How Denialism Spreads Across Pandemics

Responding to pandemics hinges on timely, accurate, and transparent public health communication. The urgent need for information at the outset of a pandemic is fertile soil for misinformation. In the case of COVID-19, anti-vaccine activists, who had spent decades persuading people not to vaccinate themselves or their children, quickly spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories months before there was even a vaccine. Similarly, AIDS denialists who had been promoting their baseless beliefs that HIV does not cause AIDS were ready and eager to spread COVID-19 misinformation.

Just as viruses can jump from one species to another, a process called zoonosis, AIDS denialists jumped pandemics to spread COVID-19 misinformation. The former president of the denialist Rethinking AIDS Society, David Crowe, was quick to claim COVID-19 was a hoax. Crowe and others used their AIDS denialist tactics to refute the realities of COVID-19. They said neither virus, HIV nor SARS-CoV-2, had been isolated in ‘pure form’ or proven to cause disease, which is simply not true.

The idea that HIV is harmless and that AIDS is caused by poverty and lifestyle factors, such as drug abuse, originated with University of California biologist Peter Duesberg in the late 1980s and persists to this day. When COVID-19 emerged, AIDS denialists quickly adapted Duesberg’s Harmless Virus Myth for the new pandemic. They cherry-picked research findings, imposed impossible standards of evidence, and moved the goalposts if new evidence emerged. These tactics created an alternative universe where 5G networks explained why people were getting sick and Bill Gates orchestrated the pandemic.

The next pandemic is inevitable, and denialists are ready and waiting.

AIDS denialists have sustained their movement for over 40 years because they have an audience. It feels good to believe that HIV does not cause AIDS. The same was true for COVID-19. In fact, downplaying the severity of COVID-19 remained popular even during the devastating global peaks of 2021, when deaths were in the tens of thousands per day. One effort to diminish public health responses to COVID-19 came in the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, coauthored by now-NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Peter Duesberg sympathizer. The declaration called for opening schools and businesses before there was a vaccine and allowing the virus to spread among lower-risk populations to achieve herd immunity. This was a popular idea because it felt good. It said what people wanted to hear, even as thousands were dying each day.

Denialism lives in conspiracy theories, where powerful forces are working together to invent diseases in order to enrich a testing-treatment-vaccine industry. Conspiracy theories are necessary for denialism to explain how it is possible to pull off a hoax on the grand scale of AIDS and COVID-19. Celia Farber, who spread AIDS conspiracy theories for decades, quickly jumped to COVID-19. She said AIDS was so profitable that Big Pharma conspirators took it to the next level with COVID-19. Likewise, longtime associate of Peter Duesberg, David Rasnick claimed that AIDS scare tactics invented by the government were repackaged for COVID-19.

Spearheading COVID-19 conspiracy theories, though, was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., also an AIDS denialist and now Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). In his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy wrote, “[Bill] Gates, and the other members of this government/industry collaboration used the lockdown to accelerate construction of their 5G network of satellites, antennae, biometric facial recognition, and ‘track and trace’ infrastructure that they, and their government and intelligence agency partners, can use to mine and monetize our data, further suppress dissent, to compel obedience to arbitrary dictates, and to manage the rage that comes as Americans finally wake up to the fact that this outlaw gang has stolen our democracy, our civil rights, our country, and our way of life—while we huddled in orchestrated fear from a flu-like virus.” As HHS Secretary, Kennedy’s denialism is no longer just challenging established science; he is making denialist health policies.            

The next pandemic is inevitable, and denialists are ready and waiting. We don’t know anything about the origin or pathogen of the next pandemic, but we do know how denialists will spread conspiracy theories and misinformation. They will claim that the new pathogen has never been isolated and its existence is unproven. They will say that tests are invalid, treatments are toxic, and vaccines can kill you. They will create alternative facts. They will blame immigrants or some other minority population. They will claim the pandemic was invented by Big Pharma. Denialists have a pandemic playbook. They are prepared for the next one, even if we are not.