In addition to being the originator and leading purveyor of most of the bogus Christian nationalist propaganda circulating today, David Barton is also a virulently anti-LGBTQ religious-right activist who has repeatedly said that AIDS is God "penalty" for those who engage in "shameful sexual acts."
As such, Barton has asserted multiple times that AIDS is something for which there will never be a cure. As he stated in 2012:
There's a passage that I love in Romans 1 - I don't love what the topic is - but it talks about homosexuality and it says that they will receive in their bodies the penalties of their behavior. And the Bible again, it's right every time, and studies keep proving that and that's why AIDS has been something they haven't discovered a cure for or a vaccine for, because it's the fastest self-mutating virus known to mankind. Every time they just about get a vaccine discovered for it, it transmutes into something new and they have to start over again. And that goes to what God says, hey you're going to bear in your body the consequences of this homosexual behavior.
In a shocking development, the confident predictions of a right-wing activist with a bachelor's degree in Christian education from Oral Roberts University have been refuted by actual scientists:
Researchers are announcing that a 53-year-old man in Germany has been cured of HIV.
Referred to as "the Dusseldorf patient" to protect his privacy, researchers said he is the fifth confirmed case of an HIV cure. Although the details of his successful treatment were first announced at a conference in 2019, researchers could not confirm he had been officially cured at that time.
Today, researchers announced the Dusseldorf patient still has no detectable virus in his body, even after stopping his HIV medication four years ago.
As ABC News reported, "modern medication can keep the virus at bay, and studies looking into preventing HIV infection with a vaccine are also underway," which is also something that Barton repeatedly asserted would never succeed.
