The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back by Nicoli Nattrass (review)

The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back is Nicoli Nattrass’s third book that details the devastating consequences of AIDS conspiracy theories and AIDS denialist tactics in South Africa. Based on quantitative research data in South Africa and the United States, Nattrass argues that belief in AIDS origin conspiracy theories, including the idea that “HIV is a man-made bioweapon” (p. 1), is highly racialized, with “black” people in both countries believing to a larger extent than “white” people that “AIDS was invented to kill black people” by scientists in America (p. 12). In her rigorous investigation of the social schemas in both countries that supported the rise of such beliefs. Nattrass identifies the reviled character of Dr. Wouter Basson, the head of the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare program. Given Basson’s pernicious role, the conspiracy that he was working in a postapartheid context with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to further racist projects such as the now infamous Tuskegee Study where black syphilis patients in rural Alabama were deliberately untreated for three decades between 1937 and 1972 in order to study the progression of the disease, is rendered legible.

But the legibility that Nattrass offers is not to be confused with what she identifies as the dangers of relativist approaches to the truth. In rather broad brush strokes, Nattrass claims that postmodernism and anthropological relativism have led to the undermining of the truth value of science, and that scholars cannot afford to hold a multiplicity of views on equal footing when human lives are at stake. Her critique rests on a rather thin reading of the “postmodern turn” in anthropology and confuses the project of relativism with the kinds of political engagement, medical interventions, and activism that often underpin such projects.¹The AIDS Conspiracy will thus prove a frustrating read for some, but should not detract attention from the central claims in the book, which offer a comprehensive account of conspiracy theories and AIDS denialism on two interconnected continents.

In a chapter titled “Hero Scientists, Cultroprenuers, Living Icons, and Praise Singers,” Nattrass links South Africa’s former president Thabo Mbeki’s ill-informed ideas about the HIV virus with American-based virologist and leading proponent of AIDS denialism Peter Duesberg. Nattrass argues that the dissident movement relied on the credibility of such “hero scientists” to legitimate denialist claims that antiretrovirals (ARVs) are “toxic” drugs. The conspiracy theory promoted by Duesberg, and later adopted by Mbeki, that ARVs were invented to produce profit for big pharmaceutical companies, is not incompatible with such a formulation. Such claims about the toxicity of ARV treatment opened the way for the opportunistic punting of alternative therapies to deal with weakened immune systems.

Mbeki’s health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, was one of the key players in this deadly play, whereby she rejected reports from South Africa’s Medicines Control Council that ARV treatment was safe and effective medicine for people living with HIV and AIDS. Tshabalala-Msimang drew on a range of American “hero scientists” and “living icons” to support her position that “African remedies” including garlic, the African potato, lemon juice, and beetroot, along with micronutrients such as those offered to poor South Africans by the notorious German “vitamin magnet,” Mattias Rath, offered a less “toxic” solution to ARV treatment.² Given the climate of AIDS conspiracy theories and dissident positions at the top levels of governance in the country, Nattrass’s intolerance for any kind of apology by way of explaining the internal logic of these positions is understandable. For Nattrass, the analysis of irrational rejections of biomedical science must be the foundation for action rather than reflection, and her book certainly works effectively to promote radical critique.

An intriguing finding in the study under investigation reflects that people in South Africa who had never heard of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), the social movement that fought the government’s (ANC) AIDS policies, were...