• Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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    12 hours ago

    So he can’t even be consistent in his lies.

    As journalist Justin Ling observed last year, Kennedy has enthusiastically promoted an untrue link between poppers and AIDS at least since his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci. In that book, Kennedy frequently cited the long-discredited work of AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg, falsely claiming that “heavy recreational drug use in gay men and drug addicts was the real cause of immune deficiency” among AIDS victims of the 1980s and 1990s. Kennedy went on to write that he had never “found any evidence that HIV ever actually kills a T-cell,” asserting that the connection between HIV and AIDS was itself the product of a medical conspiracy with former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci at its head.

    “100% of the people who died — the first thousand who had AIDS were people who were addicted to poppers,” Kennedy (falsely) told an audience of supporters in a video posted by the watchdog social media account PatriotTakes in 2023. “There were people that were part of a gay lifestyle, where they were burning the candle at both ends […] and there were poppers on sale everywhere at the gay bars.”

    https://www.them.us/story/rfk-jr-kennedy-trump-health-human-services-secretary