AIDS Policy: Deadly Feel-Good Emotionalism

Last week Michael Fumento wrote in the NY Post about the gross politicization of AIDS.

AIDS, while a deadly disease, has become a politically correct disease about which misinformation and misrepresentation are usually the official order of the day.

Despite the fact that 72% of male AIDS cases in the United States are linked to homosexual activity, most government agencies and public policy organizations vociferously refuse to mention any connection to that behavior. The silence on the homosexuality-AIDS connection is so deafening that it makes waves (as many waves as there can be when the "mainstream" media remains doggedly loyal to the politically correct party line) when Matt Foreman, the former Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, admits: "HIV is a Gay Disease. Own it. End it."

Homosexuality, like AIDS, is a politically correct behavior and a politically-protected practice. That official whitewash is killing people by masking the danger of risky behaviors.

And as Fumento points out, that official AIDS-fetish may just cost lives in other indirect ways. Despite the unprecedented billions of dollars we're pouring out not only here in the United States and overseas, AIDS isn't turning out to be the apocalyptic epidemic it was hyped to be.

From Fumento's NYP piece:

Peter Piot, now executive director of UNAIDS, warned as late as 1997 that "HIV will cut through Asian populations like a hot knife through cold butter." UNAIDS's 2001 estimate had 30 million infected adults in sub-Saharan Africa.

Last year, the UN had to cut that Africa figure by almost half - and drop its Asia number by 38 percent from just the year before. Dr. James Chin, a former top AIDS epidemiologist at the World Health Organization, has long declared the UN figures to be to too high and insists they still are.

What's more:

The world's top AIDS bureaucrat recently admitted the truth: "It is very unlikely that there will be a heterosexual epidemic" outside Africa, Kevin de Cock, director of the World Health Organization, told London's Independent newspaper. His bosses at the United Nations issued an official denial - but couldn't truly challenge his science.

As the piece points out, the official whitewash has long included statements and allusions that "anyone can get AIDS." Yes they can...if they engage in homosexual behavior, intravenous drug use, or high-risk heterosexual behavior (i.e. sex with someone who has AIDS, sex with a male who has homosexual sex, sex with a drug user, or sex with a prostitute or someone who has had sex with a prostitute, etc.).

If you reserve sex for the proper relationship (marriage), your chances of contracting AIDS are...pretty small. Less than 1% of AIDS cases fall into "other" transmission categories, according to Centers for Disease Control (CDC) figures.

What's even more disturbing about the massive spending on a disease which could be almost completely wiped out by sexual restraint is the imbalance in spending on diseases.

Fumento also addresses this:

The group Fair Allocations in Research compiles statistics on federal spending to fight various diseases, compared to how many Americans each disease kills. Measured that way, we spend 21 times as much on AIDS as cancer - and 78 times what we spend on coronary artery disease, 97 times anti-stroke spending.

I also pointed this out several months ago. The charts I cited from the CDC are worth another look.



AIDS gets the most funding. It gets more than four times the next biggest disease, which is breast and cervical cancer. While there may be some behaviors linked to breast and cervical cancer, which disease can be stopped the quickest and most directly by altering behavior?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words? What does this graphical representation of disease spending tell you about proportionality?



I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything to help those afflicted by the deadly disease of AIDS, or try to find a cure. But based on the number of people affected, does this make any sense at all? Or does it shout "Political correctness!" from the highest hilltops?

And when you consider that the spread of AIDS can be essentially stopped by altering behavior, shouldn't we be frank about where the risk truly lies, rather than trying to cover it up and pretend it isn't really what it is?

If a pharmaceutical company lied or covered up a danger associated with a drug and someone died, we'd expect to see it sued for wrongful death, if not criminally prosecuted. If a company sold a defective product, covered up the danger and someone was harmed or died as a result, we'd expect the same, wouldn't we? If a TV would explode if tuned to a specific channel, we'd be incensed if the manufacturer knew about the problem, yet pretended it didn't exist.

Why is it different when our government, health officials and the media do the same thing?

We encourage people not to drive drunk. We encourage people to "just say no" to drugs. Why can't we take that kind of action to stop a deadly disease which is spread primarily through risky behavior?

HT to Americans for Truth.