Vitamin guru Matthias Rath joins South African Leaders to further foil a long delayed HIV-med rollout
Matthias Rath, MD, ain’t your ordinary zillionaire
Internet vitamin mogul. Since the mid-’90s, the German-born Rath has
led a worldwide crusade to take down big pharma, pushing nutrients as
an AIDS cure-all and dissing what he considers noxious meds. “Fighting
for a medical breakthrough against existing interests and dogmas is
like sailing on the ocean,” the dapper Rath, 50, writes on his website
(he wouldn’t comment for POZ). “The wind that blows in your face
becomes your compass.” Since 2002, Rath has placed many pricey
full-page ads in the New York Times and other international
publications, insisting that the War on Terror and even the attacks of
9/11 were engineered by a drug cartel involving everyone from George W.
Bush to the United Nations. The alleged cartel’s goal, he contends, is
to keep the world buying patented drugs. Now he’s rejuvenating AIDS
denialism—a movement that has long plagued both HIV-prevention and
-treatment efforts by arguing that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS—and
befriending South Africa’s government, where he’s battling a lawsuit
filed by AIDS activists and hindering a long-delayed med rollout.
“Rath’s disinformation campaign provides more openings for others who
are undermining efforts to nformation campaign provides more openings
for others who are undermining efforts to scale up treatment access,”
says U.S. Health Gap treatment activist Asia Russell. “When
disinformation is spread at the [grassroots] level, treatment advocates
worldwide have to band together and oppose it.”
That the South
African government should welcome Rath’s preposterous theories—say,
that micronutrients alone can cure AIDS—is hardly surprising. President
Thabo Mbeki has long publicized his own doubts that HIV causes AIDS,
and Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, MD—who touts lemon juice,
olive oil and beets as med alternatives—said May 5 that she was “not
happy” that 42,000 positive South Africans were finally getting
antiretrovirals (ARVs). (The nation has the world’s largest number of
HIVers at 5.6 million.) At a recent pro-Rath rally, 100 members of
South Africa’s Traditional Healers Organization showed support. One
South African former nurse, Tine van der Maas, even claims to have
treated 40,000 patients with lemon and olive oil. “[Anti-Rath
activists] talk about how ARVs can slow the disease, but we can
actually reverse it,” she told Gay.com. “We’ve had patients with a CD4
count of 1 whose count is now 780.” Nathan Geffen of South Africa’s
Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) responds, “I’m sure that if you
give people proper nutrition and tender loving care, some will rebound
for a while. But people need good nutrition and ARVs.”
Rath is
best known for his work in the ’80s with the late Nobel laureate
physicist Linus Pauling, who was trying to prove that vitamin C could
remedy everything from colds to cancer. Rath mounted ad campaigns in
Britain, Switzerland and Germany from 2000 till 2002, claiming his
$30-a-month multivitamins could cure heart disease and cancer. The UK
Advertising Standards Authority censured his leaflets; the Swiss Cancer
League called his claims objectionable; and in Germany, Rath is
involved in an investigation with the death of a 9-year-old boy with
bone cancer (he’d convinced the parents that his supplements worked
better than chemotherapy). When South African authorities censured
Rath’s ads for AIDS cure-alls there last summer, he leafleted
townships, alleging that activist pioneers TAC paid demonstrators “to
march against our government on behalf of foreign pharmaceutical
multinationals.” Says Geffen, “At first we thought his ads were too
insane to bother with. Then people started calling in and saying they’d
stopped taking their ARVs because of Rath. We felt we had to take
action.”
Led by PWA Zackie Achmat, TAC sought a court injunction
to stop Rath from defaming TAC as a pharma front in his ads and also
demanded his arrest for illegal medical experimentation. “We believe he
has broken criminal law in distributing unregistered medicines and
conducting a trial without the approval of our Medical Research
Council,” Geffen says. (At press time, the hearing was about to take
place.) But Rath has made other enemies, too: The World Health
Organization, United Nations and UNICEF issued this statement on March
30: “[We] have condemned the irresponsible linking of our names to
claims that vitamins and nutrition therapy alone can prevent AIDS
deaths.” While Rath has yet to seduce the American HIV community, he
maintains an office in Santa Clara, California, and ran an ad in May in
the New York Times headlined “Stop AIDS Genocide by the Drug Cartel.”
Rath’s
South African spokesman Anthony Brink, a lawyer who has long campaigned
against AIDS meds, says, “As a journalist, you’re either hip to
colossal, murderous fraud or you’re not. Mbeki is; Tshabalala-Msimang
is; and the highest level of [our government] is, thanks to the blood I
sweated laying it bare virtually alone in South Africa for a
decade—till this year when I ran into this radical doctor from
Germany.”
