Right Wing Fringe — ‘HIV Is A Harmless Passenger Virus’, Doesn’t Cause AIDS

HIV-virus

This piece was originally a section in another article on which I’m currently working. But there was so much information that I felt it began to take over the entire original article, and I made the quick decision to give it an article of its very own.

Why did I put so much research into this one area of my other article?

  • Because I believe that it is the second most dangerous fallacy afflicting the gay community today (the first being that all gay people are child molesters).
  • I want to provide concise information and extensive research links for people who are eager for truth and knowledge.
  • It would also be really cool to debunk some of the idiot talking points of the Lunatic Right. They feed lies and misleading information to people who will not do their own research.
  • For firmly ignorant and unmovable Leaders of the Foolish: I’ve provided material for your next sermon or blog post, in which you’ll preach about scientists, China, and the National Geographic‘s secret plot to blame AIDS on the HIV virus.

The Leader of the Foolish

There are so many conspiracy theories behind who/what created AIDS that the topic would be an article unto itself. The Illuminati? The CIA? Mad scientists and their lab experiments gone wrong? Well, homophobes can rejoice, because one guy is certain that he’s stumbled onto the answer.

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It’s been reported that Bryan Fischer, of American Family Association fame, stated that AIDS is caused by gays having sex and using drugs, NOT by the deadly HIV virus. As stated in my colleague’s articleBryan Fischer is not known as a friend to the gay community. As head of the American Family Association, Fischer has spread misinformation about homosexuals on an epic scale. 

From Fischer’s article:

And specifically, drug use connected with the kind of sex that is far too common in the homosexual community. While the average heterosexual has somewhere between seven to 14 sexual partners in a lifetime, it is not uncommon for homosexuals to have hundreds, even thousands, of sexual partners.

Anonymous sex in public places like bathhouses, public parks and public restrooms is an all-too frequent occurrence in the gay community, and homosexuals will frequently attempt to have multiple sexual encounters in a single night, often with total strangers. The only way this is possible is through taking stimulants that heighten sexual pleasure and make multiple sexual experiences possible.

Now, how does Mr. Fischer come to this conclusion? Is he a scientist? A doctor? An academic researcher? Nope. He has degrees in philosophy and theology. Hmmm so how?

Oh, Oh, Oh, It’s Magic

Mr. Fischer has conducted his own brand of convoluted research and analysis and come to the conclusion that the HIV virus is a harmless microbe that could not possibly cause such a devastating disease as AIDS. By what series of thought processes did Mr. Fischer come to this conclusion? What ONE thing brought him to this world-changing hypothesis? Why, Magic Johnson, of course.

Yes. Really. Magic Johnson. The basketball player.

Why is Magic Johnson healthy as a horse? HIV virus does NOT cause AIDSis the bold title of the article on Mr. Fischer’s organization’s OFFICIAL WEBSITE:

From Fischer’s article:

I recently came across several articles commemorating the 20th anniversary of Magic Johnson’s HIV diagnosis. I still remember the screaming headlines in 1991, the abrupt termination of his NBA career at the height of his powers, and his subsequent and short-lived come back.

One would have expected pictures of Magic, taken 20 years after this life-sentence diagnosis, to be a withered, shriveled version of his former self, his life force eaten away by this killer virus.

But pictures of Magic show him to be as healthy as the proverbial horse. He’s considerably bulkier than he was in his playing days, and as the saying goes, seems quite comfortable in his own expanded skin.

So why is Magic the picture of health 20 years after this supposedly terminal diagnosis? Easy: the HIV virus does NOT cause AIDS. Since, as one of the world’s leading virologists, Peter Duesberg of U.C. Berkeley, says, HIV is a harmless passenger virus, Magic is likely to carry HIV with him to the end of a long and healthy life.

The World’s Leading Virologist? Mr. Fischer is referring to is Dr. Peter Duesberg, a shock doc who has always been considered by his peers in the scientific community to be a scientist who’deliberately goes against the prevailing wisdom of credible research. He wrote a book in 1996 called Inventing the AIDS Virus

Understand one thing. Fischer and his Mad Scientist buddy Duesberg are very clearly, in no uncertain terms, calling the HIV virus a harmless microbe. They are stating unequivocally that  AIDS is not caused by the HIV virus, but by the hedonistic behavior of gay people.

If you’re one of his followers, you probably want to stop reading now. Because unlike Mr. Fischer, I will attempt to put some reality and research into this topic. And I know that’s scary to some folks.

Some Stats

The uneducated belief held by Fischer, Leader of the Foolish, is largely shared and supported by people who are unwilling to research and read to find real answers. They zero in on one obvious statistic and stop reading everything else: statistically, gay and bisexual men are the demographic most severely affected by HIV/AIDS. Thus, they are often blamed for creating HIV/AIDS.

The first official reporting of what was to become known as the Aids Epidemic was published in 1981, when a U.S. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report described cases of five previously healthy young gay men who were infected with?Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a rare lung infection. What followed in the next several years was confusion, chaos, fear, and paranoia as the Aids Epidemic spiraled out of controland millions began to die.

United States statistics show that men who have sex with men (MSM) accounted for 61 percent of new HIV infections in 2009, with the other 39 percent consisting of injection drug users and heterosexuals (source: Aids.gov).

 

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But that’s just the United States. The reality is that 97 percent of HIV infected people live in low and middle income countries, with particular density in the sub-Saharan area of Africa.

How does this compute?

Again, Mr. Fischer clearly states (sorry for making you’read this garbage twice):

And specifically, drug use connected with the kind of sex that is far too common in the homosexual community. While the average heterosexual has somewhere between seven to 14 sexual partners in a lifetime, it is not uncommon for homosexuals to have hundreds, even thousands, of sexual partners.

Anonymous sex in public places like bathhouses, public parks and public restrooms is an all-too frequent occurrence in the gay community, and homosexuals will frequently attempt to have multiple sexual encounters in a single night, often with total strangers. The only way this is possible is through taking stimulants that heighten sexual pleasure and make multiple sexual experiences possible.

If that is what he believes, how would he attempt to explain the sub-Saharan statistic and AIDS statistics worldwide? I guess to people like Mr. Fisher, it makes perfectly logical sense that Americans who choose to have sex with people of the same gender in a public restroom have caused this devastating worldwide epidemic.

If it Wasn’t a Magical Thing, What or Who Created Aids?

A specific Western African chimpanzee hosts the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which is similar to HIV. Humans likely encountered SIV/HIV by hunting and eating infected animals. After a breakthrough study in 1999, the scientific community widely accepted that SIV jumped the species barrier in the same way that Ebola and Marburg contagions did: from chimpanzees/monkeys to humans. When a contagion jumps species, it finds a whole new surplus of hosts to infect, and it sometimes evolves and goes through changes in the process.

Recent studies indicate that SIV may have made the jump as far back as the late 1800s in the sub-Saharan African area (another source: click this link and it will open a study in a word document that traces the virus). Until a 2008 study, it was widely believed that HIV-1 Group M, the HIV strain that causes the most infections worldwide, originated in Cameroon in 1930. Epidemics began to appear in the former Belgian Congo around 1960.

Most scientists are in agreement that SIV jumped, and there are several theories that explain the possible method that the SIV virus used to jump species. It is probably not possible to determine the precise method by which the virus made its leap over to the much more prolific species of homo sapiens, but with humans, SIV hit the jackpot. It evolved into HIV, and there are a lot more of us than there are chimps. We (gay AND straight) happen to reallyyyyyy enjoy the primary method in which this virus is able to enter a host and begin to multiply itself.

A lot of people don’t like that theory. They find it unbelievable that we could contract AIDS from monkeys. Of course. People who choose to remain ignorant because something conflicts with their innate belief system are generally resistant to any idea outside of their own realm of limited knowledge. Why now, the skeptics may ask? If these chimps have always carried SIV, why didn’t we have an AIDS pandemic much earlier?

 Rapid urbanization was the turning point that allowed the pandemic to start, said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson in an interview with National GeographicWe as human beings made some changes that took a virus that could not exist on its own and turned it into a successful epidemic, he added.

A September 2012 study, New Strain of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus Identified in Wild-Born Chimpanzees from Central Africa, was published by PLOS-ONE, a peer-reviewed, open access journal. What this means is that it is subject to review by anyone in the’scientific research community. They can’t publish junk without getting called out on it by some VERY credible people. Note that this study was edited by the University of Hong Kong. I know that most people reading this want the straight facts and not a lot of scientific verbiage. So, if you do want to read the entire study, visit the PLOS-ONE site, and I’ll excerpt it here:

Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a member of the Lentivirus genus (Retroviridae), has been isolated from various African nonhuman primates, including Cercopithecidae species and great apes (Pan troglodytes and Gorilla spp.) SIV has been clustered into six distinct lineages. SIV from chimpanzees (SIVcpz) has been found to be genetically related to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1), with the same genomic organization, and the strong homology suggested that HIV-1 originated from chimpanzees. This hypothesis was strengthened by the identification and characterization of two SIVcpz strains (SIVcpzPtt-Gab1 and SIVcpzPtt-Gab2) from captive wild-born chimpanzees in Gabon and of one strain (SIVcpzPtt-US) in chimpanzees from an unknown central African country but kept in captivity in the USA. Another strain (SIVcpz-Ant), which was not related to the HIV-1 group M (pandemic), N or O (nonpandemic), was characterized in a wild-born captured chimpanzee in Belgium.

Yawn. I know. It’s like a foreign language to lay-folk like us. But if you take the time to wade through it, the study tracks the connection between SIV and HIV extensively and precisely, with references, supporting information, and statistical analysis that show that SIV/HIV absolutely do cause AIDS.

You can also read more about the science behind these studies via tabloid style publications such as The National GeographicThey, like China and all of these scientists, seem to be involved in a vicious plot to distract attention away from American gay people.

Science isn’t enough or some people. It’s easier and more comfortable, and well more convenient, to blame gay people than it is to accept scientific research. It gives ignorant people something else to pin on “them gays.” They already despise and/or fear gay people, and saying that the gay community created AIDS simply gives them false justification for doing so. I read in a good book once that fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Gay people did not create AIDS. For people to continue to say so is sheer ignorance in its purest form. Certainly, promiscuous sexual activity (gay AND straight) has caused the virus to spread much more rapidly than it would have on its own.

Want 67 more resources, scientific references, and academic works that explore this topic? Here you go. You can also follow Aids.gov on Facebook, the U.S. Center for Disease Control’s HIV/AIDS page, and its Global HIV/AIDS page.

Or you can still just keep blaming gay people.

 

I had a successful career actively working with at-risk youth, people struggling with poverty and unemployment, and disadvantaged and oppressed populations. In 2011, I made the decision to pursue my dreams and become a full-time writer. Connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.