By Walter Williams, Creators Syndicate, Inc.

August 1996 – Last November, the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan, independent research arm of Congress, released its findings in a report called “Environmental Tobacco Smoke and Lung Cancer Risk.” In evaluating the Environmental Protection Agency’s claim that environmental tobacco smoke was a class-A carcinogen, causing 3,000 deaths per year, the Congressional Research Service concluded, “It is possible that very few, even no, deaths can be attributed to environmental tobacco smoke…. The statistical evidence does not appear to support a conclusion that there are substantial health effects of passive smoking.”

Now comes the revelation of more government deceit and manipulation of the American people by way of the Centers for Disease Control. In a story titled “AIDS Fight Is Skewed by Federal Campaign Exaggerating Risks” in the Wall Street Journal (May 1,1996), Amanda Bennett and Anita Sharpe report a woeful tale of government deceit.

The CDC’s propaganda message is: Anyone could get AIDS! The fact of business is that for most heterosexuals, the risk of getting AIDS from a single act of sex is smaller than the risk of ever being struck by lightning. A recent major study concludes that the average risk from a one-time heterosexual encounter, with someone not in a high-risk group, is 1 in 5 million without a condom and 1 in 50 million for condom users. However, a single act of anal sex with an infected partner or a single injection with an AIDS-tainted needle carried a 1-in-50 chance of infection. Indeed, of all reported AIDS cases, 83% are homosexuals and intravenous drug users.

Why the lie? Here’s what was said by Dr. Walter Dowdle, a virologist who helped create the CDC’s anti-AIDS office in the early 1980s: “As long as this was seen as a gay disease or, even worse, a disease of drug abusers, that pushed the disease way down the ladder (of people’s priorities).” Dr. Dowdle and others thought there wouldn’t be political support for AIDS prevention and research if the majority of heterosexuals believed they and their families were only minimally at risk. Thus, the CDC’s public relations ploy was to deliberately create ads where the subjects wouldn’t be identified as homosexual or intravenous drug users. CDC official John Ward said, “I don’t see much downside in slightly exaggerating (AIDS risk).”

The CDC strategy paid off. Taxpayer funding for CDC’s AIDS-related medical research soared from $341 million in 1987 to $1.65 billion today. CDC’s AIDS-prevention dollars went from $136 million in 1987 to $584 million this year.

With all the lying about AIDS, we might ask questions about how the CDC is spending our money. The CDC’s largest prevention program is AIDS testing. In 1994, it gave 2.4 million costly AIDS tests. Only 13% of those tests were given to the high-risk population: homosexual or bisexual men and intravenous drug users.

But Washington doesn’t have a monopoly of doing things completely backward. A California study found that 85% of AIDS cases were among men who had sex with men, but prevention programs targeting this group received only 9% of state AIDS prevention dollars.

There are those in the medical profession who’ve tried to be honest. In the 1980s, Stephen C. Joseph, former New York City commissioner of public health, blasted the notion that AIDS was making inroads into the general population. Today, Dr. Joseph, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs at the Pentagon, says, “Political correctness has prevented us from looking at the issue (AIDS) squarely in the eye and dealing with it. It is the responsibility of the public-health department to tell the truth.”