Overestimating AIDS
The Boston Globe reported in late June that estimates of the number of people in many countries with AIDS have been dramatically overstated because of errors in the statistical models used to estimate the number and other factors. The Globe said that analysts are cutting the estimates of those infected with HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus) in many nations by half or more. Rwanda’s figure is being cut from eleven to five percent, and Haiti’s from six to three percent.
The newspaper candidly reported that any finding that the epidemic may have been overstated will not be welcomed by activists who have devoted their careers to fighting HIV and do not want to see any HIV money diverted to meeting other needs. I presume that the thousands of HIV researchers and the multinational pharmaceutical companies that sell the expensive drug cocktails honestly believe what they say, but there are more than enough billions at stake in the estimates to motivate a tendency to believe the worst, which is actually the best if you are thinking in dollars.
In fact, the prevailing sentiment in AIDS research is that it is reprehensible to say or do anything that might cause the public to doubt the severity of the epidemic, because any doubts may cause people to risk unsafe sex, to neglect to take the nausea-inducing medications that are supposed to extend their lives, and, although this is left unsaid, to lose some of their enthusiasm for funding AIDS programs generously.
A Sweet Racket
When the biennial International AIDS Conference convened in Bangkok this past July, there was no mention of revising estimates of HIV prevalence downward, despite the consensus of experts reported in the Globe. These international conferences, supported by the pharmaceutical companies, have an ambience typical of United Nations conferences on peace or poverty, with delegates competing in the stridency of their denunciations of the United States and their demands for more money.
The delegates behave as if they know they have a sweet racket going and don’t want to call attention to anything that might spoil it. The only news of importance revealed at the 2004 conference was that researchers are almost ready to give up on ever developing a vaccine.
Almost exactly 20 years ago, American health authorities announced the discovery of the virus (HIV) they said was the probable cause of AIDS, and predicted that a vaccine would be available within two years. Neither the exposure of the long-suppressed doubts about the validity of the scary statistics nor the failure of the vaccine trials has motivated the researchers to consider the possibility that there might be something wrong with their understanding of the epidemic.
As predictions fail and anomalies pile up, the AIDS experts cling to their theory as dogmatically as they have done since 1984. If anyone ever wonders, “Could we have made a mistake?” the unwelcome question never appears in the mass media or in the scientific journals. The World Health Organization and UNAIDS say that 42 million people around the world are infected with HIV, and that nearly 22 million people in Africa, the continent most severely affected, have died in the prime of their lives, leaving countless AIDS orphans.
The impasse in AIDS research suggests two questions. One is whether the HIV infection and mortality numbers have been inflated, either inadvertently or deliberately, in order to keep the money flowing. If they have been, the second question is whether the necessary statistical corrections reflect merely a somewhat reduced epidemic of the same general nature, or whether the statistics are wrong because the official understanding of the underlying syndrome is wrong.
The validity of the statistics is tied to the validity of the underlying virus theory because the horrific death totals are not derived by counting diagnosed bodies in hospitals or morgues, but by extrapolations delivered from a computer located in Switzerland. Here is how the Epimodel program works.
Every year, all over Africa, blood samples are taken from small numbers of women at pregnancy clinics and screened, not for the virus itself, but for proteins thought to be indicative of antibodies to HIV. From the premise that the presence of the antibody equals incurable infection, the Epimodel program calculates an estimate of the total number of African women infected by HIV. If so many women are infected, it follows that a like number of their husbands and lovers must be infected also, and, according to the underlying virus theory, all these will sicken and die at a predictable rate.
Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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