April 2016 — As a world authority on drug injury, founder of the Drug & Therapeutics Bulletin and a founding member of Cochrane UK, Dr Herxheimer was always alert to claims made by the pharmaceutical industry about safety and efficacy of their products. When his attention was drawn to the way people who had been diagnosed with "AIDS" were dying after being prescribed the high doses of AZT (two and sometimes three thousand milligrams a day) in the late eighties and early nineties, Dr Herxheimer agreed to join President Thabo Mbeki's Expert Panel on AIDS in Pretoria, South Africa in June 200. The panel was made up of scientists who challenged the virus/\aids hypothesis.

 At the Pretoria conference Herxheimer and physician Dr Claus Koehnlein (board member of Rethinking AIDS) were interviewed for a documentary (later called Positively False - Birth of a Heresy).

 Dr. Herxheimer said: "I think zidovudine [AZT] was a drug that was never really evaluated properly and that its efficacy has never been proved but its toxicity certainly is important. And I think it has killed a lot of people – especially at the higher doses. I personally think that it is not worth using alone or combination at all."

 Dr. Koehnlein said: "...I saw a lot of patients dying in the early nineties and the late eighties which all had the high dose regime of AZT and AZT is a cancer drug and it’s just a question of time when the bone marrow will be completely suppressed... so we reached consensus yesterday here that we killed people with AZT. It’s just the question that how many did we kill?"