Michael Specter has an important piece in the New Yorker (only an abstract is available online) on AIDS denialists. These are the people who, like those who thought the earth was flat, claim that HIV does not cause AIDS (indeed, some of them allege that contracting the virus can be beneficial to your health). These nutters have deluded themselves into thinking that they are the Galileos of the modern world and that the established scientific community is the Church (as one South African government official tells Specter). South African President Thabo Mbeki has entertained these theories, and his Health Minister is frequently derided as "Dr. Beetroot" for her suggestion that HIV sufferers consume African potatoes, beets, and garlic to cure themselves. Specter profiles Peter Duesberg, the father of AIDS denialists, and the elusive snake-oil salesman Dr. Matthias Rath, who publishes full page ads in newspapers decrying anti-retroviral treatment and who has made a fortune marketing vitamins to impoverished South Africans living with HIV. An important part of the story that Specter does not mention, however, is the 15-page article that Harper's published last year by the fabulist Celia Farber, who has no medical background and who has made a career out of trying to debunk, in public consciousness, the belief that HIV causes AIDS. In her piece, titled "Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science," Farber reports favorably on Duesberg and attacks the National Institutes of Health as leading some ghastly conspiracy to silence AIDS "dissidents." Larry Kramer, the legendary gay activist and founder of both ACT-UP and Gay Men's Health Crisis, called it, simply, "scary." Farber's piece was, in the words of The New York Times, a "parting gift" from editor Lewis Lapham to his successor, Roger Hodge. Some gift. Lapham's decision to assign and Hodge's decision to print this article was, without question, one of the most irresponsible, dangerous, and unforgivable acts in modern American journalism--and it was ritually denounced as such by people who know far more about AIDS than the likes of Lapham, Hodge, and Farber. Last year, the leader of the parliamentary opposition in South Africa told me that President Mbeki has presided over an "African holocaust." He is right. But now Harper's has blood on its hands, too. Update: I forgot to link to another New Yorker article about AIDS denialism; this one by Samantha Power profiling the heroic South African AIDS activist Zackie Achmat. If the Nobel Committee was not busy awarding another African who claimed that AIDS was created by "evil-minded" Western scientists to kill blacks, they would give an award to Achmat (who was actually nominated in 2004, the same year as the Kenyan Wangari Maathai), no matter how much that honor has been tarnished by its previous recipients. --James Kirchick