Considering that Dave Grohl has been in the news recently, I guess it's a good opportunity for a reminder that he and his band were heavy in promoting the conspiracy theory that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, and thus, he has a body count.
Quote: In early 2000, President Clinton’s director of AIDS policy admonished them: “For the Foo Fighters to be promoting this is extraordinarily irresponsible behaviour. There is no doubt about the link between HIV and AIDS in the respected scientific community and it’s quite unfortunate that a band reads one book and then adopts this theory. To say [that HIV does not cause AIDS] is akin to saying the world is flat.”
That “one book” was What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? — self-published pseudo-science written by Alive and Well’s founder, Christine Maggiore, a woman diagnosed with HIV in the early ’90s — and it fell into the idle hands of the Foo Fighters’ bassist, Nate Mendel. After devouring it, Mendel conscripted his bandmates in his advocacy for Maggiore’s group.
The alliance lasted years. In January 2000, the group held a benefit concert for Alive and Well. “I’m living in perfect health without any AIDS medicines,” Maggiore told the cheering crowd between songs. For years, the band’s website featured Alive and Well banners, and listed them as a favoured charity.
When Mother Jones ran an article critical of Mendel in 2000, the musician responded with an indignant letter: “The story takes a decidedly derisive view of our efforts … I am not a medical professional, and I am relatively new to these questions, but I am convinced that those who have tested HIV positive and those sick with AIDS are being done a disservice by not having all the information available to them.”
The founder of Alive and Well 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.
The death of her daughter did not free Maggiore from her destructive theories — or the Foo Fighters from their endorsement of them. Instead, Maggiore doubled down. She accused the coroner of political bias and continued to refuse treatment for herself. She died three years after her daughter, of pneumonia as well, and we are left with the very essence of tragedy: a denial of extreme and self-annihilating sophistication.
https://medium.com/the-monthly/the-foo-f...33666fdc3c
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
