Corona, AIDS, cancer: why some do not want to admit these diseases

So far, more than 108 million sick people and 2.4 million dead worldwide, despite all protective measures: How real the dangers of the global Covid-19 pandemic are is obvious.

Nevertheless, the slogan "Corona is a lie" has often been read in recent months - on demonstrators' signs, as stickers or graffiti on buildings, especially on social media.

The denial of a disease that affects large parts of the world's population is by no means new.

Whether AIDS or cancer, diabetes or tooth decay: in the course of history the most diverse diseases have been denied and their symptoms have been explained with hair-raising alternative reasons.

In one case, an entire government denied the threat of one of the most dangerous viruses - HIV.

Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa, which is badly affected by the AIDS pandemic, claimed in 2000, contrary to all medical knowledge, that the disease known as AIDS was in no way caused by the HIV virus.

The symptoms are rather due to poverty and malnutrition and therefore cannot be combated with medication.

Vitamin cures against AIDS

Mbeki convened a staff of advisors with highly controversial AIDS deniers, including Peter Duesberg.

The German virologist described HIV as "harmless" and attributed the symptoms of the sick to drug abuse or even the AIDS medication itself.

The US biochemist David Rasnick even called for a ban on HIV tests.

For the treatment of HIV-positive people, Rasnick and the German doctor Matthias Rath urgently advised against taking conventional AIDS medication, as these are toxic.

Instead, they recommended vitamin cures - which the two researchers sold themselves. In 2008 a South African dish banned them from marketing the vitamin cocktails as AIDS cures and from conducting tests on them.

The case of the American AIDS denier Christina Maggiore ended tragically.

After she was diagnosed with HIV in 1992, she too questioned the virus' connection with AIDS.

Maggiore met with Duesberg and Mbeki, wrote the bestseller "What If Everything You Thought You Knew About Aids Was Wrong?" And appeared on talk shows.

Even when she became pregnant, Maggiore refused to take any medication to protect the child - after all, she did not want to "expose her daughter to toxins."

After giving birth, she refused to have her daughter tested for HIV.

The child died at the age of three, according to the coroner of AIDS-related pneumonia, and Christina Maggiore herself at only 52 years of complications from pneumonia.

The cause of death was not investigated more closely at the family's request.

Hundreds of thousands dead - through ignorance

By far the most tragic consequences of AIDS denial had to be borne by the population of South Africa: According to estimates by researchers at Harvard University, more than 330,000 people died as a result of Mbeki's ignorant AIDS policy.

It is already known from the 19th century that people question widespread diseases with absurd alternative explanations or conspiracy theories.

In the wake of the cholera epidemic, British doctors were accused of only inventing the disease - to lure patients into clinics and kill them so that they could use the body parts for research.

And when polio vaccination campaigns finally began in the USA after increasingly devastating polio epidemics in 1955, chiropractors disagreed with the knowledge that polio spreads through infection with pathogens.

Instead of vaccinations, the Journal of the National Chiropractic Association recommended having a chiropractor treat your spine.

"A fragility in their thinking."

The American psychology professor Seth Kalichman

Seth Kalichman describes the denial of diseases and their causes as "an outgrowth of a more fundamental anti-scientific and anti-medical movement."

For a year, the American psychology professor went undercover in HIV denial groups to understand the psychological background.

For some, Kalichman said in an interview in 2009, it's just about an intellectual game.

Others benefit personally from it or seek "attention (...) that they would never have received unlike journalists or academics." And then there are even those affected by HIV: "For them it is a coping strategy." They all have one thing in common: "There is a fragility in their thinking that draws them closer to people who are easily exposed as deceivers."

These instigators are psychologically far more worrying than their followers: "They show all signs of a paranoid personality disorder," said the researcher to the "New Scientist" in 2010 - namely, intolerance to criticism and excessive awareness of one's own importance, coupled with anger.

"At the end of the day," said Kalichman, "their systematic denial is a mental health problem."

»Faith Healer« Hamer: Tooth decay due to fear of migrants?

Ryke Geerd Hamer became one of the most notorious leading figures.

From the 1990s onwards, he denied a number of diseases and thus endangered the lives of seriously ill people.

The internist, who died in 2017, called his alternative healing methods, accompanied by anti-Semitic views, »New Germanic Medicine«.

In 1986 the Higher Administrative Court in Koblenz had revoked his license to practice medicine.

Nevertheless, he continued to care for patients - as a naturopath, although he was also forbidden to do so.

According to Hamer, AIDS does not actually exist in the form that is publicly discussed.

It is not a disease of the HI virus, rather it is a "smegma allergy".

He also took strange views on other diseases: tooth decay is not a dental disease caused by acids and microorganisms, but a psychological conflict of "not being able to bite" and arises in children who are intimidated by older foreign classmates.

Instead of a lack of insulin, he attributed a patient's diabetes to the fact that she was "disgusted with spiders, frogs and the male member."

Hamer made his equally crude attitude to cancer particularly well known.

In 1992 he was sentenced to four months' probation for violating the Heilpraktikergesetz (Heilpraktikergesetz) after he had put in a cast on the leg of a boy suffering from bone cancer in order to "calcify" the tumor.

The leg had to be amputated, and the boy survived after ten weeks of chemotherapy.

His repeated conflicts with the law hardly seemed to bother him: in 1995 an international arrest warrant was issued in Austria for unresolved patient deaths.

Two years later the Cologne District Court sentenced him to 19 months without parole because he had treated three seriously ill cancer patients without medical approval.

And in 2004 Hamer was arrested in Spain and extradited to France.

The verdict: nine months in prison, another nine months on probation and a fine.

Conventional medicine as a nightmare

In the mid-1990s he had "treated" Olivia Pilhar, a six-year-old with a kidney tumor.

Hamer convinced the parents not to leave them to conventional medicine.

Since Olivia had once said that she did not like her grandmother's food, the case for Hamer was clear: it was about the physical processing of a "starvation conflict."

Ultimately, Olivia's parents and their daughter fled from the authorities' access to Spain - with Hamer.

Cancer is not really a disease, but "a biologically meaningful special program of nature" and itself already part of a healing process, sounded Hamer, triggered by a "conflict experience shock", not by predisposition or carcinogenic substances.

"Dirk Hamer Syndrome" is what he called the cancer that followed the psychological shock - after his own son, who died at the age of only 19 as a result of a gunshot wound, after which his father developed testicular cancer.

According to Hamer, it is not cancer that is dangerous, only the forms of therapy used against it by the »chemo mafia«, the »medicynics« and »medicinals«.

Because we know that "95 percent of patients die from chemo."

Only when little Olivia was almost dying after Hamer's non-treatment did her parents hand her over to a Vienna hospital.

The school doctors they hated so much removed the tumor, which was now the size of a football, and treated her with chemoradiotherapy.

Olivia survived - but her father continued to support the "faith healer" Hamer and claimed: "Olivia was already in the healing phase before she was admitted to the intensive care unit." The parents received suspended sentences for negligent assault and Hamer escaped to Spain.

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