The Foo Fighters’ “AIDS denialism?”

Freedom of Speech must never be compromised

If you don’t follow popular culture, you may not be aware that Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters recently revealed on social media that he had fathered a daughter outside of his marriage. Given Grohl’s reputation as “the nicest guy in rock,” this news shocked many fans. Another thing it managed to do is to inspire a blogger/YouTuber named Rebecca Watson, who blogs at the site Skepchick (I have to admit I like that site name) to remind people that this is no surprise, since the Foo Fighters were at one point prominent supporters of the charitable organization Alive & Well, who comprised of many “HIV” positive members that were thriving without “anti-HIV” drugs. Of course, Ms. Watson is horrified by the fact that the band once supported HIV AIDS criticism, and even more horrified by the fact that they have not apologized for holding this opinion.

Here is the video; I’ll link the article below. The comments on this video are wild.

How Dave Grohl & Foo Fighters Put Actual Lives at Risk

Notice the overly dramatic headline—guys, they put lives at risk by having an opinion and supporting a charitable cause. This is nothing new; I myself have been accused of “being responsible for several deaths” and that accusation has been leveled at many of us, including Peter Duesberg. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting more and more worried about my first amendment rights. I’ll also add the caveat that Foo Fighters have not endorsed HIV AIDS criticism for over twenty years and I have no idea what they believe now. I’ve been led to believe that they promoted the COVID vaccines, but I’m really not familiar with this and I don’t know if it’s relevant to their (perhaps) former AIDS criticism.

I’m not going to address every single point she makes; I’ll merely hit the high points. The article isn’t an exact transcript of the video, but it’s pretty close.

After some discussion of the current paternity scandal, Ms. Watson opens her discussion of their “denialism” with the following:

But people tend to be a bit less likely to buy and enjoy music from a guy with a body count. Not the sexual kind; the actual death kind. And Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters have a body count.

Oh boy, here we go. A “body count?” Read on; you could swap out “HIV” for Covid and the narrative would be identical. Here we go:

In the late ‘90s, Nate Mendel got his hands on a book called “What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?” And no, it’s not a book correcting dangerous misconceptions like “you can get AIDS by shaking hands with a gay guy.” It’s a book that created dangerous misconceptions out of whole cloth, like “HIV does not lead to AIDS” and “no one should bother testing for AIDS” and “no one should take medication to treat HIV or AIDS.”

If you’ve been watching this channel for a decade or so you already have heard about the author, but for those newer viewers, let me tell you about Christine Maggiore.

Note the language used. Mendel “got his hands on” a book—not that he read a book, but that he somehow managed to obtain a book that ought to be hidden from the public entirely. How dare he?

Regarding Christine Maggiore, Celia Farber has covered this extensively in Spin magazine and other places, and the story of her having “died of AIDS” is, to put it mildly, extremely suspicious. This article spends a lot of time smearing Christine and Alive & Well, repeating the usual lies, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time on that except to say that there is no evidence Christine “died of AIDS” and there is certainly no evidence her daughter “died of AIDS”; no positive “HIV” test for Eliza Jane was ever produced and her illness was not consistent with an AIDS defining condition. Despite this fact, Ms. Watson insists that “In April of 2005, Maggiore’s three and a half year old daughter died from complications caused by advanced AIDS.” Advanced AIDS, for a girl with no positive “HIV” test (the only thing they could find postmortem was evidence of p24, which is not specific to “HIV”). And then, apparently, Christine “died horribly and painfully in 2008.” My understanding is that she actually died extremely suddenly after decades of good health. If I’m incorrect, please correct me with a link. Perhaps all the attacks from the media and activists from all fronts took a toll—just a thought. Also, have you noticed that according to AIDS activists, you’re not actually ever allowed to die if you’re “HIV” positive without being called an “AIDS death,” even if you fell off a building? Sounds a lot like how COVID deaths were counted.

Nevertheless, the band stopped publicly promoting Alive & Well in 2005; here is Ms. Watson’s explanation as to why this might be:

So I don’t know, it’s just a guess, but maybe at least one Foo Fighter DID rethink his philosophy when that happened, leading to them no longer be a united front on supporting whoever was still alive to run Alive & Well.

Maybe that’s the case; I certainly can’t read the minds of Nate Mendel and Dave Grohl. Ms. Watson then goes on to effectively demand a public apology, and then bizarrely compares HIV AIDS criticism to the Sandy Hook hoax perpetuated by Alex Jones, which is ridiculous. There is a big difference between pointing out the many controversies and contradictions of the HIV AIDS story, and pretending that a school shooting never happened.

Other than misrepresenting Christine’s story, there isn’t much substance to this article. I wonder if Ms. Watson is aware of the manifest harms that have been done to patients via these “life saving drugs,” to the extent that 26,000 plaintiffs are suing Gilead for covering up the fact that Truvada has caused incredible harm to many patients in the form of kidney damage, osteoporosis so severe as to require 30 year olds to get double hip replacement. I wonder if she’s aware of HAND—“HIV associated neurological disorder”— which the mainstream admits is mostly caused by the drugs.

She concludes with the following:

I’d like it if we were able to hit the same kind of critical mass of people asking the Foo Fighters about their dangerous mistakes, where the need to unburden and apologize finally outweighs the financial benefit of pretending it never happened. So. Yeah. Maybe like and share this video?

I love the request for a public apology. I’m not holding my breath; I suspect Foo Fighters won’t ever mention this topic again. This whole piece is so depressing. All I can think when I read it is of this growing movement that wants to completely squash free speech, under the guise that some speech is literally dangerous. (Clearly these people think we’re all idiots with no discernment whatsoever. But we knew this already.) And the public has been so thoroughly bamboozled by the HIV AIDS narrative that even to look into it is deemed heretical—it truly is the third rail. And that sets a very scary precedent, not only for freedom of speech but also for scientific progress, because if dissenting opinions are so thoroughly repudiated and vilified—especially in a new field of study where uncertainty abounds—what happens is that research settles into a narrow channel of investigation, and once that train starts rolling, it becomes harder and harder with each passing year to reverse course, even if the evidence mounts against the prevailing hypothesis.

For the most comprehensive information on the manifest harms of Truvada and related drugs, check out my latest Kindle release, The Truvada and PrEP disaster. And, as always, let me know what you think in the comments.