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Pride Chigwedere

Pride Chigwedere, MD, PhD (born August 1, 1974), a Zimbabwean national, is a Harvard trained physician-scientist working in management consultancy. He is a global health expert most notable for leading a team of Harvard researchers who demonstrated that South African President Thabo Mbeki's AIDS policies led to more than 300 000 deaths. While South Africa's policies had previously been condemned by many, Chigwedere's contribution was in developing and applying methods to quantify the consequences of the policies thus demonstrating the calamitous effects of AIDS denialism. Generalized, he developed an approach for evaluating public health practice and highlighted the need to develop a framework for accountability in public health. Drawing from the analogy with medicine, he has proposed the concept of public health malpractice to capture negligence that causes harm as a useful first step towards accountability in public health. A response to Chigwedere's work by AIDS denialists led by Peter Duesberg was initially published by the non-peer-reviewed journal Medical Hypotheses followed by a retraction pending an investigation into the quality of data, undeclared conflicts of interest and effects on global health. This has ignited a reappraisal of the peer review system for serious scientific journals.