Could science really be so wrong for so long about global warming, HIV/AIDS, and more?

Yes.

In theory and in the abstract, “science” delivers accurate knowledge because it is based on facts and applies the scientific method to them.

But science is performed by human beings, and any human activity can go wrong.

Even when many dedicated experts are agreed about something, they may be wrong. Innumerable examples are available, for instance from politics and religion.

No political system has proved to be effectively sustainable in the long run. Empires have not lasted, nor have communes. Monarchies became parliamentary democracies, and in turn, parliamentary democracies succumbed to dictatorships.

Religions that preach love and peace have spawned innumerable sects that practice the most extreme and irrational violence.

Contemporary science is an extremely labor-intensive human activity. On any given topic or research project, only a small proportion of scientists are concerned with “the big picture”. Most are fully occupied with intensive work on some small special detail in a manner that could be described in the way Tom Lehrer put it: “If the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department, says Werner von Braun”. Few scientists re-examine the fundamental basis of the theory on which their work rests.

Articles published from atom-smashers may list 50 or more “authors”, but most of the names are people fully occupied in what are essentially purely technical tasks, albeit ones that call for special expertise. Only a few of the authors decided which experiments to carry out, and why; and the analysis of results, and judging their validity and significance, is also in only a few hands.

Very few scientists ever engage in truly fundamental discussions; say, over “Big-Bang” versus “steady-state” cosmology, whether “the universe” came into being suddenly by a quantum-something in a field of nothingness exploding, or whether matter is continually being formed somewhere and consumed continually elsewhere, say in “black holes”.

“Science” is vast, and organized inro a host of fields or disciplines. In all of them, there are specialized journals, and particular sources of funds, and specialized teams and institutes, and associations and societies. Everywhere it is human beings at work, and everywhere mistakes may be made.

That major errors can be not only made but may persist for decades, or even longer, results from the way science has become self-organized. Once a sufficient number of those engaged on a particular problem have agreed on an explanation, that “consensus” becomes the basis on which new projects and publications and requests for funding are judged, and it is what graduate and pre-graduate students learn to believe. Those who disagree, no matter how highly regarded, cannot shake the “mainstream” “consensus” nowadays — all the incentives are to go with the flow, to not shake the boat, because the best way to a successful career is to go with the Groupthink and the sources of funds.

Thus HIV/AIDS theory has resisted the evidence against it [1] and the arguments against it presented from the very beginning by eminent high-achievers [2], including winners of Nobel Prizes like Kary Mullis, inventor of PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) which everyone uses who studies DNA or RNA, anything in genetics or virology. Among those high-achieving dissenters was Robert Root-Bernstein, a physiologist awarded one of the highly-prized MacArthur Fellowships, popularly described as a “genius grant”. In 1993, he published Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus [3], whose sub-title is the general theme of this blog post: if a consensus forms before the theory has been established beyond reasonable or even unreasonable doubt, it is likely to do harm, because policymakers rely on it.

The mass media take their reports about science from the scientific literature, quite naturally. But the “mainstream consensus”, not objective truths, determines what is published in the scientific literature. So even premature consensus can become “what everyone knows” and thinks is true.

A wrong consensus can form too early for any number of reasons. In the case of HIV/AIDS, those reasons include the ambitions of the highly-placed Robert Gallo and Anthony Fauci, as well as improper statistical data-categorizing by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) [4].

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[1] The case against HIV, https://web.archive.org/web/20250305094201/https://www.thecaseagainsthiv.net/

[2] The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis; https://www.virusmyth.com/aids/group.htm

[3] Robert Scott Root-Bernstein, Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus, Free Press, 1993
The manner in which “science groupies” (activist true-believers in mainstream consensuses) seek to discredit those like Root-Bernstein, dissenting experts with unimpeachable credentials, is illustrated in the anonymously authored Wikipedia entry that maligns him as an “AIDS denialist”.
That cleverly chosen epithet is on the face of it misleading, since what is denied is not “AIDS” but HIV as its cause.

[4] Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007, part III;
see also:
“Science-deficiency of the MD-trained: Robert Gallo and Anthony Fauci”; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/science-deficiency-of-the-md-trained
“How serious errors persist in modern science and medicine”; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/how-serious-errors-persist-in-modern

“HIV/AIDS: a perfect storm that continues to rage”;

HIV/AIDS: a perfect storm that continues to rage