Dr. Alan Cantwell claims the United States government created HIV and introduced it to the gay community: “The gay community was the most hated minority in America… In my view, what made gay men ‘high risk’ was the fact that they were the exclusive volunteers for government medical experiments that undoubtedly put them at ‘high risk.'” Uh-huh… [The Canadian]
Crazy Conspiracy
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Kevin Foster
With isolated cases going all the way back to the 1950’s, it seems doubtful that it’s a plot. Indeed, there was NO technology at the time for virual or DNA manipulation.
Three of the earliest known instances of HIV infection are:
1. A plasma sample taken in 1959 from an adult male living in Kinshasa, today part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.[151]
2. HIV found in tissue samples from “Robert R.”, a 15 year old African-American teenager who died in St. Louis in 1969.[152]
3. HIV found in tissue samples from Arvid Noe, a Norwegian sailor who died around 1976.[153]
–Wikipedia
Charley
The following is satirical.
Yes, I remember it distinctly as if it were yesterday. I volunteered to the CIA program, headed by Herbert Hoover. My mission, to have sex with an African green monkeys. The government flew me there on Air Force One, along with many other prominent gay Americans.
Once in Africa, I selected my male monkey, known to be infected with the HIV virus. Anal sex was the only way we were allowed to participate. Female monkeys were not included in the experiment.
I wasn’t the only volunteer. I recognized Rock Hudson. We stayed in a big dormitory with alot of gay men like myself fucking monkeys in the ass. Roy Cohn was in the cot next to mine. He became infected, I did not.
Roy came back to the USA and spread HIV to many male prostitutes. Then all hell broke loose in the 1980’s..The rest is history.
Rick
It’s completely absurd to dismiss this doctor’s claims as “crazy conspiracy” since it is irrefutable that AIDS epicenters of mass infection(gay & IV users, SF & NY) both had Blood Centers using these target groups in their Hep B vaccine programs. This fact was publicly and clearly stated by Dr Mathilde Krim before she “went quiet” on the subject. Mass infection requires more than a large gay population from an epidemiological perspective, and it’s unreasonable to assume that gay men’s sexual practices alone were responsible (for AIDS) when a co-factor like the Blood Center involvement exists.
Additionally, the men accepted for the trials submitted to extensive plasmophoresis, and the very fact that the long-term medical reports of the participants are unavailble in their entirety should be reason alone to raise suspicion.
btw: I was the liason officer for New York Blood Center at Gay Men’s Health Project in New York during the recruitment and testing phase of the vaccine trials, and for the last 25 years it’s never left my mind that perhaps the only reason I’m still alive is because I was ineligible for those trials. I will never believe those guys (who were) didn’t ALL die of virulent AIDS until I see conclusive proof otherwise.
bob
no, it’s not a crazy conspiracy….open your eyes and ears, people! in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when minorities (black, gay) were poised to force our society to make sweeping social changes, two scourges (aids for gays and crack for blacks) “mysteriously” appeared to decimate both groups, setting them back decades in their quest for full equality….it has always seemed suspicious, especially in the early years of the scourges of aids and crack, that these two minorities were so blatantly “targeted”…
conrad
yeah, this doesnt seem all too absurd or crazy to me either. sure maybe its not all true, but that article raises a lot of questions that no one seems to be able to answer…
I'm With The Government and I'm Here To Help
The US government has a loooong tradition of amoral behavior: Native Americans on death marches were given blankets infected with small pox, black military personnel were secretly infected with syphillis to study the end stages of the disease, Japanese war criminals were put in charge of Japan’s government and universities after the war because they would be easy to control, not to mention the two A-Bombs dropped on civilian populations killing hundreds of thousands of people, etc., etc. Now we’re having a national debate on the pluses and minuses of torturing people.
The quasi-governmental American Red Cross was well aware that the blood supply was compromised and did nothing about it. I read that 1 in 4 Americans will die of Alzheimers – or is it Mad Cow disease has already entered the food chain only they don’t dare tell the public about it. Remember how the cattle industry went after Oprah
I don’t doubt that the US government had their hand in the spread of HIV — either intentionally or through massive incompetence.
G.
This is a ridiculous theory based on paranoia.
HIV existed in Africa for centuries and finally jumped from the primate population to the human population due to eating raw monkey meat and/or blood rituals.
Increase in international travel and promicious sex post-sexual revolution facilited the spread.
G.
Yes – gays have been a despised minority in America. But creating a paranoid theory like this does nothing for gays or gay rights. It only makes us look like fools and victims. And I am neither.
Afroguapo
I can’t completely dismiss this article as nonsense. It does seem rather too convenient/coincidental to have two disparate populations who are readily viewed as expendable and seen as a nuisance (poor third world people in Africa and West Indies and affluent gay white men) to manifest symptoms of imminent death from a new extremely virulent disease simultaneously. Of course, things like the Tuskegee experiment don’t help to negate this. Whether, it was intentionally planned or malfeasance/incompetence or neither, the government or culpable parties, if any, is not going to come clean and say something went wrong and a mistake was made. Could you imagine the public outcry that would ensue!
TSowell Fan
If such conspiracies are so straightforward to plan, organize and execute — you know, without a shred of judicial evidence being left behind, why don’t a bunch of you try it? Start small and work your way up.
Ultimately, you could conspire to produce compelling research proving that homosexuality is a superior condition that should be bred in for humanity’s own sake — like that infamous Nazi conspiracy, but in reverse.
Charley
Dr Mathilde Krim going quiet on a subject is not unusal. Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minneli gave their hearts and soul for gay men and AMFAR, but they were cast aside for an actress without underpants, Sharon Stone. Does Sharon even kown any gays ?
Rick
Point well taken Charlie, but Elizabeth Taylor is still International Founding Chairman of AMFAR – being nobody’s fool she undoubtedly knows exactly where the bodies are buried with THAT organization, and not likely to take kindly to their biting the diamond-encrusted hand that fed them.
Taylor still bills herself as an activist rather than philanthropist, and has consistently maintained her mission of compassion, education and service provision for over two decades. Her wealth, power and personal integrity immunize her to some extent from the corruption that is never too far away from established employment practices within the scientific and medical communities. Her determined “damn the torpedoes!” activism with no regard for personal consequences has done more than a thousand “organizations” or grant fundings could ever manage to do: it’s the textbook example of simply making the world a better place by doing it with guts.
And without fearless activists queers will end up with nothing but apologist whores who don’t dare demand truth and transparency about anything – including the epidemiology of the disease which has destroyed our finest generation, devastated our progress and weakened much of our hope.
David
I believe it completely. First off they knew about this disease since 1955 when the first person died of aids. Then introduced it in africa in 1975 in the small pox vaccine they were touting then the Gay community in 1977 using the hepititis vaccine . Figure it out people they killed us because they could. And get away with it.
leomoore
Jesus H. Fucking Christ. Do you people truly believe the government, any government, would create a disease to kill just gay people or black people? It seems so obviously irrational that it shouldn’t require refuting. If a government wanted to get rid of a hated minority, there are certainly more efficient and less risky ways to do it. Creating a virus that infects indiscriminately is not the way to do it. The viral RNA has mutated over and over, which has made creating a vaccine so difficult. Such a conspiracy would require thousands or hundreds of thousands of conspirators who could be trusted not to slip up, not to get drunk and blab it, and wouldn’t go over the edge when one of them was accidentally infected.
No one knows the exact first case. There is almost nothing available to test. For the most part, it’s guesswork based on patient history. The symptoms of AIDS are not unique to AIDS.
Why must you blame “the government”, or a god, or anything else? If we are going to blame something, I think we should blame nonhuman primates in Africa that were eaten by humans. Let’s kill all the nonhuman primates in Africa so the rest of us will be safe from their nefarious plots. Now how can we cure paranoid stupidity.
Rick
Point by reactionary point:
Yes. Have you never heard of genocide?
What could be less risky than an incurable mutating virus guaranteed to reach (and be essentially contained by) the targeted groups? While there is no proof of a government conspiracy it’s very reasonable to doubt that AIDS “just happened” all by itself, coupled with no apparent transparency or disclosure from the scientic community which would effectively silence any theory of conspiracy.
The origins or the “first case” have little proximity or epidemiological value in explaining the huge and rapid rates of infection in the early 80’s amongst gay men and needle-users: the fact that both groups participated in NY & SF Blood Center trials at the time is of great importance, and co-incidence needs to be scientifically eliminated as an infection co-factor.
You know for a fact that Africans are to blame huh?
Science would probably first look at curing general stupidity before treating sub-groups in the spectrum.
Jaroslaw
The US Government along with most other governments is hardly squeaky clean as many proven examples have already cited in this post. This subject like so many others doesn’t have to be either/or. The US gov’t COULD have started it and jet travel, promiscuous sex and a host of other things helped it along.
Afroguapo
+1 Jaroslaw, Gaetan Dugas (sp?) as a theory of a typhoid Mary vector who could spread it. All it had to be was introduced. Looking at Tina and how it’s taken a toll on our community, bathhouses, circuit parties and things like the Black Party show how easily it can hop from person to person. No one is saying this is how it happened definitively, but don’t think we can wholesale dismiss it.
leomoore
Using the logic evinced in so many of these responses, someone must have invented the Black Plague and introduced it to Europe in the 15th century in order to wipe out all those ignorant peasants and serfs. Are you so paranoid you would believe the U.S. government would deliberately introduce a disease to wipe out certain populations. Rather than make up some nefarious plot related to the hep B vaccine, why not focus on the fact that new diseases appear all the time. The tropics whether Asia (almost every influenza epidemic and bubonic plague), the Americas (yellow fever), Africa (ebola).
Suspicion, paranoia, and irrational speculation are not substitutes for realism. This sounds more like the sublime rantings of talk radio during the Clinton presidency. It reminds me of my crazy sister who thinks her father was Howard Hughes and that I have been plotting to kill her since I was two years old.
Phoenix
It may be paranoia to state that the U.S. government deliberately infected gays with HIV/AIDS, BUT there is no doubt that the U.S. government could have done more to slow the spread or fund more research in the 1980’s when it first started killing off gay men in droves. Republicans, especially Ron Regan, disliked gays and therefore turned a blind eye to it.
Also, in South Africa during apartheid, the white run government actually researched germs that would only kill blacks. They never found a disease that would kill selectively by race, but you never know what they did come up with.
leomoore
You are correct. The U.S. government was nearly criminal and certainly immoral in the response to the appearance of AIDS in the U.S. I was there and remember it well. Almost everything that was done was done because gay men and lesbians banded together, pooled resources, and got busy. Reagan, who if there was really a hell, would be immersed head first in a barrel of rotting flesh, did nothing. Jesse Helms was one of the most reactionary and opportunistic politicians since Joe McCarthy and resisted almost everything that might help. Helms deserves every bit of suffering he helped inflict on others. It was largely his efforts that added HIV infection as one of the things to deny entry into the U.S. There were calls to round up infected people and put them into quarantine camps. There were even calls to round up all gay men. Many friends died. Obituaries abounded with young men who died “after a long illness” or “a valiant battle with cancer”.
Don’t think it was restricted to Republicans. The entire government was complicit. It was a terrible time. I became infected just before the advent of the array of drugs available now. Until then, the only drug that had any affect on the virus was AZT, with often awful side effects. Other than that, the only thing that could be done was use antibiotics in an attempt to treat the opportunistic infections. Blindness, dementia, AIDS related cancers were things that could not be reversed. Death was considered inevitable until the middle 90s.
Worldwide, millions have died, yet more was spent on preventing mad cow disease. Condoms offended the Pope and his bitches in the Vatican. Sex education that mentioned anything but abstinence offended all those good Christians who kept up the mantra of hate the sin/love the sinner. It was a shitty phrase then, and it’s a shitty phrase, now.
I won’t be silent but neither will I give the CIA or the white government of South Africa before Mandela enough credit for brains to execute such a plot.
James
I heard this theory in 1984 while sitting with Buddy Noro, an AIDS activist, in Julius’ in the West Village. When he told me he thought the virus was introduced into the gay population by the government, I was shocked at the idea.
However, for twenty-four years, that possibility has always been in the back of my mind.