AND ANOTHER THING
Time to stop chattering about Aids
PAUL JOHNSON
One good rule in contemporary life is: never believe anything you read about Aids. It is just conceivable that it may be 100 per cent true. But this likelihood is so small that, for all practical purposes, it can be discounted. Thanks to the exertions of the homosexual lobbies, Aids is the first epidemic to be politicised and information about it is correspondingly muddled. Homosexual activists have a clear motive: they want spending on Aids research to increase astronomically, in the hope probably vain — that a miracle 'cure' can be found, so that they can resume their hyper-promiscuous activities. To increase public spending, they need to convince electorates that Aids is not confined to sex- ual deviants and drug-addicts, but is spreading with terrifying speed among the normal population. They have enjoyed enviable success in getting this fantasy accepted by governments, international agencies, medical establishments and the media. Indeed, it should be a lesson to all of us how easily such supposedly intelligent and well-informed people are conned. As a result, statistical assertions about Aids, often from exalted quarters, are an inextri- cable mixture of half- and quarter-truths, tendentious projections, propaganda and downright falsehoods. Sorting out the facts from the fables is hard going, often impos- sible, so the best thing is to ignore the Aids noise altogether. And that, one is relieved to observe, is what the great majority, who rightly believe they have nothing to fear, are increasingly doing, thus showing a good deal more sense than their rulers. Just for once, all the wiles of the advertising indus- try, which of course has a huge vested inter- est in keeping the scare going, all the fin- ger-waggings from solemn-faced medics, all the blatherings from concerned clergymen, compassionate show-biz personalities and caring intellectuals — in short, all the efforts of the chattering classes — have failed.
It is worth pointing out that during the Black Death of the late 1340s — and that really was a scourge on a formidable scale — the activities of the rulers and chatterers were similarly misguided and ineffectual. The conventional wisdom then, among many eggheads, was that the Jews were responsible. They had poisoned the wells and so forth. As Michael Fumento has pointed out, Aids and the Black Death have certain characteristics in common, which they share with polio and the great flu outbreak of the early 20th century. Such epidemics follow a curve which is neither linear nor properly exponential. 'Even as they grow larger,' Fumento writes, 'they always grow more slowly, until eventually they level and drop off.' Aids is much less serious than the 14th-century form of bubonic plague because it is far less easily transmitted. But it seems to be following a similar history. Fumento points out:
From 1981 to 1982, diagnosed Aids cases increased 264 per cent. From 1982 to 1983, they increased 170 per cent, then 103 per cent to thc next year. By 1986 the epidemic had slowed to a 63 per cent increase from the year before.
He argues that the percentage increases, as opposed to absolute figures, show that the real crisis had passed even before, per- haps well before, the first big media scare.
Fumento has been one of the few people who has written sense about Aids through- out. The homosexual lobbies made immense efforts, here and elsewhere, to rubbish and even suppress his book, The Myth of Homosexual Aids, but it has, in fact, been vindicated. From time to time he reports, in the New York monthly Com- mentary, on the phoney claims and bogus statistics being published on the subject by interested parties. I particularly recom- mend his latest demolition job in the December issue, which reveals consider- able backtracking and changes of strategy by the panic lobbies. They still demand massive advertising campaigns to alert het- erosexuals to their 'peril'. But governments are getting more wary of the Aids alarmists, especially when it comes to spending money. Members of the public shrug their shoulders. When told that a heterosexual
`I think we had better check this cake out.' black sports star has got Aids, they note that, on his own admission, he had sexual intercourse with 'thousands of women'. Highly promiscuous people are in obvious danger of infectious complaints of all kinds, especially venereal ones. We do not need governments and experts to tell us that. So what is new? The contraceptive industry is obviously keen to have everyone, male and female, carry around condoms at all times. But ordinary people know that the best advice is contained in the sensible wartime slogan, which I remember as a schoolboy: `Clean Living is the Only Safeguard'. Why don't our concerned clergymen return to this approach, just for a change?
There are signs that even the most ardent lobbyists are aware they have failed to panic the Western heterosexual masses. So attention is being switched to 'Third World Aids'. The Guardian had a front- page splash last week, headlined 'Aids to Rise Tenfold', quoting the director of the World Health Organisation Aids pro- gramme, who says that the 'epidemic is only at its beginning'. 'The fate of Africa,' he claimed, is likely to be shared by 'India, south-east Asia, China and Latin America', with 'devastating economic and social con- sequences'. The statement was designed to alarm governments into coughing up more funds: 'What happens in Asia and Latin America in ten to 20 years time will depend on what we do now.' But it is worth point- ing out that, in 1986, WHO predicted as many as 100 million worldwide Aids infec- tions by 1990. When 1990 came, as Fumen- to notes, the prediction had to be scaled down to eight to ten million, and even this is an exaggeration. No doubt areas with very high population increases will indeed be subject to Malthusian checks, wars and famine as well as disease, and Aids may well play some minor role in the process. But to select, from all the multitudes of evils, natural and man-made, which make the lives of the poorest people on earth nasty, brutish and short, one particular medical problem for special Western atten- tion and finance simply because it is the subject of fashionable chitchat in New York, London and Paris, makes no sense; there are many other areas where money is not only more urgently required but could be more profitably spent. To divert it into the bottomless pit of Aids spending IS wicked. What the whole subject requires is a long, thoughtful silence.
Previous page
