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rfmcdonaldOne of the many controversial statements of Jeremiah Wright, minister to Barack Obama and the man whose controversial YouTubed statements may well cost Obama the presidency, is the claim that the HIV virus was produced by the American government as a weapon to kill off black people.
Slate has assembled "The AIDS Conspiracy Handbook", outlining a few of the major scholia, although I find Wikipedia's page AIDS conspiracy theories somewhat more appealing, with its open-source goodness. The idea of HIV being seeded into unknowing populations has come up with surprising frequency, both among gays and among blacks. If, as the line of argument goes, a government is unhappy with the disruptive presence of a particular group or groups, what might it do if it could ensure that these groups just ... went away? The infamous Tuskegee syphillis experiments, in which poor African-American men infected with syphillis were not only left in the dark about their infection with obvious consequences for their partners and their children, but were denied access to the cheap and effective penicillin cures available after 1947, frequently comes up and might be part of the reason why this idea is popular in urban American neighbourhoods today.
It goes without saying that there are numerous problems with this argument. If (as seems quite likely) large numbers of cases can be traced back to central Africa in the 1970s, and if (as is certain) few scientists imagined that retroviruses even existed until the 1960s, how was HIV discovered by these uncannily smart government scientists? Either genetic engineering advanced much more rapidly than we were told in the decade after DNA's discovery, or someone was astonishingly astute in discovering a viral epidemic that spread unnoticed a couple of decades before anyone noticed that, wait, the unusual diseases that had been popping up were becoming still more common. Non-falsifiability aside, I have to gently suggest that this conspiracy theory demonstrates altogether too much faith in government omnipotence.
Slate has assembled "The AIDS Conspiracy Handbook", outlining a few of the major scholia, although I find Wikipedia's page AIDS conspiracy theories somewhat more appealing, with its open-source goodness. The idea of HIV being seeded into unknowing populations has come up with surprising frequency, both among gays and among blacks. If, as the line of argument goes, a government is unhappy with the disruptive presence of a particular group or groups, what might it do if it could ensure that these groups just ... went away? The infamous Tuskegee syphillis experiments, in which poor African-American men infected with syphillis were not only left in the dark about their infection with obvious consequences for their partners and their children, but were denied access to the cheap and effective penicillin cures available after 1947, frequently comes up and might be part of the reason why this idea is popular in urban American neighbourhoods today.
It goes without saying that there are numerous problems with this argument. If (as seems quite likely) large numbers of cases can be traced back to central Africa in the 1970s, and if (as is certain) few scientists imagined that retroviruses even existed until the 1960s, how was HIV discovered by these uncannily smart government scientists? Either genetic engineering advanced much more rapidly than we were told in the decade after DNA's discovery, or someone was astonishingly astute in discovering a viral epidemic that spread unnoticed a couple of decades before anyone noticed that, wait, the unusual diseases that had been popping up were becoming still more common. Non-falsifiability aside, I have to gently suggest that this conspiracy theory demonstrates altogether too much faith in government omnipotence.
