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Friday 29 August 2008

The authorities have lied, and I am not glad
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, author of 1987’s The Truth About the AIDS Panic, says it is a shame
that AIDS insiders did not expose the myths and opportunism of the AIDS industry earlier. But
still, better late than never.
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick

There is a widely accepted view that Britain was saved from an explosive epidemic of heterosexual
AIDS in the late 1980s by a bold campaign initiated by gay activists and radical doctors and
subsequently endorsed by the government and the mass media.

According to advocates of this view, we owe our low rates of HIV

infection today largely to the success of initiatives such as the ‘Don’t Die
of Ignorance’ leaflet distributed to 23million households and the scary
‘Tombstones and Icebergs’ television and cinema adverts (though they
are always quick to add that we must maintain vigilance and guard
against complacency).

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 Cover illustration by
1990s. Elizabeth Pisani, a journalist turned epidemiologist and author of Jan Bowman
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’.

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By the late 1980s, it was already clear that, given the very low prevalence of HIV, the difficulty of
transmitting HIV through heterosexual sex and the stable character of sexual relationships (even
those having multiple partners tend to favour serial monogamy), an explosive HIV epidemic in
Britain, of the sort that occurred in relatively small networks of gay men and drug users, was
highly improbable, as Don Milligan and I argued in 1987 (1).

As both Chin and Pisani indicate, high rates of heterosexually spread HIV infection remain the
exceptional feature of sub-Saharan Africa (and parts of the Caribbean) where a particular pattern
of concurrent networks of sexual partners together with high rates of other sexually transmitted
infections facilitated an AIDS epidemic. Though this has had a devastating impact on many
communities, Chin suggests that HIV prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean has been
overestimated by about 50 per cent. The good news is that, contrary to the doom-mongering of
the AIDS bureaucracy, the rising annual global HIV incidence peaked in the late 1990s and the
AIDS pandemic has now passed its peak.

Most significantly, the sub-Saharan pattern has not been replicated in Europe or North America, or
even in Asia or Latin America, though there have been localised epidemics associated with gay
men, drug users and prostitution, most recently in South-East Asia and Eastern Europe.

Many commentators now acknowledge the gross exaggerations and scaremongering of the AIDS
bureaucracy. It is clear that HIV has remained largely confined to people following recognised
high-risk behaviours, rather than being, in the mantra of the AIDS bureaucracy, a condition of
poverty, gender inequality and under-development. Yet they also accept the argument,
characterised by Chin as ‘political correctness’, that it is better to try to terrify the entire population
with the spectre of an AIDS epidemic than it is to risk stigmatising the gays and junkies, ladyboys
and whores who feature prominently in Pisani’s colourful account.

For Chin and Pisani, the main problem of the mendacity of the AIDS bureaucracy is that it leads to
misdirected, ineffective and wasteful campaigns to change the sexual behaviour of the entire
population, while the real problems of HIV transmission through high-risk networks are neglected.
To deal with these problems, both favour a return to traditional public health methods of containing
sexually transmitted infections through aggressive testing, contact tracing and treatment of
carriers of HIV. Whereas the gay activists who influenced the early approach of the AIDS
bureaucracy favoured anonymous and voluntary testing, our whistleblowers now recommend a
more coercive approach, in relation to both diagnosis and treatment.

Pisani reminds readers that ‘public health is inherently a somewhat fascist discipline’ (for example,
quarantine restrictions have an inescapably authoritarian character) and enthusiastically endorses
the AIDS policies of the Thai military authorities and the Chinese bureaucrats who are not
restrained from targeting high-risk groups by democratic niceties. The problem is that, given the
climate of fear generated by two decades of the ‘everyone-is-at-risk nonsense’, the policy now
recommended by Chin and Pisani is likely to lead to more repressive interventions against
stigmatised minorities (which will not help to deter the spread of HIV infection).

Chin confesses that he has found it difficult ‘to understand how, over the past decade, mainstream
AIDS scientists, including most infectious disease epidemiologists, have virtually all uncritically
accepted the many “glorious” myths and misconceptions UNAIDS and AIDS activists continue to
perpetuate’. An explanation for this shocking betrayal of principle can be found in a 1996
commentary on the British AIDS campaign entitled ‘Icebergs and rocks of the “good lie”’. In this
article, Guardian journalist Mark Lawson accepted that the public had been misled over the threat
of AIDS, but argued that the end of promoting sexual restraint (especially among the young)
justified the means (exaggerating the risk of HIV infection): as he put it, ‘the government has lied
and I am glad’ (2).

This sort of opportunism is not confined to AIDS: in other areas where experts are broadly in
sympathy with government policy – such as passive smoking, obesity and climate change – they
have been similarly complicit in the prostitution of science to propaganda.

It is a pity that Chin and Pisani did not blow their whistles earlier and louder, but better late than
never.

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick is the author of MMR and Autism: What Parents Need to Know (buy this

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spiked review of books | The authorities have lied, and I am not glad http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_printable/...

book from Amazon(UK)) and The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle (buy
this book from Amazon(UK)).

The Wisdom of Whores, by Elisabeth Pisani, is published by Granta Books. (Buy this
book from Amazon(UK).)

The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness, by James
Chin, is published by Radcliffe Publishing Ltd. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

(1) Michael Fitzpatrick and Don Milligan, The Truth About The Aids Panic, 1987

(2) Mark Lawson, ‘Icebergs and rocks of the “good” lie’, Guardian, 24 June 1996

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5661/

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