How much more atheist disillusionment can you take? At least in this case, the fall isn’t quite as far. Bill Maher used his show to promote HIV quackery. The man thinks you’re dumb to get vaccinated, but drinking the milk of arthritic goats…now that’s brilliant, and will cure you of everything.
Maher hosted—and seemed to take seriously—Dr. Samir Chachoua, who famously injected himself with Charlie Sheen’s blood while treating the HIV-positive actor in Mexico, as revealed on an episode of Dr. Oz that ran earlier this month. Chachoua is not licensed to practice medicine in the U.S., a fact glossed over by Maher, who repeatedly gave the “doctor” the benefit of the doubt as a beacon of hope in the fight against AIDS. Maher furthermore denigrated the usefulness of the antiretroviral drugs that are proven life-savers to promote Chachoua’s supposed miracle cure.
Chachoua claims his cure comes from the CAEV virus, which he says is present in the milk of arthritic goats. “This virus destroys HIV and protects people who drink it for life,” he claimed to Bill Maher. While he didn’t get into the exact science, what he’s offering is a cure not a therapy, which means that after Chachoua’s services, Sheen should be HIV free. Sheen is not HIV negative, which means that Bill Maher should not be taking this quack seriously, much less giving him ten minutes of airtime to spout his nonsense, which is full of evident contradictions. Chachoua, for example, claimed to Dr. Oz that Sheen was “the first adult in history to go HIV negative.”
He injected himself with Charlie Sheen’s blood. Now there’s a valid scientific procedure for you, or at least Maher thinks so.
Quick! Get that man a slot at the Reason Rally!
Mighty skeptic just believes that the guy injected himself with Sheen’s blood?
How hard would that be to fake, I wonder?
That episode had quackery and hippie punching re the Muslims. It was a classic Maher two-fer as it were.
Has the fool been tested to determine if he is now HIV positive? Even if he were, I suppose it would not be make public. Bad publicity.
@4 Remeber, Robert Atkins died after “slipping in front of his house.” Anyone that points out he had massive hypertension and was in congestive heart failure is just a “militant vegan.” :)
A certain kind of mind loves a “doctor” who doesn’t kowtow to the “mind control” of the AMA and the “materialist scientific eatablishment.”
OK, but Maher still wants to bomb Muslims back to the Stone Age, right? That’s all that matters!
Fuck. Fucketty fuck fuck. Fucking fuck fuckery fuckbrained fuckness.
Not high on my list of people who get to live without being called out on their fuckwittery.
Hmmm… Ok.i can kinda see that. I mean, some powerful drugs comes from some pretty weird places. Bread mold, anyone?
Woah, that’s a bold claim. Gonna need some pretty solid evidence to back that up.
{ Presents yellow card}
{ Waves red card around}
That’s it! You’re outta here.
For his next act, he will roll around in uranium and go on to find the cure for cancer. Which will likely be a rock that also repels tigers.
@5 There is actually substantial uncertainty about the details of what caused Atkin’s death. Snopes page Low-carb diets are pretty well established to be effective for some.
The ironic thing is that if this batshitter actually injected himself with Sheen’s blood, he might have been saved from seroconversion by the antiviral cocktail of drugs that, if he’s taking them properly, may have reduced his viral load to undetectable levels. I don’t know if that’s the case for Sheen, but it’s known to be something that happens with HIV+ people on up-to-date medication regimes.
I wouldn’t be surprised, if this guy actually did inject himself, that he secretly took Truvada (a pre-exposure prophylactic medicine) to prevent himself from seroconverting.
My first ever comment here (back in 2005!) referred to the genetic fallacy; in short, evaluate claims for what they are, not from whom they originate.
(Maher is a case in point)
@10 low-carb diets have their place; though Atkins was famous for eating steaks every day and taking his morning cereal in heavy cream. I remember when his wife (read: literary executor) came on TV and made her original “militant vegan” claim, which I thought was odd because at the time I was vegan and had ALFer friends, and I don’t recall the subject coming up at Militant Vegan Headquarters.
It’s interesting how the nostrums always seem to attach to the chronic or incurable stuff, like arthritis, obesity, AIDS– even Airborne for colds. You never hear about people going to a crackpot doctor to cure their strep infection or a broken leg. People may say they are eh “skeptical” of the medical establishment but its usually a very selective skepticism…
Maher maintains his anti-science quackery.
sigma@12: I have no problem with people being skeptical of the medical establishment — there are many good reasons to be skeptical, and if a given recommendation by established medical theory is worthwhile then it will stand up to skeptical enquiry. The problem is that many “skeptics” are hyper-skeptical about medicine (that is, rejecting all positive evidence no matter how strong) while being completely anti-skeptical about their own beliefs.
@14 chrislawson
That’s why I say stop calling them skeptics. Skepticism means questioning. It doesn’t mean holding to your own personal dogma without question.
The New Age shall bring forth the Stone Age!
I can Finally utter this sentence in a context where it makes perfect sense. See? Maher’s useful to something!
Not only does he want to bomb Teh Muslims into oblivion, he also thinks it’s hilarious to mock christians for the sake of it. That makes him a thinky thought atheist leader right there. You fucking SJWs with your fucking feminism and muslim-loving, it’s “preposterous quackery doesn’t cure HIV”, now, is it? Is there no end to your thirst for feigned outraged and offense?
Ever since those deconstructions by Orac I can’t take anything Maher says seriously. This here just adds to it. As for the people who keep telling me that despite some issues here or there, he’s a great commentator on other topics…
I’m sorry, but I’m not going to ask Ken Ham about his opinions on electrical engineering or whatever. Similarly, I honestly don’t care what Maher thinks on non-medical topics, either.
I can’t even muster mockery for that knuckledragging bastard, I’m that angry.
How many HIV-positive people did Mr. Atheist Superstar condemn to a premature and painful death? You can be sure this brainwashed actual victims, or their family members, into inaction wrt. HAART regimes. The death figure climbs if you count in figures of authority like policy-makers. We already saw that in South Africa, where AIDS quackery set back progress of health programs.
CAE is something we try to eliminate in our goat herds. It kills baby goats and reduces the doe’s lifespan. It’s entirely milk borne so if a doe has CAE, you have to grab her babies before she sees them and raise them on pasteurized milk. It’s a pain and every goat person I know is trying their best to get rid of it.
This asshole is not helping with that. Also, it has no effect on humans, so where would you get the idea that it’d do anything to help? From what I understand it is similar to HIV, but not that similar. The only thing I can think is that he thinks it’s a kind of vaccine, which I thought he was against?
Does Maher consider himself a skeptic?
Saganite @18:
I’d be interested in reading them. Do you have a link?
@22 Tony! The Queer Shoop
Oh, there were a lot. But here’s a link to search results with most of the relevant articles:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/?s=bill+maher
But the most relevant ones for me in that list were the “Is Bill Maher really that ignorant?”-articles, with quotes, links to transcripts and everything.
Addendum: Clicking through the articles a bit, it appears that some of the links and transcript posts are by now defunct, unfortunately. Still informative and the most important bits are usually quoted in the articles themselves, anyway.
Chiral
Except for the HPV Vaccine because the Catholic Church and the fundagelicals are against it which trumps being an evil vaccine. Cut the man some slack – being an atheist whackalloon is hard work.