Dr. Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health, is not mincing words when it comes to Republican Senators' decision to confirm anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department.
Writing in the New York Times, Gonsalves recalls his time working to combat AIDS in South Africa two decades ago when then-President Thabo Mbeki fell for conspiracy theories about the disease and came to believe that antiviral drugs used to treat it were actually poisonous.
"Mr. Mbeki, in thrall to these ideas, many of which came from America, refused to allow antiretroviral therapy to be used in the country’s health system," he writes. "His health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, recommended healthy eating, with lots of beets, ginger and garlic, to ward off sickness."
ALSO READ: 'Stone cold idiot': Hegseth battered for 'faux-alpha-male bluster' NATO speech
All of this led to the unchecked spread of HIV throughout the country and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people -- and now Gonsalves now says he's "afraid for our country" that something similar could happen in the United States due to Kennedy's ascendance as America's top health official.
In fact, the epidemiologist believes that Kennedy's "science denialism is a more pernicious variant of the South African version."
He then runs down Kennedy's own history of promoting AIDS denialism, including the idea that HIV is merely a "harmless passenger virus" with no connection to the AIDS disease.
"As a gay man living with H.I.V., I cannot tell you how grotesque and offensive all this is and how hard it is to wrap my head around the idea that Mr. Kennedy will now preside over AIDS research, care and prevention programs at federal agencies," he argues. "Mr. Kennedy’s science denialism has the potential to be worse than that of his South African counterparts. Because it’s not only his AIDS denialism we need to worry about, it is his rejection of vaccines and flirtation with the rejection of germ theory, a key foundation of modern biomedicine."
