Silent
Slaughter
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com
| June 10, 2003
Since 1981 more
Americans have died from AIDS than died in the Second World War – 468,000 to be
exact. About 40,000 new AIDS cases are
reported in the
Back in the 1980s,
when most of the dead (about 350,000 of them) were still alive, I interviewed
Don Francis, an immunologist and epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease
Control, who was a generally recognized hero of the battle against AIDS.
Francis had been the CDC official in charge of the battle against the Hepatitis
B epidemic in the 1970s. I asked him how epidemics are fought. He said that
there was really only one way to fight an epidemic, which was to identify the
carriers of the infection and to separate them from those in their path. How to
manage this separation, he said – whether by quarantine, education or other
methods -- was a political question.
I then asked him whether
testing was important in this process. He said it depends on whether the
symptoms manifest themselves on the body’s surface, particularly the face of
the victim immediately, or whether they are they are latent and difficult to
detect when the infection is present. With the HIV virus a person can be a
carrier for a decade without symptoms. It seemed obvious that mandatory testing
would be a hugely important factor in any effort to contain the AIDS epidemic,
yet at the time there was no testing and in fact the opposition to it was
fierce.
Opponents of testing, which
included the entire leadership of the gay community and the Democratic Party,
maintained that tests could not be kept confidential and that AIDS carriers
would thus become the targets of persecution. I asked Francis if this were a
reasonable fear. He said, “We have been studying gay diseases since before
Stonewall [the demonstration that launched the gay liberation movement] and I
don’t know of a single case of breach of confidentiality.”
I asked him when there would
be mandatory testing in the
Apparently, 468,000 dead are
not enough.
There are still no federal
laws requiring testing for the AIDS virus or reporting of AIDS infections. There
is no move to close public infection sites like bathhouses and sex
clubs. The state of
The very next section is
titled “Prohibitions Against Mandatory Testing,” and informs citizens that the
“Health and Safety Code Section 120980 prohibits HIV testing to determine
suitability for employment … and …insurance.” State laws also prevent doctors
and medical workers who perform the voluntary tests from reporting the names of
individuals to public health authorities. There is thus no contact tracing to
inform sexual partners of the person infected that they may have contracted the
virus as well. In other words the AIDS virus is protected by law so that it can
pursue its silent course through the body of the nation affecting tens of
thousands of individuals who do not know they have it (by some estimates half
of those infected) and who are putting others in danger through contact.
On June 4, the Seattle
Times reported that new AIDS cases had nearly doubled in the last year and
are expected to increase by another 60% this year. “It’s the most dramatic
increase since the beginning of the epidemic,” the Times quoted Dr. Bob
Wood, director of AIDS Control for the Public Health Department in Seattle’s
King County. “One of the most important things you can do in HIV prevention is
make sure people know if they are positive or negative,” Wood said. “Studies
show that people make major changes in behavior when they learn their status.”
Well, yes.
How did this state of affairs
come to pass? How have 463,000 young Americans been allowed to die without
being protected by public health authorities? Without the government
intervening to deploy the most basic measure that could save them? How have
both political parties remained silent or collusive in this dereliction of
duty? How can the media have ignored – as they have – a policy decision that
has meant serious illness and death for so many people? How can reporters have
ignored a story about the needless suffering and deaths of hundreds of
thousands of people whom proven and established health methods might have
saved? Why has there been no interrogation of the special interests responsible
for derailing the health system, specifically AIDS groups who have benefited by
receiving most of the government AIDS funds -- billions upon billions of
dollars, allocated to “fight” the epidemic but in fact consumed in ministering
to its hapless victims?
The answer is, on the one
hand, that Democrats had so surrendered to the ideology of victimization that
they were unable to withstand the pressures of the AIDS activists whose
self-destructive political correctness won the day. It was convenient for the Democrats
not to insist on hard choices for the stricken community but instead to allow
AIDS activists to blame Ronald Reagan and Republican “homophobia” for the
epidemic. It was good politics to ignore the reality -- the epidemic was fed by a determination to disregard public
health risks once the virus was discovered and to continue sexual practices
that were (and are) reckless in the circumstances.
Republicans understood the
policy issue but were too cowardly to confront it. One of the sources of the cowardice
is a continuing affliction of the party, which is its lack of clarity on the
issue of homosexuality itself. If Republicans were clear that their task as a
political party is not to manage private morality, they could have responded to
the crisis of a vulnerable community whose leaders have betrayed it. Compassion
for the victims of the epidemic, whose government has failed to protect them,
should have inspired Republicans to support the public health measures that
have been discarded. But so far it hasn’t.
Republicans and Democrats alike
should consider the implications of what has happened. The very activists who
assaulted and undermined the public health system are currently mounting new
assaults on traditional institutions that are vital to the health of
ENDNOTES:
[1][1]
Horowitz,
“A Radical Holocaust,” in The Politics of Bad Faith, 1998, p. 199n28
[1][2]
http://www.dhs.cahwnet.gov/ps/ooa/Reports/aidslaws/pdf/AIDSLaws2002.pdf