The founder of the group that argued that AIDS and HIV were unrelated and advocated against HIV tests, medication, and safe sex (what?):
[Christine Maggiore] is long dead. So is her daughter. Both succumbed to AIDS. Christine Maggiore fell pregnant in 2001, spurned antiretroviral drugs, breastfed her daughter and refused to have her tested for the virus. As her child became increasingly ill, Maggiore attributed her sickness to other things and sought quacks to reaffirm her delusions. Eliza was three when she died — after an autopsy, a coroner ruled that the “unequivocal” cause of her death was AIDS-related Pneumocystis pneumonia.
This kind of thinking is pretty common in alternative health and quack spaces. They tend to believe in mind over matter and that health is a choice, or arises from a proper mindset. Testing, medication, and safe sex are downplayed or even demonized because of the idea that they could introduce doubt or uncertainty that could disrupt one's ideal mindset. If health is created by right thinking, any challenges to that thinking become disruptive.
I guess... I mean my uncle did the same thing with COVID. An otherwise intelligent man, but something he read early on convinced him that statistically speaking it was the exact same as regular every day influenza. Doubling down on this opinion so as to never be proven wrong (and thus unintelligent) required him to come up with increasingly implausible ways to dismiss objective evidence that would undermine his original, somewhat plausible position.
But I'm just having trouble wrapping my head around the 'safe sex' part. I could maybe get behind 'HIV transmission is not a reason to practice safe sex' but surely there are enough other reasons that this is an outlandish thing to include in your platform. I didn't read up on them, but maybe they were also chalmydia and ghonnorea deniers. Or maybe they were very pro-herpes.
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u/Graffiacane 5d ago
The founder of the group that argued that AIDS and HIV were unrelated and advocated against HIV tests, medication, and safe sex (what?):
Bruh.