weinstein appears to be trying to make a name for himself by being medically heterodox. It’s fine to question untested theories, but the evidence is now very, very strong that HIV causes AIDs and that Covid-19 is caused by a coronavirus.
People often say that “pseudoscience” isn’t that harmful. After all, what’s the danger in reading the astrology column or tarot cards? But that’s just the thin edge of the wedge that opens up medical pseudoscience like that given above. And that can kill people.
Eric Weinstein, the older and smarter brother of Bret, started distancing himself from Bret’s off the wall idiotic rantings.
I’m in haste, so I’ll leave it to readers to find Michael Shermer’s straightforward take on precisely this. It has a GREAT Jefferson quote (see? I’m in such haste I’m not using italics!):
Let friends be wrong.
… caveat : readers gotta look all that up.
Cheers
Here it is :
Excerpt of Shermer – there’s a link to a Skeptic treatment of HIV/AIDS below:
“I love Joe Rogan and listen to his show regularly & have been on many times myself. And I love you guys too! But if you have serious challenges to mainstream scientific consensus opinions you need to present them in scientific/scholarly journals and/or professional meetings so they can be properly assessed among professionals. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best one we have. Podcasts are not peer review.”
https://x.com/michaelshermer/status/1759364141356323129?s=46
Skeptic link : https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/The-Aids-Heresies-Skeptic-3-2.pdf
More HIV/AIDS denial on a “major platform”? Ghastly. And who the hell is Bret Weinstein? Crankosphere gleams brightly.
A former professor of biology at Evergreen State College. He now does YouTube with his wife (also former prof of biology).
He seemed OK at first but I ignored him on the Covid vax. He seems to be getting worse with this HIV stuff.
I haven’t watched him lately.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Weinstein
This is terrible. I’m a virologist who, in the mid 1980s developed an HIV diagnostic test in collaboration with leading virologists in the UK. There is no doubt that HIV causes AIDS – patently true because HIV drugs reduce viral load to the point that patients do not develop the symptoms. We know how the virus interacts with immune cells and we know that people with mutations for receptors on these cells are immune from HIV infections. We have EM pictures too!
Same for COVID-19. It’s a coronavirus which has been isolated, seen under EM. The viral RNA has been cloned and sequenced, and we have used this data to produce spike protein-based vaccines which are highly effective. These people are deluded, living in a fantasy land. Do they believe the moon landings were faked too, and that Elvis is still alive (or kidnapped by aliens)?
Exactly. And BW’s claim that he gives extra credibility to nobel laureate Kary Mullis, who questioned whether HIV caused AIDS though never did any research in the area himself, which is definitionally an argument from pseudo-authority. I expect to see Bret Weinstein on an episode of Ghosthunters soon.
Ha! I think Ghosthunters would be perfect for him!
I thought all of these falsehoods were dealt with, conclusively, during the Duesberg years?
I believe that they were but that doesn’t stop quacks and their quackery. And it seems as though Duesberg’s claims were debunked 15 to 20 years ago.
I find this stuff deeply concerning. I have known people who treated their cancer with only prayer. They are dead now. I know people who swear by homeopathic concoctions. They are poorer now. I know people who believe that a newspaper horoscope is trustworthy. I know people who are anti-vaxxers(Thanks, Oprah!). It troubles me that so many many people are taken in but this sort of misinformation.
I find it incomprehensible. Why on Earth would someone as well educated as BW go down this road? He seems like an intelligent man. It simply does not compute. The only motive I can imagine is simply the desire to remain in the public eye. Perhaps also to sell some books. But, at what cost to the world?!
Yes. If I were to imagine SOME conspiracy, it would be that someone is slipping some heavy metals and/or psychedelics into Bret Weinstein’s food and water. His older brother is more than a bit heterodox, so there may be some susceptibility in the family–and Bret may feel overshadowed by his highly monetarily successful OB–but he really OUGHT to know better.
He also has a theory that the migration through the Darien Gap is an invasion with China behind it.
https://darkhorse.locals.com/post/5170988/migration-or-invasion-darkhorse-podcast-with-chris-martenson
Rick you might find this interesting [access to the article from the Skeptical Inquirer is free]:
Candice Basterfield, Scott O. Lilienfeld, Shauna M. Bowes, Thomas H. Costello: The Nobel Disease: When Intelligence Fails to Protect against Irrationality. Skeptical Inquirer, May / June 2020
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2020/05/the-nobel-disease-when-intelligence-fails-to-protect-against-irrationality/
Scott O. Lilienfeld, Candice Basterfield, Shauna M. Bowes and Thomas H. Costello: Nobelists gone wild: case studies in the domain specificity of critical thinking.
in: Robert J. Sternberg & Diane F. Halpern (eds.): Critical thinking in psychology. 2nd ed., 2020
That makes sense. Perhaps BW thinks he’s too smart to need to think critically about what he thinks uncritically.
There’s something very seductive about the idea that “everyone else around here is wrong and I alone discern the truth.” Every now and then it’s not completely wrong — but it’s not the way to bet.
“I alone can fix it!”
How far he has fallen. Could it be that his unjust and probably shattering departure from Evergreen College made him a paranoid?
One facet that is really annoying about his quackery is that it will be used by those leftists I know to justify the Evergreen student madness.
In the early days of Covid I reached out to Heather about their misinterpretation of studies of vaccines. She was cordial, acknowledged my points, but a week later reiterated their faulty interpretation. That was the moment I stopped listening to them.
Often in cases like these the crank aspect was always there. We just weren’t exposed to it. Perhaps he became addicted to the spotlight after the evergreen kerfuffel and didn’t know how to stay in it aside from this lunacy.
I think the departure from TESC made him poor. College teaching is a straightforward way to turn one’s knowledge (or ability to synthesize it) into money (this is what I do, and I think Mark is also a university professor?).
After their defenestration Brett & Heather got severance but not enough to just retire. Monetizing his knowledge (or “knowledge”) on twitter and youtube may have seemed like an easy natural path to follow.
Mark, I too wondered about the effect his experience had on him. I live within a couple of miles of TESC and read about his experience as it happened, or soon thereafter. He considered himself a man of the left and was harassed by out of control students and rejected by his tribe of fellow progressives. Was blamed for the deservedly bad publicity that descended upon the college as a result of rampaging students who thought they had the right to kick all “white” people off campus for a day of absence and were outraged that he decided to stay at his teaching post on campus that day. Unsupported by the spineless and uber-progressive college administration and rejected by his tribe, he sought out a new tribe that would listen to him. That would allow him to remain relevant. Another victim of cancel culture. It’s too bad that path sent him down this rabbit hole.
Makes sense, but no excuse — none whatever — to embrace deadly quackery and crankery. There are other tribes.
If true, that would be a case for how the Ctrl-Left might drive people to move farther right.
I also live a few miles from TESC. Here’s another take on some of the issues you refer to from the protests there. Was there an attempt to “kick all ‘white’ people of campus for a day? The official event (Day of Absence) was explicitly voluntary: white people could choose to stay off campus that day, but the organizers were very clear that everyone was free to make their own choice, and as one professor put it soon after, the campus was “crawling” with white people that day. Weinstein was one of those people, but nobody actually cared that he was on campus (along with many other white people) that day. Except for Weinstein, who framed it as some kind of heroic stance. Weeks later he was targeted by protestors, but not for being on campus that day.
Was he “unsupported” by the college admin? Publicly, the president said very clearly that nobody would be fired based on protestor demands, and he never wavered from that statement. Behind the scenes? We can’t be sure, but 7 years on, do you know of any evidence that the admin was even considering an investigation of Weinstein? I don’t. And the scale of publicly available info/leaks has been huge. Weinstein left the college because he sued the college (more or less for ‘reverse discrimination’), and agreed to resign as part of a settlement.
I agree with you on other points: some student protestors, if not meeting the legal definition of harassment (room for debate here), did harass Weinstein and others in the more every-day use of the word; also true that Weinstein became unpopular on campus, as student protestors were calling for him to resign, and after his Tucker Carlson appearance, a significant number of faculty signed on to a statement calling for the college to investigate him on grounds of contributing to a dangerous situation (partially manifested in violent and racist emails to students, staff and faculty, and in a called-in threat of extreme violence clearly motivated by hostility to the protesters that led the administration to close campus for a couple of days). Weinstein was targeted unfairly, but in a much more limited way than is generally depicted.
We are also in agreement on the most important point: it is too bad that he’s gained new popularity by going ‘down this rabbit hole’ with Covid, HIV, etc. Kudos to WhyEvolutionIsTrue for writing about this.
I think we tend to forget that Weinstein fit right in at Evergreen College, with its fairly loony liberal slant on things, till one particular issue got out of hand and he rebelled. There are alt med cranks on both ends of the political/social spectrum and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that a poll of faculty and students there — both before and after the debacle— showed a fair percentage of the same crankery. Upfront, then, I see no reason to assume he changed.
I am unhappy that he eventually proved his enemies right – he is unfit to teach biology.
So, millions of rural Sub-Saharan Africans were taking ‘party drugs’ in the 80s and 90s? Who knew?
I was thinking the same thing. I was also thinking of the poor women whom I treated in the Bronx during residency who’d been given HIV by their husbands without realizing it, and we couldn’t explain it to them because it was against the law to reveal to the wife her husband’s viral status without his consent–you could lose your license if you told them. These were generally not the party-drug taking types.
This: “because it was against the law to reveal to the wife her husband’s viral status without his consent–you could lose your license if you told them.”
A well-intentioned law with dreadful consequences, is my first reaction.
Exactly. It was meant to prevent discrimination against someone because of their Viral status, and was most assuredly well-intentioned. But good intentions are often the paving stones on that famous proverbial road.
Mark, how would you know the HIV status of the male partner of a woman you were treating for HIV disease, unless she told you, in which case it would hardly be a mystery to her as to how she got it, or a secret you had to keep? I could see the dilemma if the male sex partner was also your patient and she didn’t know he was infected. You owed each a duty of confidentiality.
The solution in either case was to report the woman’s diagnosis to the local public health authority as legally required under state or provincial law regarding sexually transmitted and other communicable diseases. (The man’s too, if he was also your patient.). Then it is up to the expert interviewers at Public Health to figure out what to tell them both. That’s their job —they do it all day long.
Now, if New York State’s communicable-disease law said that you could not legally report HIV/AIDS cases to Public Health, this would not have been “well-meaning” but simple cowardice in truckling to activists seeking to privilege their interests over everyone else’s….and also inflicting moral injury on you. This was part of the zeitgeist of the times.
Oops, Sorry Robert, not Mark.
This is so often the killer argument: is the phenomenon cross-cultural? Works the other direction too (cf. transgenderism, a purely cultural phenomenon).
I’m not sure I follow your point, since “transgenderism” is found in many societies/cultures around the world.
I meant that, in contrast to AIDS (which has the same biological cause across all cultures), transgenderism does not occur across all cultures (and is therefore not a purely biological phenomenon).
No, transgenderism is not a cultural universal. What transgender activists promote in English-speaking countries is a culturally bound phenomenon. Germaine Greer has emphasized this (so has Kathleen Stock).
The most common cross-cultural example activists trot out is the fa’afafine of Samoa: males who adopt some or all of the traditional feminine sexual stereotypes of Samoan females. But the fa’afafine are a kind of third gender – they are not transwomen (males who feel they have an internal feminine essence and desire to transform into females). In particular, almost all fa’afafine have sexual relationships with men, whereas many transwomen in western cultures are sexually attracted to females (and consider themselves “lesbians”). An obvious interpretation of fa’afafine is that in a western culture these males would be socialized to grow up as gay men (homosexuality *is* a cultural universal and has a well documented and strongly heritable polygenic basis).
And the fa’afafine are not even a cultural universal in Samoa: they are rejected as inauthentic by many Samoans including those who have adopted western religions and Samoans who have traditional cultural and religious beliefs.
But maybe you had some other different cross-cultural examples in mind?
Thanks for your note. Yeah, I had in mind ethnographic examples of transgenderism in numerous societies around the world, and a bit of googling will provide lots of examples for you.
Part of the problem here may be that, as in the Samoan case, we have several levels of phenomena functioning at the same time, including a psychological state (subjective gender identity) and cultural norms for channeling gender into public displays, that are not necessarily identical from culture to culture, and it complicates what “transgenderism” is — for example, does “homosexuality” exist in a society in which it is so strongly condemned that no one practices homosexuality? Presumably yes, though you might not find examples.
Anthropologists have long noted, for instance, that the existence of a “third gender” allowed/allows Native American transgender men to adopt female clothing and domestic tasks — and to marry ‘cisgender’ men — but there is no comparable role for transgender women, which may be a reflection of the dominance of men in public life rather than a product of biology. And all gender practices everywhere are ‘culturally bound phenomena,’ so they might have no bearing on the issue… remember work by Gil Herdt, who was especially insightful at sorting out differences among kinds of sexuality and expressions of gender.
Otherwise, the universality — or not — of transgenderism might be something of a red herring. If there is a genetic, hereditary component to transgenderism, we might not be surprised to find that a small, isolated island population that lacks that genetic trait does not have individuals who display it, since no one possesses it, just as Samoans might not have a genetic trait for blue eyes, yet no one would cite Samoa as a test case for whether blue eye color is genetic (it cannot be, since we don’t find it in Samoa….) Blue eyes may not be universal, but to then argue that blue eyes are not ‘real’ in some sense would be a category error. Given the stigma that transgender people experience in many cultures, it should also not surprise us to find that transgender people hide their subjective psychological gender identity in the service of being “normal” publicly, just as ‘closeted’ gays hide their sexual orientation.
Otherwise, I am wondering what is at stake here?
Thanks again for your reply — and apologies for a quickly dashed-off note this morning, which may have a more disorganized quality than I would have preferred….
Right. When my daughter was in her teens, I used to joke that I was a lesbian trapped in a man’s body. It was a JOKE FFS! She thought it was funny as dad jokes go. Now it has become a cancel-worthy offense to suggest that anyone who asserts that of HIMself might not be entirely truthful. W.T.F. ??
@Barbara Thanks! I think a lot of those cross-cultural comparisons are way too superficial. In Samoa the status of fa’fafina seems to allow some males to become leaders in what’s otherwise a traditional matriarchal leadership. That kind of subversion of a power relationship complicates comparisons to transwomen in western cultures. Similar for the sexual relationships that complicate interpretation of the native American groups you noted. I don’t think any of those cases can be directly compared to western transgenderism with its complicated linguistic origins and its basis in queer theory.
There is no evidence for a heritable polygenic biological cause of transgenderism. It’s ~impossible to find one until trans activists agree to a single definition of transgender that’s objective and repeatable. For same-sex sexual attraction this is easy to do: one can observe that an individual is male and is sexually attracted to other males (no self reporting necessary). That behaviour has a polygenic basis and is heritable. This is a good study.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aat7693
I think what’s at stake here is honest discussion [edit: I hasten to add honest discussion by others – the comments here including yours are honest and excellent!] about what it means to be male and female. At least that’s what trans activists think is at stake (deleted part of the link to avoid my reply going to moderation, but you can find this link all over twitter as it’s a review of Judith Butler’s new book written by a notorious trans activist).
[nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trans-rights-biological-sex-gender-judith-butler.html]
We have kids in the orphanage in Kenya who were infected during delivery, in one case the mother was infected too by unsterilised surgical instruments. “Gay lifestyle” my ass!
And haemophiliacs, too. The party drugs theory is bonkers!
Yes, I believe about 40% of hemophiliacs died of AIDS before HIV was known and Factor VIII concentrate was purified.
My first two AIDS patients were hemophiliac twins. Both died, along with the wife of the older twin.
Al these “dark web” guys are really anti-establishment and hate the main stream media. The problem is, they are not a good replacement for many of these issues that you get with the main stream. I guess identifying an issue does not mean your solution is valid.
Just read about the episode at Evergreen in Douglas Murray’s “The Madness of Crowds” and was wondering the same thing. In response to Mark Sturtevant.
Now I’m wondering if Weinstein’s stance on Evergreen’s “Day of Absence” was less about principle and more about just plain crankiness.
Sadly, there’s money in conspiracies and once you align yourself with that income stream, you can’t pick and choose. Bret sold his soul a while back and is now nothing more than a cynical grifter.
What do they think HIV causes? A mysterious traveler syndrome that also kills people, but is not AIDS? Why do people treated with drugs that inhibit the replication of HIV have much lower rates of death from AIDS? They must think the drugs attack some ghost that is always with people that have AIDS, but not AIDS itself. It really is impressive that someone as stupid as Rogan is so wealthy. Supreme confidence and dumb as rocks. Not a bad way of going through life.
I don’t make it a point to learn the fuller argument from the delusional (perhaps I should), but I think they claim that the viruses are opportunistic infections.
These guys are a genre of “Often wrong but never in doubt”.
Yep. And those who are never in doubt are more likely TO be wrong, since they don’t adequately check themselves. Confidence is the most overrated attribute that I can immediately bring to mind.
Dear PCC(E) – my follow-up comment with links to Michael Shermer’s stuff is currently being moderated.
Cheers
… and thank you!
It’s posted, held up because it had links, which gives an automatic hold.
Just a reminder for those in the USA who are 65+ that you can now get an additional Covid-19 vaccination to boost your immunity if it has been 4 months since your last vaccination.
The first word that came to mind was an ad hominem, so be it. “Jackass!”
That’s the problem with being Joe Public: it’s impossible to distinguish between dissenting scientists who practise robust science from those who espouse conspiracy theories. Science loses when respectable scientists resort to personal attacks. I just want the facts, people.
AMEN, so to speak. Go and debate culture, politics, aesthetics, and everything under the sun but I really discourage anyone from trying to play doctor because the consequences of bad advice can literally kill people. Leave it to the doctors, epidemiologists, and experts to give others medical advice. Is there anything more consequential in life than giving someone advice (almost always as a rank amateur or layperson) that results in their death or irreversible bodily harm? Doctors take an oath to do no harm. That egotistical human conceit of wanting to be right can start to veer dangerously close to involuntary manslaughter or really damaging the people you most care about. Imagine the guilt if that was the outcome…so don’t do it.
Caveat: where I think some experts in their field of study (Fauci might possibly be one) go awry is in deciding public policy based on their science. The science may say one thing (in the case of COVID: the highest risk group, the risk of overwhelmed hospitals, the efficacy of masking, models of the rate of pandemic spread by keeping schools open, etc.) but they are not policymakers and that should be handled by those experts who must balance many factors in public health, politics, resources, the rights of citizens, and even civil order. Scientists might be able to model with high probability what can happen in the future but they should not presume to arbitrate what society should do in response. That’s a different group of experts and stakeholders.
Rogan would just be humoring him, he’s deep down respectful of science but the joker enjoys having these guys act the way they do around him, I think he finds it funny.
It’s what gets the clicks. I saw a conversation Rogan had with Robert Sapolsky which was very good. I stopped watching him because of the click bait stuff.
We could say freedom of speech has exposed a wayward ‘idiot’ (in this case) along with some friends. You’re allowed to be so SOME of the time, are we not human?
BW may like to stir, motivated by abandonment “where were you when I was being rejected and ostracized” and maybe this is the goal he has set for himself, bitterness and contempt for being left and left out, how would we know but for now, you say hello and I say goodbye!
I should just point out that doctors who doubt the official views of every major medical association in North America and, until very recently, in Europe on the correct and legally mandated medical and psychological approach to gender confusion in children and adults, and indeed the very basis of sex, are regarded as heterodox cranks and transphobic haters in thrall to dark forces on the Christian fundamentalist Right.
Fortunately, and I think this is the difference from AIDS heterodoxy, we have the scientific knowledge of actual biologists on our side, as in this website. And also in contrast, I don’t think most doctors secretly believe Weinstein about AIDS but are just too afraid of excommunication to speak out. However, don’t underestimate how refractory people seriously wedded to an ideology are to revising their beliefs and agendas in the face of evidence, as Weinstein clearly demonstrates.
I think you are being too kind to him. I could just about forgive Weinstein if I thought he was sincere, but I would view him as illiterate in terms of biology. However, I don’t think he is sincere in the slightest and I cannot accept that he believes what he is saying about HIV and AIDS. He is simply spouting nonsense to increase his notoriety, irrespective of the harm it may cause. He has become an embarrassing joke.
Bret jumped the shark a long time ago when he actively spread anti-vax conspiracy theories for fun and profit. This latest idiocy is part of that degeneration into profiteering by pandering to ignoramuses. Next he’ll be asking innocently why we shouldn’t believe the Earth is flat or that birds are all robot drones reporting our activities to the CIA.
Brett Weinstein has gone the way of PZ Myers.
Audience capture has a lot to do with it.