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Reprinted from the New York Post, March 19, 2004
Straight AIDS Myth Shattered
“A disease-free man who has unprotected sex with a
drug-free woman stands a one in 5 million chance of contracting
HIV."
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The public health experts - and their amen corner in the media -
owe Helen Gurley Brown an apology. The legendary Cosmopolitan editor
was vilified in 1993 when she published a piece called "The
Myth of Heterosexual AIDS." But she was right.
Eleven years later, Details is asking: "Whatever Happened to
AIDS and Straight Men?" The article states, "A disease-free
man who has unprotected sex with a drug-free woman stands a one
in 5 million chance of contracting HIV."
The story by Kevin Gray also cites a joke that made the rounds of
the New York City Department of Health as statistics came in showing
that the predicted spread of AIDS to heterosexuals wasn't happening:
Q: What do you call a man who got HIV from his girlfriend? . A:
A liar.
"I feel somewhat vindicated," Brown told the Post.
Michael Fumento, who wrote the original 1990 book titled "The
Myth of Heterosexual AIDS," said, "I'm not waiting for
an apology. It's not going to happen."
When Basic Books published Fumento's tome, "Distributors refused
to handle it," he says. "Stores refused to carry it. And
at many stores that did have it, clerks left it in the basement."
Celia Farber, who wrote an AIDS column in Spin magazine, was routinely
attacked because she refused to rehash the propaganda put out by
AmFAR and other groups.
"Everybody who was wrong got journalism awards. Everybody who
was right got all but driven from the profession," Farber said.
Farber exposed the conspiracy between profit-hungry drug companies,
researchers who wanted more funding, homosexuals who didn't want
the disease to be known as "the gay plague," and conservatives
who wanted to turn back the sexual revolution.
"They believed in what they were doing, not what they were
saying," Fumento said. "They knew it was lies. They felt
the end justified the means."
At a recent editorial meeting at Seed, the new science magazine,
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Laurie Garrett supposedly threatened
to quit when a colleague suggested a story about Peter Duesberg,
a leading retrovirologist.
Duesberg lost his funding, his laboratory, and his students when
he announced in 1987 that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. "He lost
everything," said one insider. Duesberg switched to cancer
research, and is now touted to win a Nobel Prize.
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