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Front Page Magazine Horowitz's
Notepad: Facing the Truth about AIDS David Horowitz’s Guest Appearance on Fox News’s "Special Report with Brit Hume" For more information on AIDS and the so-called public awareness campaign, read David Horowitz’s recent Salon.com article… Brit Hume: This year is the 20th anniversary of the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and it comes amid disturbing evidence that the epidemic is now worsening. This despite the major expenditure of public money on research on the disease and a vast public awareness campaign that made those little AIDS ribbons the fixture on lapels at countless events. But there is a view that these very campaigns have not only failed to stem the disease, but actually contributed to its spread. And one who strongly holds that view is David Horowitz, the onetime leftist radical who is now President of the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Welcome sir. David Horowitz: Hello Brit. Brit Hume: What is the case that the efforts to halt the disease and spread awareness of it has done the opposite? David Horowitz: A political decision was made, because of pressure groups at the outset of the epidemic, that all the eggs would be put into the medical basket. An education campaign would be conducted, but it was a misleading campaign that said AIDS was an equal-opportunity disease. It pretended that it wasn’t focused on the homosexual community and HIV drug users almost exclusively. Brit Hume: And you make the point that it has been concentrated on those communities … David Horowitz: It has spread now to the Hispanic and the Black community, which I think could have been prevented. We have a public health system in this country, which successfully fought epidemics in the past. It involved testing, it involved contact tracing, it involved reporting. People may not realize, but here we are in the 20th year of the epidemic, half a million people are dead, and we don’t even report AIDS cases. That is, the name of whoever has the AIDS, and we don’t make any effort to find out who their contacts have been. We don’t do focused education campaigns. The idea would be: here is where the epidemic is spreading, in this geographic area, among these groups. Let’s focus our public health energies on those roots. That doesn’t happen because it is politically forbidden. Brit Hume: Why? David Horowitz: Because of the left-wing leaders of the gay community, not all gays, but the spokesmen for the community subverted the public health system. Brit Hume: Why would they do that? David Horowitz: They were defending what they considered a revolutionary gay lifestyle. They did not want the infection to close the bathhouses; they did not want to focus on promiscuous anal sex, which is the absolute, primary sexual cause of AIDS transmission. If you do not engage in promiscuous anal sex, you are extremely unlikely to get this disease. They don’t want any of this discussed, which it hasn’t been. And they want all their eggs in one basket, which is a vaccine. I attended a conference organized by the city of San Francisco, with many doctors attending. It was organized by Diane Feinstein. This was in 1983, at the outset of the epidemic. They said very clearly that there may never be a cure for AIDS. These are the scientists speaking. And we may not have a vaccine for five to 10 years. They were extremely optimistic; it’s been 20 years. Therefore, they say, the only way to stop this epidemic from spreading is a public health message. You have to identify who the carriers of the disease are and separate them from people in their path. That’s a fundamental way to fight an epidemic. A lot of hysteria was whipped up that if people were identified, they’d all be put in concentration camps, or something like that, and we hear … Brit Hume: And stigmatized … is there truth to that? David Horowitz: There was some, but I interviewed CDC officials … Brit Hume: The Center for Disease Control … David Horowitz: Yes. And one of the heroes of this epidemic, Don Frances, I asked him about the confidentiality issue. And he said we have been studying gay diseases since before Stonewall, which is 1969 and gay liberation, and I don’t know of a single case where there was a breach of confidentiality. The public health system kept records confidential, except doctors would know, and they would know the epidemic is exploding in this area, let’s close down bathhouses, let’s warn people … Brit Hume: And you say it’s worsening now … David Horowitz: Yes. What the press allows itself to report is the fact that infection rates are going up, that now the black community accounts for 45 percent of the infected. Brit Hume: What will happen now? David Horowitz: Well, I am a Cassandra here. This is the worst reported story in the history of American journalism. If you read every account of this 20-year anniversary, there was never any attention to the public health problem … Brit Hume: We’re giving a little here … David Horowitz, thanks for being here. (originally aired June 14, 2001) |
