“Political Correctness Undermines AIDS Fight”

Not everyone is equally likely to get AIDS, notes former World Health Organization official James Chin in “Political Correctness Undermines AIDS Fight,” an editorial in today’s Washington Examiner.   As he points out, “We now know that apart from a few HIV epidemics due to infected blood, epidemic HIV transmission has occurred only in populations with the highest HIV risk behaviors, principally having multiple and concurrent sex partners within overlapping sex networks or sharing needles with other injecting drug users.”

Yet anti-AIDS programs continue to pretend that “anyone” is equally at risk to get AIDS.  They continue to promote the “politically correct myth that poverty and discrimination are the driving forces of HIV epidemics, instead of risky sex.”  They also promote the falsehood that vaginal and oral sex are just as risky as anal sex, even though “the head of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization admitted in June that ‘it is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic’ outside sub-Saharan Africa,” where “adults of both sexes in some countries routinely have several . . . overlapping sex partners.”

Chin argues that “apart from Africa, prevention programs should exclusively target the highest-HIV-risk behavior groups: gay men, injecting drug users, sex workers and their clients.” 

Instead of doing that, however, taxpayer-supported anti-AIDS programs have made up a false statistic claiming that marital sex is more likely to transmit AIDS than sex with a prostitute.

We wrote earlier about how AIDS rates are falling faster in impoverished African countries like Zimbabwe, where men can no longer afford multiple sex partners, than in prosperous neighboring countries like Botswana that receive lots of anti-AIDS money, and where multiple concurrent sex partners are commonplace.   

Similarly, Chin notes that “numerous studies in Africa have consistently shown that the richest men and women have HIV prevalence rates two to three times higher than the poorest, probably because the rich can afford more sex partners.”

So much foreign aid money is being spent on AIDS that countries like Botswana can’t handle it all.   

In poor African countries like Lesotho, “H.I.V.-infected children are offered exemplary treatment, while children suffering from much simpler-to-treat diseases are left untreated, sometimes to die,” notes an AIDS researcher quoted in a post at Reason entitled “Too Much Money for AIDS.”  The huge amount of AIDS spending also results in a brain drain that harms primary care.