Nearly 15 years ago, the unspeakable happened in AIDS-ravaged South Africa. The nation’s president, Thabo Mbeki, was apparently fooled by posts on Western Internet websites that disputed whether HIV caused AIDS, and he ordered that the country’s physicians stop administering antiretroviral drugs to citizens afflicted with HIV, which was almost 1 in 10 at the time. President Mbeki aggressively defended his actions, claiming that AIDS in Africa was primarily a heterosexual paradox. He insisted that the disease was “a uniquely African catastrophe,” and said that conventional medicine from the West was an “absurd and illogical” solution to the country’s health crisis. Mbeki deferred to a group of dissident—and thoroughly discredited—academics and naysayers in the U.S. With AIDS predicted to decimate a full 25% of South Africa’s population by the year 2010, Mbeki pinned all South Africa’s hopes on containing the disease on the advice of a controversial molecular biologist, Peter Duesberg,...
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