{"id":238492,"date":"2022-09-28T19:17:55","date_gmt":"2022-09-28T17:17:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/tac-slams-mbeki-over-his-views-on-hivaids\/"},"modified":"2022-09-28T19:17:55","modified_gmt":"2022-09-28T17:17:55","slug":"tac-slams-mbeki-over-his-views-on-hiv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/tac-slams-mbeki-over-his-views-on-hiv\/","title":{"rendered":"TAC slams Mbeki over his views on HIV"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/Third%20Party\/thabombeki.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/tac-slams-mbeki-over-his-views-on-hiv.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Former President Thabo Mbeki has once more found himself in conflict with HIV activists. Photo: Mohamed Nanabhay (via <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/mohamedn\/4632391595\">Flickr<\/a>, CC BY 2.0)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The TAC has demanded an apology from former president Thabo Mbeki.<\/li>\n<li>Mbeki repeated confusing statements about HIV during a lecture.<\/li>\n<li>GroundUp editor Nathan Geffen set the record straight about Mbeki\u2019s HIV\/AIDS legacy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has called on former president Thabo Mbeki to offer an apology to the public for the \u201cdissident\u201d views he expressed about HIV\/AIDS while delivering a speech at the University of South Africa (UNISA) last week Wednesday.<\/p>\n<p>In a scathing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tac.org.za\/news\/tac-press-statement-on-former-president-mbekis-recent-statements\/\">statement<\/a> published by the TAC on Tuesday, the organisation said the \u201crepetition of his scientifically erroneous views with such insensitive arrogance is an insult to the 8 million people living with HIV in SA and the families of 4 million South Africans who have died from HIV over the last three decades\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Mbeki, who is also the Chancellor at UNISA, was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=3wvq8_3EOQY\">speaking<\/a> to students, diplomats and members of the media at an event which takes place twice each year and allows students to interact with him on pertinent issues that affect Africans.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/tac-slams-mbeki-over-his-views-on-hiv.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<p>The TAC accuses Mbeki of misleading the public when he questions the cause of AIDS. The organisation also goes on to say that they were stunned again by Mbeki\u2019s support of the views of the late former Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang \u201cwho was ridiculed for promoting garlic and beetroot as the essential ingredient to manage AIDS, giving it a higher premium than antiretroviral (ARV) treatment\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhilst there may be benefits in all healthy foods, the idea that these vegetables are what are most required in the management of AIDS has no basis in fact and is misleading to the public,\u201d said the statement.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking about HIV\/AIDS after a question was raised in the event, Mbeki said the questions that he raised then, he would still raise today. He emphasized that AIDS was a syndrome and not a disease.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNow this syndrome in medical terms is a group of diseases. So all of these diseases which fall under this syndrome, meningitis, TB, they\u2019re in the syndrome.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCauses of Tuberculosis are known and historical, but it\u2019s part of the syndrome. So you can\u2019t say one virus causes all of these illnesses, what you can say is this virus impacts negatively on the immune system, it\u2019s that weakened immune system which results in a syndrome.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut there\u2019s a consequence to that kind of thinking which is when you go to test and that test says HIV positive\u2026 it does not necessarily mean you\u2019ve got the virus. What it means is that the immune system is responding to something that is threatening the body, and therefore you need a clinical analysis in order to determine what is this thing that the immune system is rejecting. It\u2019s in all the medical documents that go about it, and it\u2019s correct, because then you have to go and do this clinical examination in order to determine which of these illnesses in the syndrome is the one that\u2019s affecting this person. And then you treat the person for that particular disease,\u201d said Mbeki.<\/p>\n<p>Mentioning the views of Tshabalala-Msimang, Mbeki started off by saying as government they had to respond in an effective manner to the HIV\/AIDS pandemic and various interventions were needed to do this.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhich is why the question was raised by the then Minister of Health in a very dramatic fashion. Nutrition. Nutrition is very very critical to solving this problem and that\u2019s why she was saying that we must take garlic and beetroot and so on. She was not saying that with those things you\u2019re going to be cured.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cShe was raising the matter about the importance of nutrition. And those particular types of foods even today have been raised in the context of this Covid-19,\u201d said Mbeki.<\/p>\n<p>The TAC, which successfully campaigned in the 2000s for Mbeki\u2019s government to roll out life-saving medicines, was not impressed.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere is much ongoing stigma and denial when it comes to HIV and we call on Mr Mbeki to desist from statements about HIV that have no basis in fact,\u201d said the TAC statement.<\/p>\n<p>It said: \u201cThe former president\u2019s statements remind us that his unscientific views led to a delay in the rollout of the ARV programme during his presidency.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The TAC\u2019s General Secretary, Anele Yawa, said that if Mbeki was not prepared to apologise, the organisation would make sure that his HIV denialism and the thousands of deaths that resulted, would be the only thing that he would be remembered for.<\/p>\n<div class=\"editor-summary\">\n<h2 class=\"subheading\">These are the facts when it comes to HIV\/AIDS under Thabo Mbeki\u2019s presidency<\/h2>\n<p><em>By Nathan Geffen, GroundUp Editor<\/em><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s seldom clear what Thabo Mbeki means when it comes to HIV\/AIDS. There is much obfuscation. But the key facts are this:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>HIV destroys immune cells in infected people.<\/li>\n<li>Usually over a period of several years, if left untreated, the immune system collapses, causing the person to become ill with life-threatening infections. This is known as AIDS.<\/li>\n<li>Only antiretroviral medicines can halt this process. They have been so effective that the life-expectancy for people with HIV who take them is brought back to almost normal.<\/li>\n<li>HIV tests are reliable. If proper protocols are followed the odds of an incorrect result are extremely small.<\/li>\n<li>Mbeki\u2019s government delayed the rollout of antiretroviral treatment in the public sector until 2004, even though an effective combination of antiretroviral medicines was available from the mid to late 1990s.<\/li>\n<li>It was only due to pressure from the TAC and its allies that Mbeki\u2019s government made antiretrovirals available in the public sector.<\/li>\n<li>The prices of these medicines also became affordable because of the TAC\u2019s (and its allies) campaigning against pharmaceutical companies. Mbeki\u2019s government was largely AWOL in these efforts, despite Mbeki\u2019s rhetoric about these companies.<\/li>\n<li>Two different studies have estimated that the delayed rollout of antiretrovirals resulted in well over 300,000 avoidable deaths. These estimates are conservative.<\/li>\n<li>These estimates also exclude those who died because they were convinced by pseudoscientific treatments promoted by Mbeki, Tshabalala-Msimang and their acolytes as alternatives to antiretroviral medicines. The promotion of these nonsense remedies by Mbeki and his health minister continued long after the antiretroviral treatment rollout began.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><em>Geffen was involved with the TAC from 2000 to 2013.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2022 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.<\/p>\n<p>We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, <b>not tracking<\/b> users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/tac-slams-mbeki-over-his-views-on-hiv.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Former President Thabo Mbeki has once more found himself in conflict with HIV activists. Photo: Mohamed Nanabhay (via Flickr, CC BY 2.0) The TAC has demanded an apology from former president Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki repeated confusing statements about HIV during a lecture. GroundUp editor Nathan Geffen set the record straight about Mbeki\u2019s HIV\/AIDS legacy. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":238493,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-238492","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"tag-groundup","9":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/tac-slams-mbeki-over-his-views-on-hiv.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}