Don’t trust the Internet: What South Africa Learned from AIDS

“In almost every year of the past two decades more than a third of deaths in South Africa have been aids-related. Thabo Mbeki, the president from 1999 to 2008, swallowed a crank theory he found online that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) does not cause aids, which it does. He delayed life-saving treatment, cutting short hundreds of thousands of lives.”