September 5, 2008
THE HARD PART IS CONVINCING PEOPLE YOU'RE HAITIAN:
AIDS epidemic? It was a ‘glorious myth’: The author of 1987’s The Truth About the AIDS Panic welcomes two new whistleblowing texts on the opportunism of the AIDS industry. (Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, August 2008, spiked review of books)
Now former AIDS industry insiders are challenging the imminent heterosexual plague story and many of the other scare stories of the international AIDS panic. James Chin, author of The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness, is a veteran public health epidemiologist who worked in the World Health Organisation’s Global Programme on AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Elizabeth Pisani, a journalist turned epidemiologist and author of The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS, spent most of the past decade working under the auspices of UNAIDS, which took over the global crusade against HIV in 1996. Once prominent advocates of the familiar doomsday scenarios, both have now turned whistleblowers on their former colleagues in the AIDS bureaucracy, a ‘byzantine’ world, according to Pisani, in which ‘money eclipses truth’.For Chin, the British AIDS story is an example of a ‘glorious myth’ – a tale that is ‘gloriously or nobly false’, but told ‘for a good cause’. He claims that government and international agencies, and AIDS advocacy organisations, ‘have distorted HIV epidemiology in order to perpetuate the myth of the great potential for HIV epidemics to spread into “general” populations’. In particular, he alleges, HIV/AIDS ‘estimates and projections are “cooked” or made up’.
While Pisani disputes Chin’s claim that UNAIDS epidemiologists deliberately overestimated the epidemic, she admits to what she describes as ‘beating up’ the figures, insisting – unconvincingly – that there is a ‘huge difference’ between ‘making it up (plain old lying) and beating it up’. Pisani freely acknowledges her role in manipulating statistics to maximise their scare value, and breezily dismisses the ‘everyone-is-at-risk nonsense’ of the British ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ campaign.
Chin’s book offers a comprehensive exposure of the hollowness of the claims of the AIDS bureaucracy for the efficacy of their preventive campaigns. He provides numerous examples of how exaggerated claims for the scale of the HIV epidemic (and the risks of wider spread) in different countries and contexts enable authorities to claim the credit for subsequently lower figures, as they ‘ride to glory’ on curves showing declining incidence. As he argues, ‘HIV prevalence is low in most populations throughout the world and can be expected to remain low, not because of effective HIV prevention programmes, but because… the vast majority of the world’s populations do not have sufficient HIV risk behaviours to sustain epidemic HIV transmission’.