[toc] to read reviews of this essay click here An Almost Perfect Fit AIDS – which can so heartlessly take people away in their prime of life – is the lethal scourge of our day, and it is still light years away from being brought under control. This epidemic seems to have an uncanny knack for attacki…
AIDS Conspiracy? Tracking the Real Genocide (by David Gilbert) – Kersplebedeb Kersplebedeb Navigation About Store Authors Bromma Butch Lee Chad Landrum David Gilbert J Sakai Kevin Rashid Johnson Sanyika Shakur Prisoners 2013 Prisoners Strikes California Prisoners Struggle Political Prisoners Texts Antifa Quebec Queer Reviews Weapon of Theory Women Visual Art flickr Links Older Stuff COVID News Index Contact You are here: Home › David Gilbert › AIDS Conspiracy? Tracking the Real Genocide (by David Gilbert) AIDS Conspiracy? Tracking the Real Genocide (by David Gilbert) Filed under: David Gilbert, Texts March 2, 2001 Did you like this article? Share it with your friends! Save [toc] to read reviews of this essay click here An Almost Perfect Fit AIDS – which can so heartlessly take people away in their prime of life – is the lethal scourge of our day, and it is still light years away from being brought under control. This epidemic seems to have an uncanny knack for attacking people that the dominant society considers “undesirable”: gays, injection drug users (IDUs), and prisoners. And AIDS has increasingly become a grim reaper in the Black and Latino communities within the U.S. and among Third World people internationally. The commonly cited U.S. statistic that Black people have twice the rate of AIDS as white Americans understates the problem because it is based on a cumulative figure (that is, the total number since 1981). But early on in the epidemic a large majority of the diagnosed cases were among white gay men. (It is very possible that there were many undiagnosed cases among IDUs – particularly Black and Latino – who lacked access to decent medical care.) Looking at new rather than cumulative cases gives us a better picture of what is going on now. In 1992 the rate of new cases for Latinos was 2.5 times higher than for whites.((Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report, March 1993.)) The stark Black/white ratios for the rate of new AIDS cases in 1993 was 5/1 for men and 15/1 for women. ((CDC figures reported in the New York Times ( NYT), 9/9/94.)) By then, AIDS had become the leading cause of death of Black people between the ages of 25 and 44, ((NYT, 9/19/94.)) And it continues to get worse as the AIDS hurricane moves deeper into the ghettos and barrios. Internationally, the racial disparity is even worse: about 80% of the world’s 9 million deaths from AIDS through the end of 1995 have occurred in Africa, ((Figures are based on correlating the August, 1994 report (at the World Conference on AIDS, in Japan) by the Global AIBS Policy Coalition and the update of their figures cited in J. Osborne, “The Unbeliever, New York Times Book Review, 4/7/96, p.8. Global Coalition estimates are somewhat higher – and in my opinion probably more accurate – than official figures from the World Health Organization.)) and this plague has already orphaned over 2 million children there. (( J. Mann, D. Tarantola, and T. Netter, eds., AIDS in the World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p.90, gives an estimate of 1.3 million by 1992. The death toll has more than doubled since then.)) In short, there is a powerful correlation between medical epidemiology and social oppression. What is more, that mesh fits – like a tailor made suit – on the extensive body of history of chemical and biological warfare (CBW) and medical experiments against people of color, prisoners, and other unsuspecting citizens. Such CBW in North America started when the early European settlers used smallpox infected blankets as a weapon of genocide against Native Americans. It includes the pre-market testing of birth control pills, before proper dosage was known, on Puerto Rican and Haitian women who were not warned of the potentially severe side effects. Recent revelations about U.S. human radiation experiments led to a comprehensive review of all government agencies by a Presidential Advisory Committee. They found that there had been at least 4,000 U.S. government sponsored human radiation experiments, involving as many as 20,000 people, including some children, between 1944 and 1974. ((The Final Reports White House Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995. 925pp.).)) It has also been documented that the U.S. Army conducted hundreds of tests releasing “harmless” bacteria, viruses, and other agents in populated areas, including a test to see how a fungal agent thought mainly to affect Black people would spread. ((L. Cole, “OpEd” pieces, NYT 1/25/94 and 3/23/95.)) (For an excellent summary of U.S. CBW, see Bob Lederer’s article in Covert Action Information Bulletin, #28, Summer, 1987.) The most apposite example is the four decade-long Tuskegee Syphilis study. Starting in 1932, under U.S. Public Health Services auspices, about 400 Black men in rural Alabama were subjects in an experiment on the effects of untreated syphilis. They were never told the nature of their condition or that they could infect their wives and children. Although penicillin, which became available in the 1940s, was the standard of treatment for syphilis by 1951, researchers not only withheld treatment but forbade the men from seeking help elsewhere. This shameful “experiment” was stopped in 1972, only after a federal health worker blew the whistle. ((Stephen B. Thomas and Sandra Crouse Quinn, “The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 1932 to 1972: Implications for HIV Education and AIDS Risk Reduction Programs in the Black Community, American Journal of Public Health, 81:11, Nov., 1991, p.1501. For an in-depth discussion, see James Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York: The Free Press, 1981).)) Nor is experimentation on people of color a thing of the past. Beginning in 1989, 1,500 children in West and East Los Angeles and Inglewood were given the experimental Edmonston-Zagreb, or E-Z, measles vaccine as part of a government-sponsored trial. Most of the subjects were Latino or New Afrikan (Black). The parents of these children were never told that they were part of an experiment with an unlicensed drug, and thus had a less than adequate basis for giving their consent. The E-Z vaccine was also tested in Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Guinea, and more than a dozen other Third World countries. Trials in Los Angeles, conducted with the cooperation of Kaiser Permanente, the Centers for Disease Control and John Hopkins University, were stopped two years later after questions were raised about the vaccine’s relationship to an increased death rate among female infants. ((Marlene Cimmons, “CDS Says It Erred in Measles Study,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1996.)) On another level, the drug plague in the ghettos and barrios has the effect of chemical and biological warfare against those communities. The government’s role in this scourge is probably much more direct than the obvious stupidity and corruption. There has been considerable evidence, going back to the 1960s, of CIA involvement in international drug-trafficking in order to raise money to finance anti-Communist guerrilla forces in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. A new bombshell has just hit with the August 18-20, 1996 series of articles by Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury News. Based on recently declassified documents, court testimony, and personal interviews, Webb describes how a CIA operation was instrumental in the new influx of cheap cocaine into Black communities in the early 1980s, paving the way for the emergence of the devastating crack epidemic. The CIA set up and ran the “Contras,” a terrorist force fighting to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Starting in 1982, two key Contra fundraisers (Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandón), enjoying obvious protection from investigation and prosecution, brought the first large-scale and cheap supplies of cocaine into South-Central Los Angeles. Once we move beyond specific health issues into the political realm, government plots to prevent or destroy Black liberation are a continual and central feature of U.S. history. The most relevant example for today’s dire political situation is the FBI’s “Cointelpro” (counterintelligence program), which peaked (but undoubtedly didn’t end) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This secret but extensive sabotage campaign against Black liberation and other movements of oppressed people, as well as against white radical groups allied with them, was exposed only after activists broke into an FBI office and found some of the documents. For example, a 1968 FBI memo calls on agents to: …prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups…prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability. ..prevent the rise of a black “messiah” who would unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolmb X (sic) might have been such a “messiah”… The program included a devilish array of dirty tricks and disruptions. While of course none of the documents explicitly discuss assassinations, about 40 Black Panthers were murdered over this five year period, and the Panthers were hit with over 1,000 arrests on trumped-up charges. Another grisly example is what was done to the Native American movement. In the three years following their 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, at least 69 American Indian Movement members and supporters met violent deaths. (For more detail on Cointelpro, see Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, Boston: South End Press, 1990.) The violent plots against these movements have everything to do with the terrible setbacks in power and conditions for oppressed peoples today. In light of all the documented horrors, there are good reasons why so many prisoners as well as a significant portion of the New Afrikan community believe that government scientists deliberately created AIDS as a tool of genocide. There is only one problem with this almost perfect fit: It is not true. The theories on how HIV – the virus that causes AIDS – was purposely spliced together in the laboratory wilt under scientific scrutiny. Moreover, these conspiracy theories divert energy from the work that must be done in the trenches if marginalized communities are to survive this epidemic: grassroots education and mobilizations for AIDS prevention, and better care for people living with HIV. Dangerous To Your Health It is this dangerous diversion from focusing on the preventive measures so urgently needed to save lives that makes the rash of conspiracy theories so disturbing. That’s the concern that compelled the writing of this paper. I’ve been doing AIDS education in prison for over nine years; these conspiracy myths have proven to be the main internal obstacle – in terms of prisoners’ consciousness – to concentrating on thorough and detailed work on risk reduction. What’s the use, believers ask, of making all the hard choices to avoid spreading or contracting the disease if the government is going to find a way to infect people anyway? And what’s the point of all the hassles of safer sex, or all the inconvenience of not sharing needles, if HIV can be spread, as many conspiracy theorists claim, by casual contact such as sneezing or handling dishes? The core of the mind-set that undermines prevention efforts is “denial.” People whose activities have put them at risk are often so petrified that they don’t even want to think about it. Conspiracy theories serve up a hip and seemingly militant rationale for not confronting one’s own risk practices. At the same time, such theories provide an apparently simple and satisfying alternative to the complex challenge of dealing with the myriad of social, behavioral, and medical factors that propel the epidemic. In addition to my extensive personal experience, a recent study out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that New Afrikans who believed in the conspiracy theories are significantly less likely to use condoms or to get tested for HIV. ((AIDS Weekly (A W), 1 1113/95.)) To put it bluntly: The false conspiracy theories are themselves a contributing factor to the terrible toll of unnecessary AIDS deaths among people of color. While convinced by scientists I know that humans did not design HIV, my main concern here is not to disprove the conspiracy theories. Neither do i attempt to solve the problem of the origins of AIDS or even review the many different theories and approaches to that question. The origin of this disease, as of many others, is likely to remain unsolved for years to come. Various theories of AIDS origins include: a virus that jumped species, an accidental byproduct of biological warfare experiments on animals, a new viral mutation, and a virus that lived in an isolated ecological niche until new social conditions facilitated the explosion of an epidemic. There is also a set of theories based on the now highly dubious proposition that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. (For excellent discussions of HIV’s likely history and the social factors that facilitated the explosion of the epidemic, see Gabriel Rotello, “The Birth of AIDS,” OUT, April, 1994, and Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague, pp. 281-390.) Instead this article examines the validity of one set of theories being widely propagated to prisoners and to New Afrikan communities: that HIV was deliberately spliced together in the lab as a weapon of genocide. These theories have had important public health and political implications. My urgent, life and death purpose is to refocus attention on AIDS prevention and care and, more broadly, on the struggle against the racist and profit-driven character of a public health system that is causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Readers not interested in a detailed critique of the conspiracy theories are invited to skip right to the last three sections of this essay, starting with “The Real Genocide.”Hopefully, that is also where all readers will concentrate their attention. Scientific Unraveling When first introduced to a conspiracy theory in 1987, 1 believed it because of the sordid history of U.S. chemical and biological warfare. The version I saw then was based on the work of two East German scientists, Jakob and Lilli Segal, and was published by the Soviet news agency Tass on 3/30/87. They claimed that HIV couldn’t have possibly evolved naturally and that it was obviously an artificial splice between visna virus (a retrovirus ((HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is one of the subset of viruses known as retroviruses. A retrovirus stores its genetic information in the form of a single-stranded RNA instead of the more usual double-stranded DNA. Only after the retrovirus penetrates the host cell does it construct a DNA version of its genes, using a special enzyme called reverse transcriptase.)) that infects the nervous system of sheep) and HTLV-1 (the first retrovirus known to infect humans). They argued that the splice was created at the notorious CBW lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland and then tested on prisoners in the area. Upon receiving and believing this article, I immediately sent it to a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology (now at the University of Massachusetts Medical School), who specializes in immunology, Janet Stavnezer. My friendship with Janet goes back to the 1960s and her support for civil rights and the anti-war movement. While that does not make her analysis infallible, there is certainly no way she could be a conscious part of a conspiracy against oppressed people. Stavnezer’s response to the article I had found so politically credible was unequivocal: the splice theory that the Segals posit is scientifically impossible. (All references in this paper to Stavnezer’s analysis, as well as to her colleague at U. Mass. who specializes in virology – professor of molecular genetics and microbiology, Dr. Carel Mulder – come from personal correspondence and discussions.) A couple of years later the Soviet Union withdrew the Segals’ charges. But it is open to interpretation whether they did so because the “science” involved is so demonstrably dishonest or because with “ Perestroika, ” they were now cultivating diplomatic favor with the U.S. In any case, there are other fatal flaws in the Segals’ theory. First, in an obvious error of U.S. geography, they speculated that Maryland prisoners, once released, congregated in New York City to become the seedbed of the epidemic; but most Maryland prisoners would return to Baltimore, or Washington D.C., and neither of those cities was an early center of AIDS. Second, they posit sophisticated forms of genetic engineering and cloning that hadn’t yet been invented in 1977. ((Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (New York: Penguin, 1995), p.362.)) Since the Segals there have been a number of related theories that HIV was man-made. One posits a splice of visna virus and equine infectious anemia virus; another, a splice of visna virus and bovine leukemia virus. One sets the date at Fort Detrick back to 1967; another implicates the World Health Organization (WHO), starting in 1972. Most of these other theorists (such as Robert Strecker, John Seale and William Douglass) come from the far right politically and charge that – whether it was engineered at Ft. Detrick and/or by WHO – the AIDS virus is a Soviet biological warfare assault on the Western world. I sent these various splice theories to Stavnezer and Mulder for review; none of them holds water scientifically. The method for analyzing the relationship of different viruses is to compare the base pairs of nucleic acids that constitute the DNA. None of the viruses posited in the various splice theories has nearly enough similarity (or homology) with HIV to be one of its parents. At the same time as my 1987 inquiry, another, and far more exhaustive, study independently came to a similar conclusion: the various genetic engineering theories were fundamentally flawed. Investigative journalist Bob Lederer researched the topic for Covert Action Information Bulletin (CAIB), a publication that has been outstanding at exposing CIA and related operations. Lederer, an anti-imperialist and an AIDS activist, also started out with a political predisposition for believing the government could well have created AIDS. His in-depth research led him to conclude that the series of HIV-splice theories were false. One of his prime sources was Dr. David Dubnau, a long-time activist against CBW, who was emphatic: the HIV splice theorists “are simply wrong.” This movement scientist independently offered the same explanation as Stavnezer and Mulder: HIV does not have any nearly sufficient sector of homology with the proposed parent viruses. ((B. Lederer, “Origins and Spread of AIDS,” Covert Action Information Bulletin (CAIB), 28, Summer, 1987, p.47.)) Needing a vehicle for the deliberate dissemination of the allegedly spliced virus, the conspiracy theorists also characterize various vaccination programs (against smallpox in Africa, hepatitis-B among gay men in the U.S., and polio in various places) as examples of CBW campaigns. While vaccination programs with inadequate controls for contamination may have contributed to the spread of infection, they could not have been a prime cause: The geography of the vaccination campaigns does not correspond with the locations of early centers of AIDS ((See T. Quinn, et al., “AIDS in Africa: An Epidemiologic Paradigm,” Science, Nov. 21, 1986, p.959.)) – and retrospective tests have not found any such contamination. ((Garrett, op. cit. p. 381.)) Meanwhile, such unsubstantiated rumors can dangerously discourage people here and in the Third World from getting the same protections for their children that have done so much to stop diseases among … truncated (54,253 more characters in archive)