The surprisingly popular presidential campaign of RFK Jr. is based on all sorts of myths-about vaccines, censorship, and how power really works in America.

THE KENNEDY CONSPIRACY

- Rebecca Traister

WHILE WAITING for his plate of meat loaf, gravy, and an iceberg wedge at an empty restaurant in Concord, New Hampshire, on the first day of June, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was gently explaining to me that nobody knows whether HIV is the sole cause of AIDS.

"They were doing phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people," he said of the scientists laboring through the 1980s on the array of protease inhibitors and other anti-retroviral drugs that would eventually stem mass death in countries where access to the medicines was made available, "without really being able to understand what HIV was, and pumping up fear about it constantly, not really understanding whether it was causing AIDS."

That HIV infection causes AIDS is long-established science. But the conspiracy theory Kennedy is laying out, alongside several of its associated tendrils-that HIV is a free rider on a more dangerous virus, that scientists stifled debate in order to profit from the production of AZT, the first drug approved by the FDA to treat HIV and AIDS in 1987-has deep roots and has borne tragic fruit. For instance, Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa from 1999 to 2008, shared Kennedy's skepticism, and his distrust kept crucial therapies unavailable in his country for years, resulting in an estimated hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. Still, Kennedy who has in other instances acknowledged that HIV causes AIDS-insisted to me over lunch, "There are much better candidates than HIV for what causes AIDS."