The truth about the aids panic

James Heartfield Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Thu Jan 25 09:34:22 PST 2001


In message <Pine.GSU.4.21.0101241743250.20414-100000 at garcia.efn.org>, Dennis Robert Redmond <dredmond at efn.org> writes
>On Wed, 24 Jan 2001, James Heartfield wrote:
>
>> Is nobody going to offer
>> an explanation as to why the projections of Aids infection so
>> spectacularly deviated from the actual patterns? Or is that just
>> something that you are not supposed to talk about?
>
>This is getting tiresome. *Which* deviations?

the deviations between the predicted patterns of infection and those that took place.

Department of Health, Short-term Prediction of HIV infection in England and Wales, 1988, wrote: Aids cases would be between 3600 and 12000 in 1992. Actual number 1600.

In the fifteen years of the AIDS epidemic in the UK 252 cases in total outside of high-risk groups.

Indeed 'this' is getting tiresome, if 'this' is the refusal of posters to understand what everyone knows, that governments and campaigners lied to the public about the risks from AIDS.

It can be argued that this was a necessary lie. Journalist Mark Lawson did in 1996, when he wrote 'The government has lied and I am glad' (24 June). But to say that there was no exaggeration of the risks of AIDS is to fly in the face of the truth.

Incidentally, why does Lawson think that the exaggeration of the risk of AIDS is a 'good lie'? He says 'not since the days of the Catholic convent school had children been so bluntly instructed in the causal link between sex and terror'. Not surprisingly, those children having grown up to have those fears disconfirmed by their experience treat health information as suspect.


>AIDS is indeed a terrible
>problem in sub-Saharan Africa and many other parts of the 3rd World.

There are reasons to doubt the evidence on AIDS in Africa, but even allowing that this is the case, it hardly nullifies the fact that the health campaigns in the West massively exaggerated the trend. If that is something you would prefer to forget about, then that of course is up to you, but your forgetting about it does not mean that it did not happen. -- James Heartfield



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