I'm guessing that a lot of Americans don't know who Thabo Mbeki was, and we ought to. He succeeded Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa. He had a degree in economics, and the expectation was that he would implement Mandela's vision, but he became notorious for HIV denialism. He said that people were dying as a result of poverty and poor nutrition, not HIV. He alleged that HIV was being used as a mechanism to commit genocide against black people. He blocked the availability of antiretroviral drugs in South Africa for several years, saying that they were not safe. Public health experts sometimes get things wrong for various reasons, and they sometimes revise their conclusions as new information becomes available, but Mbeki should be a cautionary tale in terms of what can happen when policy-makers ignore advice from scientists. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thabo_Mb…