Bad News for the Doomsayers

Extent of African AIDS epidemic has been wildly overstated.

So says a London Telegraph article, yesterday:

Millions of Africans believed to have HIV/Aids are free of the disease, according to research published yesterday.

The survey will dismay those who claim the West is ignoring a pandemic so acute it could wipe out the populations of entire African states.

Scientists said the new report would force a rethink in the way the United Nations measures Aids prevalence on the continent.

The preliminary report of the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey suggested that HIV has infected about one million adults in the country. Previous estimates put the number at up to three million....

(Thanks, Kathy.)

The Spectator ran a similar article last month:

.... Some might think it good news that the impact of Aids is less devastating than most laymen imagine, but they are wrong. In Africa, the only good news about Aids is bad news, and anyone who tells you otherwise is branded a moral leper, bent on sowing confusion and derailing 100,000 worthy fundraising drives. I know this, because several years ago I acquired what was generally regarded as a leprous obsession with the dumbfounding Aids numbers in my daily papers. They told me that Aids had claimed 250,000 South African lives in 1999, and I kept saying, this can’t possibly be true. What followed was very ugly — ruined dinner parties, broken friendships, ridicule from those who knew better, bitter fights with my wife. After a year or so, she put her foot down. Choose, she said. Aids or me. So I dropped the subject, put my papers in the garage, and kept my mouth shut....

We all know, thanks to Mark Twain, that statistics are often the lowest form of lie, but when it comes to HIV/Aids, we suspend all scepticism. Why? Aids is the most political disease ever. We have been fighting about it since the day it was identified. The key battleground is public perception, and the most deadly weapon is the estimate. When the virus first emerged, I was living in America, where HIV incidence was estimated to be doubling every year or so. Every time I turned on the TV, Madonna popped up to warn me that ‘Aids is an equal-opportunity killer’, poised to break out of the drug and gay subcultures and slaughter heterosexuals. In 1985, a science journal estimated that 1.7 million Americans were already infected, with ‘three to five million’ soon likely to follow suit. Oprah Winfrey told the nation that by 1990 ‘one in five heterosexuals will be dead of Aids’.

We now know that these estimates were vastly and indeed deliberately exaggerated, but they achieved the desired end: Aids was catapulted to the top of the West’s spending agenda, and the estimators turned their attention elsewhere. India’s epidemic was likened to ‘a volcano waiting to explode’. Africa faced ‘a tidal wave of death’. By 1992 they were estimating that ‘Aids could clear the whole planet’.

Who were they, these estimators? For the most part, they worked in Geneva for WHO or UNAIDS, using a computer simulator called Epimodel. Every year, all over Africa, blood would be taken from a small sample of pregnant women and screened for signs of HIV infection. The results would be programmed into Epimodel, which transmuted them into estimates. If so many women were infected, it followed that a similar proportion of their husbands and lovers must be infected, too. These numbers would be extrapolated out into the general population, enabling the computer modellers to arrive at seemingly precise tallies of the doomed, the dying and the orphans left behind....

Why would UNAIDS and its massive alliance of pharmaceutical companies, NGOs, scientists and charities insist that the epidemic is worsening if it isn’t? A possible explanation comes from New York physician Joe Sonnabend, one of the pioneers of Aids research. Sonnabend was working in a New York clap clinic when the syndrome first appeared, and went on to found the American Foundation for Aids Research, only to quit in protest when colleagues started exaggerating the threat of a generalised pandemic with a view to increasing Aids’ visibility and adding urgency to their grant applications. The Aids establishment, says Sonnabend, is extremely skilled at ‘the manipulation of fear for advancement in terms of money and power’.

With such thoughts in the back of my mind, South Africa’s Aids Day ‘celebrations’ cast me into a deeply leprous mood. Please don’t get me wrong here. I believe that Aids is a real problem in Africa. Governments and sober medical professionals should be heeded when they express deep concerns about it. But there are breeds of Aids activist and Aids journalist who sound hysterical to me. On Aids Day, they came forth like loonies drawn by a full moon, chanting that Aids was getting worse and worse, ‘spinning out of control’, crippling economies, causing famines, killing millions, contributing to the oppression of women, and ‘undermining democracy’ by sapping the will of the poor to resist dictators.

To hear them talk, Aids is the only problem in Africa, and the only solution is to continue the agitprop until free access to Aids drugs is defined as a ‘basic human right’ for everyone. They are saying, in effect, that because Mr Mhlangu of rural Zambia has a disease they find more compelling than any other, someone must spend upwards of $400 a year to provide Mr Mhlangu with life-extending Aids medication — a noble idea, on its face, but completely demented when you consider that Mr Mhlangu’s neighbours are likely to be dying in much larger numbers of diseases that could be cured for a few cents if medicines were only available. About 350 million Africans — nearly half the population — get malaria every year, but malaria medication is not a basic human right. Two million get TB, but last time I checked, spending on Aids research exceeded spending on TB by a crushing factor of 90 to one. As for pneumonia, cancer, dysentery or diabetes, let them take aspirin, or grub in the bush for medicinal herbs.

I think it is time to start questioning some of the claims made by the Aids lobby. Their certainties are so fanatical, the powers they claim so far-reaching. Their authority is ultimately derived from computer-generated estimates, which they wield like weapons, overwhelming any resistance with dumbfounding atom bombs of hypothetical human misery. Give them their head, and they will commandeer all resources to fight just one disease. Who knows, they may defeat Aids, but what if we wake up five years hence to discover that the problem has been blown up out of all proportion by unsound estimates, causing upwards of $20 billion to be wasted?

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 01/10/04 04:03:56 PM
Categorized as International.