The UNAIDS program has issued its annual report in which,
finally, it doesn’t say how many more current HIV
infections there are this year than last. Rather it drops the
figure by over six million from its 2006 estimate. Specifically, it
went from 39.5 million to 33.2 million. Further, the Agency now
admits the number of new HIV infections per year peaked way back
around 1998.
For years, some of us have dared write that worldwide HIV and
AIDS figures have been grossly exaggerated; that we were being lied
to by just about everybody, including — or especially — the
UNAIDS program and the World
Health Organization.
For example, pious Peter
Piot, executive director of the UNAIDS program since its
founding, in 2004 bemoaned that “Projections now suggest that some
countries in sub-Saharan African will face economic
collapse unless they bring their epidemics under control.”
(Emphasis added.) Obviously he knew whereof he spoke; he’d been
using those exact words for at least five years.
Just last year, former President Bill Clinton told attendees at the International AIDS Conference:
“It’s difficult to imagine how the world can grow unless we tackle
AIDS.” Never mind that world population growth is fastest in areas
hardest hit by AIDS.
In 1988, a high Ugandan official on ABC News’ Nightline
said that within two years his nation will “be a desert.”
Nightline’s reporter declared that by 2000 “50 million
Africans may have died of AIDS.” Yet Uganda’s population has since
increased by over a third and is among the fastest-growing in the world. As to the 50 million
death figure, seven years after that prediction was to come to
fruition, the worldwide AIDS estimate is just over half
that.
Those who have criticized such gross exaggerations, as I did in
my 1990 book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, were labeled liars
ourselves, whackos, racists, and variety of other colorful
epithets. Now I’m being told I should gloat; but personally I’m too
busy shaking my head and wondering how despite our best efforts the
AIDS alarmists were able to sustain their fiction for so long.
Naturally, those alarmists are now a bit defensive.
“A number of critics have accused the UNAIDS and WHO of
distorting figures in the past to push for increased funding to
fight AIDS,” says a press release from the International AIDS Society in
Geneva. Do tell!
The group, which has been bringing you only the finest AIDS
disinformation since 1988, says, “This seems an unnecessary and
petty position. The fact is, the evolution of HIV prevention,
treatment, and care over the past quarter century is one of the
great successes of medical science.”
Ah! Save for the efforts of groups like theirs their awful
predictions would have come true. That echoes the explanation U.S.
AIDS alarmists give about why their beloved heterosexual AIDS
epidemic never arrived, notwithstanding that they were insistent
for years that it already had arrived.
Likewise, the new lowered estimate for worldwide HIV has nothing
to do with “prevention, treatment, care.” Infections said to
already have occurred never existed.
For its data, the U.N. had relied heavily on “sentinel-site
surveillance” at prenatal clinics. This system was described and faulted six years ago in Rolling
Stone magazine. “If a given number of pregnant women are
HIV-positive, the formula says, then a certain percentage of all
adults and children are presumed to be infected, too.” Such an
extrapolation from a small non-representative portion of the
population to literally the whole world is nonsense.
And UNAIDS knew it because it had been told by a number of
careful, knowledgeable scientists such as Berkeley epidemiologist
Dr. James Chin.
Chin, when he worked for the UN, was responsible for some of the
earliest world AIDS forecasts. Later he watched how politics — not
a virus — made those figures zoom into the stratosphere.
Three years ago, Chin told me: “They [the UN] don’t falsify per
se” but “as an epidemiologist I look at these numbers and how
they’re derived. Every step of the way there is a range and you can
choose the low end or the high end. Almost consistently the high
end was chosen.”
And guess what? Chin, who is also author of The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology
With Political Correctness, still thinks the numbers
are too high. He estimates worldwide HIV infections to be 25
million, still about eight million less than the revised
estimate.
So at some point the authorities will be forced to lower the
figures again. But they’ll hold off as long as possible in order to
continue to bring more attention to this problem at the expense of
shortchanging attention and funding to other problems that are much
more readily preventable, treatable, or both — such as
tuberculosis and malaria.
The epidemic of falsehoods coming from official organizations,
NGOs, politicians, and the media has yet to peak.
