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You are here: Home › David Gilbert › AIDS Conspiracy? Tracking the Real Genocide (by David Gilbert) AIDS Conspiracy? Tracking the Real Genocide (by David Gilbert) Filed under: David Gilbert, Texts March 2, 2001 Did you like this article? Share it with your friends! Save [toc] to read reviews of this essay click here An Almost Perfect Fit AIDS – which can so heartlessly take people away in their prime of life – is the lethal scourge of our day, and it is still light years away from being brought under control. This epidemic seems to have an uncanny knack for attacking people that the dominant society considers “undesirable”: gays, injection drug users (IDUs), and prisoners. And AIDS has increasingly become a grim reaper in the Black and Latino communities within the U.S. and among Third World people internationally. The commonly cited U.S. statistic that Black people have twice the rate of AIDS as white Americans understates the problem because it is based on a cumulative figure (that is, the total number since 1981). But early on in the epidemic a large majority of the diagnosed cases were among white gay men. (It is very possible that there were many undiagnosed cases among IDUs – particularly Black and Latino – who lacked access to decent medical care.) Looking at new rather than cumulative cases gives us a better picture of what is going on now. In 1992 the rate of new cases for Latinos was 2.5 times higher than for whites.((Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report, March 1993.)) The stark Black/white ratios for the rate of new AIDS cases in 1993 was 5/1 for men and 15/1 for women. ((CDC figures reported in the New York Times ( NYT), 9/9/94.)) By then, AIDS had become the leading cause of death of Black people between the ages of 25 and 44, ((NYT, 9/19/94.)) And it continues to get worse as the AIDS hurricane moves deeper into the ghettos and barrios. Internationally, the racial disparity is even worse: about 80% of the world’s 9 million deaths from AIDS through the end of 1995 have occurred in Africa, ((Figures are based on correlating the August, 1994 report (at the World Conference on AIDS, in Japan) by the Global AIBS Policy Coalition and the update of their figures cited in J. Osborne, “The Unbeliever, New York Times Book Review, 4/7/96, p.8. Global Coalition estimates are somewhat higher – and in my opinion probably more accurate – than official figures from the World Health Organization.)) and this plague has already orphaned over 2 million children there. (( J. Mann, D. Tarantola, and T. Netter, eds., AIDS in the World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p.90, gives an estimate of 1.3 million by 1992. The death toll has more than doubled since then.)) In short, there is a powerful correlation between medical epidemiology and social oppression. What is more, that mesh fits – like a tailor made suit – on the extensive body of history of chemical and biological warfare (CBW) and medical experiments against people of color, prisoners, and other unsuspecting citizens. Such CBW in North America started when the early European settlers used smallpox infected blankets as a weapon of genocide against Native Americans. It includes the pre-market testing of birth control pills, before proper dosage was known, on Puerto Rican and Haitian women who were not warned of the potentially severe side effects. Recent revelations about U.S. human radiation experiments led to a comprehensive review of all government agencies by a Presidential Advisory Committee. They found that there had been at least 4,000 U.S. government sponsored human radiation experiments, involving as many as 20,000 people, including some children, between 1944 and 1974. ((The Final Reports White House Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995. 925pp.).)) It has also been documented that the U.S. Army conducted hundreds of tests releasing “harmless” bacteria, viruses, and other agents in populated areas, including a test to see how a fungal agent thought mainly to affect Black people would spread. ((L. Cole, “OpEd” pieces, NYT 1/25/94 and 3/23/95.)) (For an excellent summary of U.S. CBW, see Bob Lederer’s article in Covert Action Information Bulletin, #28, Summer, 1987.) The most apposite example is the four decade-long Tuskegee Syphilis study. Starting in 1932, under U.S. Public Health Services auspices, about 400 Black men in rural Alabama were subjects in an experiment on the effects of untreated syphilis. They were never told the nature of their condition or that they could infect their wives and children. Although penicillin, which became available in the 1940s, was the standard of treatment for syphilis by 1951, researchers not only withheld treatment but forbade the men from seeking help elsewhere. This shameful “experiment” was stopped in 1972, only after a federal health worker blew the whistle. ((Stephen B. Thomas and Sandra Crouse Quinn, “The Tusk...

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