It appears that several people, including the increasingly conservative-blinded editor of Arts and Letters Daily, seem to think that the editor of Medical Hypotheses was sacked because “he allowed the debate of controversial ideas.” This is incorrect. The reason why the editor was sacked is that he allowed an author to publish fraudulent arguments in a nominally scientific journal. Judging by the response of defenders — and even the journalist trying to be even-handed in Times Higher Education doesn’t quite seem to get it – a large number of people cannot understand the difference between supporting academic freedom and allowing the publication of lies.

The full shameful paper can be read by those interested how to maximise the number of misleading statements per 1,000 words. Rather than pick it apart lie by lie (a task discharged admirably here), I will point out just one shining example. From the abstract:

…the total Sub-Saharan population doubled from 400 millions in 1980 to 800 millions in 2007 during the African HIV epidemics. We conclude that the claims that HIV has caused huge losses of African lives are unconfirmed…

The argument is that if HIV caused so many AIDS deaths, how did the population of sub-Saharan Africa increase in this time? Now, while this argument might seem convincing to a pithed lab toad, anyone with even a passing understanding of the rational sphere would understand that (i) some epidemics have very long lag times — in HIV’s case the average time from infection to death in an untreated individual is around a decade, and (ii) there is no a priori reason why population growth cannot outstrip a given cause of death. I note, for example, that in 1994 there was a rather well-known event called the Rwandan Massacre in which 800,000 people were murdered in a few weeks. Since the Rwandan Massacre took place within the period of the 1980-2007 African population increase, it follows then that this massacre never took place.

The authors of the Medical Hypotheses paper and the editor who chose to publish it deserve the same amount of sympathy as David Irving after his sub-quixotic libel defence. Actually, that’s unfair to David Irving, who may be a court-proven dissembler, a creep, and for all I know a secret admirer of fashion stirrup pants, but at least his lies haven’t been implicated in hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths.

Tags: aids, bruce charlton, hiv, max essex, medical hypotheses, peter duesberg, pride chigwedere