Duesberg contends that HIV is a harmless passenger virus and that AIDS is caused by unrelated factors such as drug abuse, antiretroviral medication, chronic malnutrition, poor sanitation, and hemophilia.

He argues that later medical and scientific leaders succumbed to political pressure to quickly find a cure for AIDS, and that the profit potential from the marketing of the HIV test and antiretroviral drugs also played its part.

He wrote that the book was well researched and referenced, and "a complex, mystifying tale where pride, greed and obstinacy have allegedly derailed science.

"[6] Horton credited Duesberg with drawing together his previous arguments about HIV into a coherent form, exposing misleading research and exaggerated predictions about the spread of AIDS, and showing how "dissidents who share his view have been snubbed by most other scientists" and how diseases have wrongly been blamed on infectious agents in the past.

He granted that Duesberg raised "important questions about the scientific policing of deviant views", but criticized him for creating a "conspiracy theory" about virus hunters suppressing dissent.

[15] John Lauritsen credited Duesberg with cogently explaining the logic of Koch's first postulate and providing a clear explanation of how AZT functions as a "non-selective terminator of DNA synthesis".

[17][failed verification][18][19] Inventing the AIDS Virus received negative reviews from the virologist John P. Moore in Nature and Peter D. Friedmann in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine.

Moore also argued that Duesberg was mistaken to believe that there is a "paradox in the fact that HIV can be grown in permanently infected, immortal T-cell lines in vitro, yet is supposed to cause AIDS by killing T cells in vivo."

He accused Duesberg of mentioning only facts that supported his views and ignoring contradictory evidence, failing to understand "even basic epidemiological concepts", and making mistaken claims about virology.

He accused Duesberg of "dogmatism" and wrote that he provided an "unquantitative critique of the biases of AIDS scientists", and "704 pages of seemingly scientific evidence in support of hypotheses that are widely regarded as wrong."

He noted that Duesberg is "well informed, with a broad and deep technical knowledge of viruses and microbes and a storehouse of facts about how public agencies responded to the epidemic", and cited eminent scientists who "initially found his argument and evidence intriguing or alarming".

Nevertheless, he accused Duesberg of logical fallacies, and criticized him for trying to show that HIV is not the cause of AIDS by "reasoning by analogy with other retroviruses that he claimed were known to be harmless."