Statement presented by Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes at the Boston screening of House of Numbers on April 21, 2009.  

For more about that event, and Dr. Kuritzkes’ example of his words being taken out of context and so misrepresented by Brent Leung, please see the story in Boston’s LGBT paper, Bay Windows.  

My name is Daniel Kuritzkes.  I am an infectious disease expert and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.  I am also the Director of AIDS Research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Vice Chair of the NIH-funded AIDS Clinical Trials Group.

I have been taking care of patients with HIV/AIDS since the very beginning of the epidemic.  I watched the HIV epidemic spread throughout the United States in the 1980’s and observed first-hand the terrible toll it took on people infected with HIV, people from all walks of life, men and women, gay or straight, people infected by their sex partners or because they shared needles or because they received a contaminated blood transfusion or because their mothers were infected.  All of these patients shared two features in common—they were all HIV-infected, and they all died of progressive acquired immune deficiency.  I also watched the death toll from HIV/AIDS plummet, beginning in the mid-1990’s, as highly effective antiretroviral therapies were developed.   We have virtually eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV in this country through the use of antiretroviral therapy during pregnancy and delivery, as a direct result of which pediatric AIDS has nearly disappeared in the US.  And more recently I have seen first-hand the dramatic impact the introduction of antiretroviral therapy has had on AIDS-related mortality in resource-limited countries like Botswana and South Africa.

The scientific data linking HIV to AIDS is overwhelming, and rests on a solid body of virological, epidemiological and clinical data accumulated over nearly 30 years.  There is no scientific controversy regarding the existence or cause of AIDS.  There is not a shred of scientific evidence to suggest that AIDS does not exist, or that HIV is not its cause.  Those who deny that HIV causes AIDS have not conducted a single experiment or clinical trial or epidemiology study of their own because they can’t.  They attract attention to themselves by claiming to highlight controversy where none exists, casting themselves as crusaders against a monolithic AIDS establishment.  But their arguments have no more merit than those of people who believe the earth is flat, or that the sun revolves around the earth, or that the moon is made of green cheese, or that the Apollo moon landings were staged on a back lot in Hollywood. 

The movie you have just seen attempts to cast doubt where none exists.  Through deception and clever editing, the producers of this so-called documentary promote the agenda of the AIDS denialists who funded it.  This film is no more a documentary than Borat, but unfortunately the producer Brent Leung is no Sasha Baron Cohen, and the subject is deadly serious.  Deadly enough that numerous denialists who were themselves HIV-infected are now dead of AIDS.  This list includes Sophie Brossard, died of AIDS at age 37 in September, 2002; Ronnie Burk, who died of AIDS at 47 in March, 2003; Jack Levine, who died of AIDS in March, 2002 at age 47;  David Pasquarelli, who died of AIDS in March, 2004 at age 37; Tony Tompsett dead from AIDS at age 39 in 1998; Huw Christie Williams, died of AIDS in August, 2001 at age 41; and most recently Christine Maggiore, who caused her daughter’s death from AIDS by withholding lifesaving antiretroviral therapy and who herself died of AIDS in December, 2008.

The denialists could be dismissed as harmless crackpots from the lunatic fringe were it not for the deadly consequences of their actions.  Withholding antiretroviral therapy from a child dying of AIDS is like refusing surgery for someone with a burst appendix; but that’s what Christine Maggiore did to her daughter Eliza Jane Scovill.  Telling people who are HIV-infected that they don’t have to use condoms or worry about safe sex or using clean needles is like the tobacco companies telling people that cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer or emphysema, but that’s what the denialists say.  And working with a misguided president and health minister in South Africa to deny access to antiretroviral therapy to its infected citizens is like telling the people of New Orleans that those levies aren’t really necessary, but that’s what the denialists have done, and responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of South Africans lies squarely on their heads.

AIDS is a preventable and treatable infectious disease caused by HIV.  To pretend otherwise threatens the health of millions around the world.