The Fake Journalism of Anna Merlan

A response to her attack on AIDS critics, whistleblowers, and investigative reporters.

This is a long post; if you receive it via email you’ll need to click to expand the conclusion. If you read it on the web or in the app, that won’t be an issue.

Remember back in August, when MIT Technology Review writer Anna Merlan attacked me, Celia Farber, Peter Duesberg, Bret Weinstein, Joe Rogan, Aaron Rodgers, Amazon, Meta, Simon & Schuster, Spotify, SubStack, and more, in a thinly veiled attack on freedom of speech? I briefly reported on this , as did my colleague Neenyah Ostrom, when the piece dropped, and although I was initially loath to respond to this, I’d like to reply in detail now, since Merlan’s piece made the recent editorial note at MIT Technology Review:

You won’t find only stories on food in this issue. Anna Merlan describes how the new face of AIDS denialism grew out of the choose-your-own-science school of covid vaccine trutherism—and how that movement basically threatens all of public health.

In the interest of transparency, Merlan did contact me through substack for a comment, but I did not reply to her request for commentary for two reasons: first, the amount of time requested for a comment was insufficient and it happened at a time when I had no internet access at home due to storms; second, I sensed that no good would come of it for me even I had had the time needed to reply thoughtfully, which I did not. (Also if anyone knows why “HIV” critics are referred to as “denialists” and Covid critics are called “truthers” please let me know. Language has meaning.)

Allow me to remind you of the piece by Anna Merlan, which mentions me.

How covid conspiracy theories led to an alarming resurgence in AIDS denialism

Check out the scary scary pull quote:

Widespread distrust of our public health system is reviving long-debunked ideas on HIV and AIDS—and energizing a broad movement that questions the foundations of disease prevention.

Onto the piece itself:

Several million people were listening in February when Joe Rogan falsely declared that “party drugs” were an “important factor in AIDS.” His guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, the former evolutionary biology professor turned contrarian podcaster Bret Weinstein, agreed with him: The “evidence” that AIDS is not caused by HIV is, he said, “surprisingly compelling.”

We’ve discussed the Rogan/Weinstein interview here before. Between Aaron Rodgers and Bret Weinstein appearing on JRE, the AIDS activists are clearly panicking that this issue, that has not been resolved, has not been fully put to bed. I’d like to move on to a few more reactions from the mainstream, including some of Merlan’s specific criticisms and my responses to them.

But it wasn’t just them. A few months later, the New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, four-time winner of the NFL’s MVP award, alleged that Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, had orchestrated the government's response to the AIDS crisis for personal gain and to promote AZT, which Rodgers also depicted as “killing people.”

I don’t think the fact that AZT has killed people is in dispute. Unfortunately, we may never know how many. There is a good reason that AZT is only present in one of over thirty combination “anti-HIV” in use today, and is almost never prescribed. From Wikipedia, not exactly a repository of skepticism:

Early long-term higher-dose therapy with AZT was initially associated with side effects that sometimes limited therapy, including anemia, neutropenia, hepatotoxicity, cardiomyopathy, and myopathy. All of these conditions were generally found to be reversible upon reduction of AZT dosages. […] According to IARC, there is sufficient evidence in experimental animals for the carcinogenicity of zidovudine; it is possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B).^[36] In 2009, the State of California added zidovudine to its list of chemicals "known to the state of California to cause cancer and other reproductive harm."^[37]

Sounds like there’s nothing to worry about there. There was also, unsurprisingly, no mention whatsoever about the more recent Truvada disaster and its at least 26,000 victims that have experienced bone density loss so severe as to require hip replacement, as well as kidney damage, and even death in the article. That would have ruined the message. Allow me to remind you of a few victims, beginning with the very brave Tyreese Buchanan, who went public with his injuries in 2019. The video of his story, in his own words, is in the link; unfortunately, I can’t embed so you’ll have to click through.

Tyreese Buchanan used to be a singer who'd perform on stage, but those days are over. “It hurts your pride. It's really bad,” he told ABC 10News. The Bay Terraces man can barely walk. “[It’s] like someone stabbed me with a butcher knife in my hip,” he explained. There's also kidney failure and tooth loss, he said. He rarely makes it out of his home.

Here are a few more:

Plaintiff [redacted—it’s in the lawsuit linked above] is a resident of the State of New York. Plaintiff was prescribed and ingested Gilead’s antiretroviral medication Truvada from approximately 2004 to 2015. As a result of taking Truvada, plaintiff developed and suffers from avascular necrosis and osteoporosis. Plaintiff was unaware that his injuries were caused by Truvada until within two years of the filing of this complaint.

Plaintiff [redacted] is a resident of San Francisco County, California. Plaintiff was prescribed and ingested Gilead’s antiretroviral medications Atripla and/or Truvada from approximately 2004 to 2018. As a result of taking Atripla and/or Truvada, Plaintiff developed and suffers from chronic kidney disease and fractures due to bone density disorder. Plaintiff was unaware that his injuries were caused by Atripla and/or Truvada until within two years of the filing of this complaint.

Plaintiff [redacted] is a resident of the State of Colorado. Plaintiff was prescribed and ingested Gilead’s antiretroviral medications Viread and/or Truvada from approximately 2003 to 2013. As a result of taking Viread and/or Truvada, Plaintiff developed and suffers from osteoporosis, avascular necrosis, fractures, and tooth loss due to bone density disorder. Plaintiff was unaware that his injuries were caused by Viread and/or Truvada until within two years of the filing of this complaint.

I think that’s enough to paint a picture. This makes the following reaction from Dr. Seth Kalichman even more egregious:

“When I hear [misinformation] like that, I just hope it doesn’t get traction,” says Seth Kalichman, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy.

But it already has. These comments and others like them add up to a small but unmistakable resurgence in AIDS denialism—a false collection of theories arguing either that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS or that there’s no such thing as HIV at all.  

We’re back to Dr. Kalichman again who famously, in his book Denying AIDS, broke a cardinal rule of clinical psychology by diagnosing a large group of people he has never met with various mental illnesses at a distance.

“The AIDS denialists have come from the covid denialists,” says Tara Smith, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and a professor at Kent State University’s College of Public Health, who tracks conspiratorial narratives about illness and public health. She saw them emerging first in social media groups driven by covid skepticism, with people asking, as she puts it, “If covid doesn’t exist, what else have we been lied to about?” 

I’ve tangled with Dr. Smith (no relation) in the past and she has since blocked me on X. Back in the day (2006), Smith had a blog sponsored by Seed magazine called Aetiology, which was very obviously part of the propaganda arm of the public health establishment, and by extension, the AIDS activists and all of Big Pharma. And for all the attacks on me for never having worked on “HIV” in the lab (who actually has?), I’d like to point out that Smith has never worked on “HIV;” she’s a bacteriologist. (Being pedantic here—how did the “AIDS denialists” “come from” the “Covid denialists” when AIDS predated covid by 40 years? I actually get the point she’s trying to make—that people that had never questioned anything the medical establishment put out until the bizarre Covid response were inspired to then to look into other medical controversies, including HIV AIDS (why is questioning a bad thing?)—but she could have worded it better.)

“The covid phenomenon—not the pandemic but the phenomenon around it—created this opportunity for AIDS denialists to reemerge,” he adds.

Supporting my previous point. I love the term “the Covid phenomenon.” That’s an unintentional tell.

Denialists like Peter Duesberg, the now-infamous Berkeley biologist who first promoted the idea that AIDS is caused by pharmaceuticals or recreational drugs, and Celia Farber and Rebecca V. Culshaw, an independent journalist and researcher, respectively, who have both written critically about what they see as the “official” narrative of HIV/AIDS. (Farber tells MIT Technology Review that she uses the term “AIDS dissent” rather than “denialism”: “‘Denialism’ is a religious and vituperative word.” )

And now for the attack on Peter Duesberg, and any form of media that dares to cover his ideas.

Spotify, for one, has largely declined to curb or moderate Rogan in any meaningful way, while also paying him an eye-watering amount of money; the company inked a $250 million renewal deal with him in February, just weeks before he and Weinstein made their false remarks about AIDS. Amazon, meanwhile, is currently offering Duesberg’s long-out-of-print 1996 book Inventing AIDS for free with a trial of its Audible program, and three of Culshaw’s books are available for free with either an Audible or Kindle Unlimited trial. And Farber has a Substack with more than 28,000 followers.

Anna Merlan either made a mistake here, or was intentionally deceptive. Duesberg’s “long out of print” book is not called Inventing AIDS. It is called Inventing the AIDS Virus. This is not a distinction without a difference; “Inventing AIDS” makes it sound like Duesberg believed the entire epidemic to be made up, which he absolutely did and does not. It is this sort of language that leads people to incorrectly refer to people like myself as “AIDS denialists” when nothing could be further from the truth. “Inventing the AIDS Virus” is a completely different title, with totally different implications.

While this wave of AIDS denialism doesn’t currently have the reach and influence that the movement had in the past, it still has potentially serious consequences for patients as well as the general public. If these ideas gain enough traction, particularly among elected officials, they could endanger funding for AIDS research and treatments.

Would that be such a terrible thing? As I’ve mentioned before, we keep developing new “anti-HIV” drugs, yet nothing really new gets done. For PrEP and for ARVs, the oldest class of drugs, NRTIs, are still the most commonly prescribed. And furthermore, there is a huge elephant in the room that is being missed, and that elephant is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, an AIDS-like condition that has been woefully neglected and underfunded due to its lack of association with “HIV” despite sharing many of its clinical features. It is beyond time to at least reconsider the “HIV”-only hypothesis of AIDS, at least in part for the benefit of ME/CFS patients, who outnumber Americans with “HIV” by a ratio of 3:1. Would splitting the funding for AIDS evenly between “HIV” and CFS research be a possible compromise? (Given the numbers, I’d argue that 75% ought to go to CFS, but I’m being nice here.)

The first wave of contrarian ideas about AIDS, then, was less true “denialism” and more the understandable confusion and differences of opinion that can emerge around a new disease. Yet as time went on, “the death rates were increasing dramatically,” says Lindsay Zafir, a distinguished lecturer in anthropology and interdisciplinary programs at the City College of New York who wrote her dissertation on the emergence and evolution of AIDS denialism. “Some people started to wonder whether scientists actually knew what they were doing.” 

I’d like to insert a little correction here. The first waves of “denialism” began at the very beginning of the epidemic—the New York Native covered HIV AIDS from a critical perspective from the early 1980s, and Duesberg’s pivotal Cancer Research article was published in 1987, which in itself ought to have been sufficient to spur a course-correction in AIDS research. But what Merlan and others never mention is that, even to this day, the initial papers out of Gallo’s lab that established the “probable cause of AIDS” appeared in the medical literature after he had announced the “probable cause of AIDS” at a press conference April 23, 1984. This is odd, and when we examine what was said at the press conference versus what was in the actual papers, we learn why it had to happen this way. At the press conference, Gallo announced that 90% of his AIDS patients had “antibody to HIV” (which was at that time still referred to as HTLV-III) while neglecting to mention the results that would be published 2 months later—fewer than half of his 72 AIDS patients had any evidence of “HIV/HTLV-III” associated genetic material. Can you imagine if he’d said this at the press conference? We should also note that the results of this experiment have not been improved upon.

The tides began to turn only in 1995, when the first generation of antiretroviral therapies emerged to treat AIDS and deaths finally, mercifully, began to drop across the United States. 

So why do we keep producing new drugs? If the standard of care in 1995 (a year before the approval of the miracle protease inhibitors, so we know something else is going on) was so great, why haven’t we just stuck with it? Again, I ask, how many alleged infectious diseases other than “HIV” have so many different drugs to treat them? When I think of “conditions” that have a plethora of treatment options available, I tend to think of either mental illness or cardiovascular disease, and we know the problems with psychiatric drugs and medications such as statins all too well.

Kent State’s Smith and Steven P. Novella, now a clinical neurologist and associate professor at Yale, wrote a paper in 2007 about how the internet had become a powerful force for AIDS denialism. It was “a fertile and unrefereed medium” for denialist ideas and one of just a few common tools to make counterarguments in the face of the widespread scientific agreement on AIDS that dominated medical literature. 

Around this time, Farber wrote another big piece, this time in Harper’s, on the so-called AIDS dissidents, which in turn generated a firestorm of criticism and corrections and revived the debate for a new era of readers. 

The not so subtle call for censorship is a thread throughout Merlan’s piece. I’d also like to point out, yet again, that the censorship of AIDS criticism paved the way for massive censorship of Covid criticism, including of the efficacy of the mRNA vaccines, which we now know is highly doubtful. This is totally unscientific and, as we have seen with some of the things the establishment got very wrong about Covid, it is also dangerous and deceptive. At every point in human history, much of what we have believed to be true has been proven wrong, and there is no point to believe that this is not the case today. Science is only self-correcting when the community allows it to be, and censorship and stifling of dissenting views is precisely the way very grave mistakes can be made and, in some cases, can persist for decades or longer.

By 2015, the decline of denialism was so complete that AIDSTruth stopped active work, believing that its mission was complete. The group wrote, “We have long since reached the point where we—the people who have in one way or another been involved in running this website—believe that AIDS denialism died as an effective political force.” 

Of course, it didn’t take too long to see the work was far from complete.

Perhaps AIDSTruth ought to consider the possibility that the reason this debate just won’t die is because the HIV AIDS story has been decidedly falsified on every front; all the predictions of the hypothesis have failed and all the establishment has left are the highly toxic “miracle drugs.”

Some have even given fresh life to the old guard. Duesberg is now 87 and is no longer active in the public sphere (and his wife told MIT Technology Review that his health did not allow him to sit for an interview or answer questions via email). But the basic shape of his arguments—obfuscating the causes of AIDS, the treatments, and the nature of the disease itself—continue to live on. Rogan actually hosted Duesberg on his podcast in 2012, a decision that generated relatively few headlines at the time—likely because Rogan hadn’t yet become so popular and America’s crisis of disinformation and medical distrust was less pronounced.

I reacted to Duesberg on Rogan; you can check it out here. Onto Merlan’s criticism of me:

Culshaw (who now uses the name Culshaw Smith) strikes a similar tone, though she is a less prominent figure. A mathematician and self-styled HIV researcher, she published her first book in 2007; it claimed to use mathematical evidence to prove that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. 

I love how Anna Merlan (who now uses the name Anna Merlan) makes it sound like I deceptively changed my name. Has she not heard of the phenomenon of women taking their husband’s last name? I’m also not a “self-styled” “HIV” researcher, although I admittedly have been out of the field for years; I’ve written a dissertation on mathematical modeling of “HIV” infection, as well as having published several peer-reviewed articles on the topic, plus two review articles. Where are Anna Merlan’s journal articles on “HIV” and AIDS?

In 2023 she published another AIDS denial book, this one with Skyhorse, a press that traffics heavily in conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, and which published Kennedy’s book on Fauci. She gained some level of notoriety when the book was distributed by the publishing giant Simon & Schuster, leading to protests outside its headquarters from the LGBT rights advocacy groups GLAAD and ACT UP NY. Though Simon & Schuster appears to continue to distribute the book, that pushback has provided the basis for her new act: life after “cancellation.” She produced a short memoir last year that describes the furor—a history Culshaw presents as a dramatic moment in the suppression of AIDS truth. This is one of the books now available for free on Amazon through a Kindle Unlimited trial. (Simon & Schuster did not respond to a request for comment. Culshaw did not respond to a request for comment sent through Substack.)

The argument that she’s been “canceled” by the scientific establishment holds tremendous sway with disease denialists online, who are always eager to seize on cases where they perceive the government to be repressing and censoring “alternative” views. In May, Chronicles, an online right-wing magazine, approvingly tied together Rodgers with the broader web of AIDS denialists, including Culshaw, Duesberg, and others—holding them up as heroic figures who’d been unfairly dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” and who’d done well to challenge medical expertise that the magazine denigrated as “white coat supremacy.” (A request for comment for Rodgers through a representative did not receive a response.)

The Chronicles article, written by Lloyd Billingsley, is really worth reading.

The difficulty of policing false or unproven health information across all these different platforms, in all the forms it can take, is immense. In 2019, for instance, Facebook allowed misleading ads from personal injury lawyers claiming that PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis drugs, can cause bone and kidney damage; it took action only after a sustained outcry from LGBT groups. 

WOW. Just wow. I cannot believe that she is dismissing the suffering of at least 26,000 plaintiffs with a wave of the pen. Next thing you know the AIDS activists will be gaslighting victims and referring to their legal counsel as “ambulance chasers.” Oh wait, they’ve done that already. Remember this stunning reversal by the AIDS activists in the summer of 2023? For years, the AIDS activists actively attempted to suppress advertisements for Truvada lawsuits, including a campaign to Facebook to have almost all of the ads removed (successfully), with the inevitable effect of denying victims the information that they might be entitled to compensation and even further, denying them the knowledge that the medication they are taking might be harming them, and by extension their ability to provide informed consent. Once the story broke in the business section of the NYT, the activists had to spin their censorship in the most unbelievable way.

It appears the HIV activists were right. For over a decade, they’ve accused HIV drugmaker Gilead Sciences of delaying the development of a newer, and possibly safer, version of tenofovir, which is included in several blockbuster HIV drugs, such as Truvada and Atripla. The pharmaceutical giant denied the claims and continues to do so. But according to The New York Times, internal documents show that Gilead did in fact utilize a “patent extension strategy” to maximize the older drug’s monopoly and profits.

Quoting myself: Which activists, exactly, were right? The ones that sponsored letter writing campaigns and protests to have the Truvada lawsuit ads scrubbed from the internet? Where were these “activists” for the past five years, while entire organizations of “activists” were coordinating a mass censorship campaign? Oh, never mind. These were the same activists, as far as I can tell. They are certainly involved in the same activist organizations. They’ve just done a complete 180 in the wake of the NYT piece, hoping to spin the story—which is already out of control—in a way that doesn’t make them look like they have egg on their faces.

The concern with these kinds of falsehoods, Smith says, is always that patient populations, communities at high risk for HIV, or populations with real histories of medical mistreatment, like Black and Native people, “think there might be a grain of truth and start to doubt if they need to be tested or continue treatment or things like that.” She adds, “It’s one of those things that either plants seeds of doubt or encourages those to grow if they’re already there.” 

I’m almost impressed by Smith’s boldness here. Why indeed would the Black and Native communities be suspicious of being targeted for experimental medical treatments? (And that’s what things like PrEP are—experimental. The clinical trial results, as we have discussed before, are wildly inconsistent and recently, even the mainstream has been beginning to admit that PrEP isn’t working as they had hoped.) The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment didn’t happen that long ago; the Black community is too smart to sacrifice themselves again, which is why PrEP uptake remains so disappointing in that demographic.

All it takes, Kalichman says, is for “someone who’s sitting in a policymaker’s chair in a state health department” to take AIDS denial arguments seriously. “A lot of damage can be done.” (He expresses relief, however, that Trump and his wing of the Republican Party have not yet taken up the particular cause of AIDS denialists: “Thank goodness.”)  

I wonder what Dr. Kalichman thinks about RFK joining Trump’s team and the likelihood that, if Trump is elected (I have no prediction as to how this election will go—it’s truly up in the air from my perspective), RFK would very likely be involved in some manner of public health bureaucracy. As we know, RFK is at least open to the possibility that the HIV AIDS story is, shall we say, suspicious.

Curran also has a larger, more existential concern when he considers the lessons of the AIDS and covid pandemics: “The problem is, if you bad-mouth Fauci and his successors so much, the next epidemic, people come around and they say, ‘Why should we trust these people?’ And the question is, who do we trust? 

“When bird flu gets out of cows and goes to humans, are we going to go to Joe Rogan for the answers?”

And that, my friends, is where the article ends. With a dire warning about bird flu. I’m old enough to remember at least three prior “bird flu” scares. They went nowhere.

As we close, I’d like to remind you that this is not the first time Anna Merlan has been dead wrong on an issue.

'Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?' Asks Idiot

A Rape on Campus" is a retracted, defamatory Rolling Stone magazine article^[2][3][4] .

A Rape on Campus" is a retracted, defamatory Rolling Stone magazine article^[2][3][4] written by Sabrina Erdelyand originally published on November 19, 2014, that describes a purported group sexual assault at the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville, Virginia. Rolling Stone retracted the story in its entirety on April 5, 2015.^[1][5] The article claimed that UVA student Jackie Coakley had been taken to a party hosted by UVA's Phi Kappa Psi fraternity by a fellow student and led to a bedroom to be gang raped by several fraternity members as part of a fraternity initiation ritual.

[…]

Anna Merlan, a writer for Jezebel, who had earlier called Reason columnist Robby Soave an "idiot" for expressing skepticism of the Rolling Stone story, declared: "I was dead fucking wrong, and for that I sincerely apologize."^[77] Merlan had also labeled journalist Richard Bradley's doubts about the article a "giant ball of shit".^[78]

I’d like to conclude this post with a few points. First, honest journalism and honest scientists cannot be reduced to repeating the mainstream talking points. And the debate about HIV AIDS still rages—there must be a reason for that. We must always remember that there is no such thing as the settled nosology of an epidemic. Like everything else in science, it is open to challenge and revision. Nosology can be the very political foundation of very political epidemiology. Lastly, I would like to say the following:

If Anna Merlan were a truly honest journalist, she would actually take the time to check for herself whether the critics might have a valid point. To simply accept and parrot the accepted talking points is not true journalism. I apologize to Anna Merlan for not having replied to her message request, but I’d like to offer an olive branch to open the discussion, and say that I would be happy to discuss/debate this topic with her in a public forum.