Perhaps I found the article clearer because of familiarity with the subject.
On the "retroviruses must be harmless" virology: He's a denier of viral involvement in cancers in general, not just that HIV must be harmless. He is way outside mainstream consensus on all kinds of things.
For instance, he argues that Kaposi sarcoma, a very common AIDS related cancer was caused by drug use and not opportunistic infection. It is now very well established that all KS, which also affects (typically older) HIV- people, is caused by HHV-8 infection.
The core thing he does on all of these topics is just to ignore or deny anything that doesn't agree with him, eg: Hemophiliacs treated with tainted blood get AIDS, HIV viral load directly corresponds to disease progression which is clearly halted by dropping HIV load with treatment, the HPV vaccine demonstrably prevents cervical cancer, etc. He is far off in quack territory.
I think I understand that retroviruses can cause disease, contrary to what Peter Duesberg seems to be claiming. What I'm wondering about is his claim that they should be harmless in order to survive. Is that something commonly accepted? If so, should it cause surprise that they aren't harmless, and still surviving? Is there an interesting scientific question somewhere in there?
That's the question I couldn't answer by reading the wikipedia article. But I think thanks to some of the comments here my question is at least partly answered: at least some retroviruses -including HIV- seem to not kill off their host immediately, which I guess gives them time to reproduce and infect more hosts.
On the "retroviruses must be harmless" virology: He's a denier of viral involvement in cancers in general, not just that HIV must be harmless. He is way outside mainstream consensus on all kinds of things.
For instance, he argues that Kaposi sarcoma, a very common AIDS related cancer was caused by drug use and not opportunistic infection. It is now very well established that all KS, which also affects (typically older) HIV- people, is caused by HHV-8 infection.
He claims that Hep-B/C can't cause liver cancer.
He claims that HPV doesn't cause cervical cancer (https://www.academia.edu/31617237/What_if_HPV_does_NOT_cause...)
The core thing he does on all of these topics is just to ignore or deny anything that doesn't agree with him, eg: Hemophiliacs treated with tainted blood get AIDS, HIV viral load directly corresponds to disease progression which is clearly halted by dropping HIV load with treatment, the HPV vaccine demonstrably prevents cervical cancer, etc. He is far off in quack territory.