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"The Great AIDS Myth..." by Andrew Neil, Sunday Times (23 VI 96).
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John Lauritsen
Jun 28, 1996, 3:00:00 AM6/28/96
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Sunday Times (London), June 23, 1996, Sunday
SECTION: Features
HEADLINE: The great Aids myth is finally laid to rest
BYLINE: Andrew Neil
'Andrew Neil is condemning thousands of young heterosexual men
and women to death," intoned Jerry Hayes, Tory MP for Harlow and
vice-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on Aids on
ITV's Frost Programme in May, 1993. The studio audience dominated
by activists from the National Aids Trust, the Terrence Higgins
Trust, Aids Care Education and Training (Acet) and the plethora
of other well-financed lobbies that make up the formidable Aids
establishment nodded enthusiastically in agreement. "For the
first time," continued Mr Hayes "we are now seeing that
heterosexuals are seriously at risk."
Among the many criticisms made during my 11-year editorship
of The Sunday Times this was the only time I was to be publicly
branded a mass murderer. Mr Hayes is a political buffoon of no
consequence, but he was merely mouthing the mantra of the most
respected medical experts of our age. A year before that
programme Dr Patrick Dixon, the boss of Acet, had written in this
newspaper that "the scientific evidence is so overwhelming that
HIV is a great danger to heterosexuals that it is hard to see how
different conclusions can be drawn".
Medical authorities as diverse as the Royal College of Nursing
and Ms Oprah Winfrey predicted that millions in Britain and
America would soon die of Aids. The most respected voices the
medical profession could muster spoke of a new Black Death. Most
of the media slavishly followed the medical establishment.
Medical correspondents in most broadsheets, who could be
counted on to toe the line, wrote many stories about
"Heterosexual HIV epidemic predicted" and "The truth about
growing menace of heterosexual Aids". On the BBC it was for a
long time almost impossible for any other view to get a hearing.
The Sunday Times was one of a handful of newspapers, perhaps the
most prominent, which argued that heterosexual Aids was a myth.
The figures are now in and this newspaper stands totally
vindicated.
Of the 12,565 people in Britain who have developed Aids since
the disease was first diagnosed in 1982, a mere 161 have been
heterosexuals not exposed to a high-risk category, such as drug
abusers or bisexual men. Even that tiny number is probably an
exaggeration: just because the authorities have been unable to
establish exposure does not mean some of the 161 did not also
catch Aids from well-known risks. The fact is that the number of
people who have caught Aids through normal vaginal sex is
infinitesimal.
There are two overwhelming ways in which Aids is transmitted:
one is to stick an infected needle in your skin; the other is to
stick a penis into an anus. Heterosexuals who indulge in anal
sex, especially women with bisexual men, are just as much at risk
as homosexuals. Aids is not exclusive to a sexual proclivity, it
is closely associated to a specific sexual practice. And if, as
is often the case, regular anal sex is accompanied by copious
amounts of recreational drug taking, then the immune system is in
even more danger.
I apologise, dear reader, for the blunt approach to such
matters on a Sunday morning. I do not feel so much vindicated as
angry. If Aids had been accompanied by more plain speaking and
honest opinion right from the start then many thousands of lives
would probably have been saved. Instead a Tory government totally
in the pocket of the Aids lobby spent millions on advertising
campaigns telling young, white, affluent middle-class
heterosexuals a category at almost no risk at all that they were
in just as much danger as anybody else.
The history of Aids is one of the great scandals of our time.
I do not blame doctors and the Aids lobby for warning that
everybody might be at risk in the early days, when ignorance was
rife and reliable evidence scant. In the mid-1980s, on my
instructions, The Sunday Times Magazine devoted a whole edition
to the "We're all vulnerable" theme, which earned plaudits from
the Terrence Higgins Trust. But the heterosexual epidemic never
materialised; a few of us thought it was time to reassess the
facts. The Aids establishment did not want to know.
It believed that the massive funding it enjoyed, more than
Pounds 1.5 billion since 1987, was precisely because Aids had not
been stigmatised as fundamentally a risk for homosexuals and
intravenous drug abusers. Aids had becme an industry, a job-
creation scheme for the caring classes: at one stage there were
three times as many Aids counsellors as Aids victims. They sought
to suppress or rubbish anybody who doubted the threat to
heterosexuals.
Michael Fumento, who wrote The Myth of Heterosexual Aids
(serialised by thisnewspaper), had trouble finding a publisher.
Dissident scientists even Nobel prize winners had problems
getting their work published in the scientific journals. When, in
April 1993, The Sunday Times revealed, using official research,
that fears of a hidden spread of HIV into the heterosexual
population were proving unfounded, the authorities tried to put a
different spin on their own figures.
The duplicity of the Aids establishment has been fatal.
Hundreds of millionsof pounds that could have been spent on far
greater risks to life such as breast cancer, from which more die
every year than have died of Aids in 14 years was siphoned off
and squandered. Money that should have been targeted at the real
risk groups was spread uselessly across the population instead.
Homosexual groups are now calling for money to be concentrated
on those still at greatest risk, in a belated attempt to "re-gay"
the disease. It is a welcome conversion. But this country has
only two real heroes when it comes to the truth about Aids: one
is Gordon Stewart, emeritus professor of public health at Glasgow
University, who warned from the start it was a threat only to
specific high-risk groups, and Neville Hodgkinson, former science
correspondent of this newspaper, who brought to public attention
respectable dissident views about Aids that were being suppressed
and has just published a book on the subject.
Now that one of the central tenets of the Aids establishment
has been debunked it is time to scrutinise what else it has been
telling us: to question drugs like AZT, which probably do more
harm than good; to challenge the view that to be HIV positive is
a death sentence and to encourage the sort of healthy lifestyle
that allows thousands of HIV positive people to live long, normal
lives; and even to investigate if the link between HIV and Aids
is as clear as mainstream research believes. Meanwhile, let us
hope that the country is not confronted with a real epidemic in
the near future: after the disinformation the government has told
us about Aids, who would believe it?
[After an abortive stint with the Fox TV network in the USA,
Andrew Neil is back in England writing for the Sunday Times
and doing a TV interview show.]
# # #
SECTION: Features
HEADLINE: The great Aids myth is finally laid to rest
BYLINE: Andrew Neil
'Andrew Neil is condemning thousands of young heterosexual men
and women to death," intoned Jerry Hayes, Tory MP for Harlow and
vice-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on Aids on
ITV's Frost Programme in May, 1993. The studio audience dominated
by activists from the National Aids Trust, the Terrence Higgins
Trust, Aids Care Education and Training (Acet) and the plethora
of other well-financed lobbies that make up the formidable Aids
establishment nodded enthusiastically in agreement. "For the
first time," continued Mr Hayes "we are now seeing that
heterosexuals are seriously at risk."
Among the many criticisms made during my 11-year editorship
of The Sunday Times this was the only time I was to be publicly
branded a mass murderer. Mr Hayes is a political buffoon of no
consequence, but he was merely mouthing the mantra of the most
respected medical experts of our age. A year before that
programme Dr Patrick Dixon, the boss of Acet, had written in this
newspaper that "the scientific evidence is so overwhelming that
HIV is a great danger to heterosexuals that it is hard to see how
different conclusions can be drawn".
Medical authorities as diverse as the Royal College of Nursing
and Ms Oprah Winfrey predicted that millions in Britain and
America would soon die of Aids. The most respected voices the
medical profession could muster spoke of a new Black Death. Most
of the media slavishly followed the medical establishment.
Medical correspondents in most broadsheets, who could be
counted on to toe the line, wrote many stories about
"Heterosexual HIV epidemic predicted" and "The truth about
growing menace of heterosexual Aids". On the BBC it was for a
long time almost impossible for any other view to get a hearing.
The Sunday Times was one of a handful of newspapers, perhaps the
most prominent, which argued that heterosexual Aids was a myth.
The figures are now in and this newspaper stands totally
vindicated.
Of the 12,565 people in Britain who have developed Aids since
the disease was first diagnosed in 1982, a mere 161 have been
heterosexuals not exposed to a high-risk category, such as drug
abusers or bisexual men. Even that tiny number is probably an
exaggeration: just because the authorities have been unable to
establish exposure does not mean some of the 161 did not also
catch Aids from well-known risks. The fact is that the number of
people who have caught Aids through normal vaginal sex is
infinitesimal.
There are two overwhelming ways in which Aids is transmitted:
one is to stick an infected needle in your skin; the other is to
stick a penis into an anus. Heterosexuals who indulge in anal
sex, especially women with bisexual men, are just as much at risk
as homosexuals. Aids is not exclusive to a sexual proclivity, it
is closely associated to a specific sexual practice. And if, as
is often the case, regular anal sex is accompanied by copious
amounts of recreational drug taking, then the immune system is in
even more danger.
I apologise, dear reader, for the blunt approach to such
matters on a Sunday morning. I do not feel so much vindicated as
angry. If Aids had been accompanied by more plain speaking and
honest opinion right from the start then many thousands of lives
would probably have been saved. Instead a Tory government totally
in the pocket of the Aids lobby spent millions on advertising
campaigns telling young, white, affluent middle-class
heterosexuals a category at almost no risk at all that they were
in just as much danger as anybody else.
The history of Aids is one of the great scandals of our time.
I do not blame doctors and the Aids lobby for warning that
everybody might be at risk in the early days, when ignorance was
rife and reliable evidence scant. In the mid-1980s, on my
instructions, The Sunday Times Magazine devoted a whole edition
to the "We're all vulnerable" theme, which earned plaudits from
the Terrence Higgins Trust. But the heterosexual epidemic never
materialised; a few of us thought it was time to reassess the
facts. The Aids establishment did not want to know.
It believed that the massive funding it enjoyed, more than
Pounds 1.5 billion since 1987, was precisely because Aids had not
been stigmatised as fundamentally a risk for homosexuals and
intravenous drug abusers. Aids had becme an industry, a job-
creation scheme for the caring classes: at one stage there were
three times as many Aids counsellors as Aids victims. They sought
to suppress or rubbish anybody who doubted the threat to
heterosexuals.
Michael Fumento, who wrote The Myth of Heterosexual Aids
(serialised by thisnewspaper), had trouble finding a publisher.
Dissident scientists even Nobel prize winners had problems
getting their work published in the scientific journals. When, in
April 1993, The Sunday Times revealed, using official research,
that fears of a hidden spread of HIV into the heterosexual
population were proving unfounded, the authorities tried to put a
different spin on their own figures.
The duplicity of the Aids establishment has been fatal.
Hundreds of millionsof pounds that could have been spent on far
greater risks to life such as breast cancer, from which more die
every year than have died of Aids in 14 years was siphoned off
and squandered. Money that should have been targeted at the real
risk groups was spread uselessly across the population instead.
Homosexual groups are now calling for money to be concentrated
on those still at greatest risk, in a belated attempt to "re-gay"
the disease. It is a welcome conversion. But this country has
only two real heroes when it comes to the truth about Aids: one
is Gordon Stewart, emeritus professor of public health at Glasgow
University, who warned from the start it was a threat only to
specific high-risk groups, and Neville Hodgkinson, former science
correspondent of this newspaper, who brought to public attention
respectable dissident views about Aids that were being suppressed
and has just published a book on the subject.
Now that one of the central tenets of the Aids establishment
has been debunked it is time to scrutinise what else it has been
telling us: to question drugs like AZT, which probably do more
harm than good; to challenge the view that to be HIV positive is
a death sentence and to encourage the sort of healthy lifestyle
that allows thousands of HIV positive people to live long, normal
lives; and even to investigate if the link between HIV and Aids
is as clear as mainstream research believes. Meanwhile, let us
hope that the country is not confronted with a real epidemic in
the near future: after the disinformation the government has told
us about Aids, who would believe it?
[After an abortive stint with the Fox TV network in the USA,
Andrew Neil is back in England writing for the Sunday Times
and doing a TV interview show.]
# # #
_______________________________________
Neville Hodgkinson.
AIDS: THE FAILURE OF CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE.
ISBN 1-85702-337-4.
Fourth Estate (1996)
6 Salem Road
London W2 4BU
England.
[+44] (0171) 727-8995 fax: [+44] (0171) 792-3176.
The Hodgkinson book can be ordered from Book Services by Post Ltd:
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The cost is 17.99 British Pounds Sterling.
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