Was AIDS invented to wipe out gay men?
 

I have heard a few people suggest that AIDS was invented by the government to wipe out gay men. Except that it got out of control and spread to straight people due to blood transfusions and some gay men sleeping with women (bisexuals).

Do you think that there could be any truth in this. If it is true its scary to think that they might already have a cure and wont tell us.

:hmm:

There are viruses analagous to HIV in other species -- chimps, cats, etc. It's not strange that humans have one too.

And although the date of the first case of AIDS is not widely agreed upon, even in the late 1970s I don't think the government would have had the technology to achieve this. For that matter, I don't think the government could do it today.

Nope, its pure bullshit.

I heard the Government created AIDS to get rid of Black people. They injected it in cocaine or some other drug and sold it the poor areas. But soon rich white people start doing drugs and that how it spread. I think it is Bullshit though.

AIDS started in Africa and the Virus originated in monkeys. It spread to humans because of monkey bites and people handling dead monkeys and getting its blood in open wouds and such.

I thought it was cause some guy fucked a monkey?

Wait, that's as lame as the idea of the government inventing AIDS....


Okay, I don't mean lame. That's harsh. Just a bit far fetched.

Next comes the poster claiming that God sent AIDS to ravage the sodomizers and fornicators as punishment for their detestible sins! Good grief, people! "injected in cocaine"? "invented by the government to wipe out gay men"?

http://www.aegis.com/topics/timeline/default.asp

There is some real information out there.

Actually...rich white people were doing coke long before people in "poor areas" ever had access to it. Ever seen the movie Blow?

I heard one theory about scientists using monkeys to grow Polio vaccines, and accidently transferred S.I.V. (monkeye H.I.V.) to humans.

I was listening to a former DoD employee being interviewed on a radio show on WBAI. He claimed to have heard a speech to a Senate committee in which the speaker tol;d them that in 10 to 15 years, they would have a bio-weapon capable of destroying the human immune system. That was allegedly in 1969.

I can't find it anywhere, even on the Internet. I would expect at least one or two of the conspiracy nuts out there to have something about it if it had been said, but I can find nothing.

As for the Polio vaccine theory, it sounds much more plausible, but I would think it initially would have spread much more quickly and been more widespread if that had happened.

This is the way I understood the transfer started. It also had to do with the people eating the monkeys, a very common act in those countries. Poor hygiene and medical accomodations quickened and widened the spread to healthcare workers.

the disease wasn't created to kill gay people.

however, Reagan did turn down funding AIDs fighters due to his lack of concern. at the time the disease mostly killed gay people only.

from what i understand, a monkey species carried it. many tribes eat monkeys. it's rabies part 2.

I think it's just population control. I mean think about it, if eveyone lived to 120 years old and never got sick earth would be a pretty crowded place.

no

Any group intelligent enough to develope the AIDS virus would also know that gays aren't strictly gay, and that the virus would migrate between social groups.

If it were like that then i guess the U.S. Government also had control of the situation in Africa, where it all originated.... I dunno, it must be all part of their master plan :D

True dat!!

Here is Snopes answer to the AIDS questions that have been passed around:
Rumors about AIDS includes the theory that it was "put in K-Y Jelly by the Centers for Disease Control to eliminate homosexuals."

It's amazing soem of the rumors that get passed around so much they start to carry weight. AIDS being created on purpose is a rumor that should never have lived this long. We are talking about a killer that continues to take lives with no end in sight. To say that it was unleashed on the world knowingly and maliciously is just insane.

You're right. As far as I know the HIV Virus cannot survive more than a few minutes in the open air. This kind of transmission would be nigh impossible.

Is it because we is black? ;)

here's some interesting reading
http://www.geocities.com/mdmorrissey/cantwell4.htm

It's Green monkeys to be precise and I believe it was contracted because of the ingestion of raw monkey brains from that species. Also the idea that someone invented a VIRUS yes it's a virus which cannot be controlled, tracked, cured, etc. to rid the world of gays or minorities & junkies is just ignorant.....because the it's a virus it is unpredictable you couldn't control it like that....the rich racist white man would give the virus to blacks because he hated them and next thing ya know his daughter slept with a black man and got it from him. So to think that they would be as stupid to think a plan like that could possibly work is foolish unless.....they sent the virus to another country as a form of biological warfare and it circled back and came here to America like on the movie Outbreak. Not only gay people use ky jelly, not only black people use cocaine, etc. Now the theory that they actually have a cure for the disease and refuse to give it so they can capitalize on the money used to buy medicines is somewhat logical but it also costs a lot of money to make the medicines as well as test them to make sure they won't kill the patients, etc.

Asta!!

Re: Was AIDS invented to wipe out gay men?
 

aids is spread more rapidly through heterosexual relationships than homosexual. I think they'd realize that to take out the gays, they'd be taking out some straights too...and not all the gays.

That is just something that ignorant homophobic people (who are almost always closeted gays) came up with. I can't believe anyone would be dumb enough to even come up with it or even believe it. Why should anyone even care if a dude or chic is gay? Thats unless they have those feelings themselves and are afraid of it. And don't give me its a sin cause a man (not god) wrote it in the bible. If people went by that then so is masturbation and there isn't a man on this planet that has never at least done that once. One of my best friends is gay and you'll never find a better man on this earth and i can't imaginethat anyone would come up with a virus that would cause a cruel death like that to anyone much less him just because he prefers something else sexually then the majority!

right.

:)

totally agree with you

i swear some people do make up crap sometimes

:)

gay men have just as much as a right as straight to be on this earth.

It is widely known that AIDS is man made, but I dont believe it was deliberately used to kill any social group or ethnic group... it was simply an agent of biological warfare that went horribly out of control.

Then providing a source for this claim won't be hard, will it? And if it's "widely known," then the details shouldn't be too hard either: where it was constructed, possibly who was involved...?

I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but the idea that an extremely fast-evolving organism, with many analogues in other species (FIV for one), was created by humans with the limited technology of the late 1970s just makes me laugh. So please, prove me wrong. Show me a remotely reputable source that says "AIDS is man-made." Not "AIDS might be man-made" or "is AIDS man-made?" but "AIDS is man-made." Something with some internal support (citations, etc) would be nice.

This is Tilted Paranoia, granted, but even here you don't get to make claims like "It's widely known that..." without providing at least some evidence to prove that what you claim is widely held is, in fact, widely held.

Yeah, I've never heard of AIDS being man-made.

The craziest AIDS origin I've heard of is "it started in humans when a man fucked a monkey." Maybe true, maybe not, I don't know.

I'd like to know how AIDS started. I've always thought it's been around just like anything else.

Knock yourself out:
OPV AIDS hypothesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You posted in Tilted Paranoia; don't blame me, I'm just the messenger.

From your source:

Strange Famous: I did not ask for sources supporting the theory that AIDS in man-made. What I asked for was a source for your assertion that such a theory is widely held. Since you are in the habit of claiming things are "common knowledge" or "widely known" when they are in fact nothing of the kind, it stuck me as a pertinent question. However, I will now address the irrelevant source you supplied to answer a question I did not ask.

From your source:

And what is this "real story?" How do we know it is, in fact, "the real story?"

There is no such thing as a "Black heterosexual disease" or "white male homosexual disease." Disease is simply disease. AIDS migrated from hetero- to homosexual persons and back again the same way all such illnesses do: sexual contact between bisexual persons.

Unsourced, but hardly unsurprising. Scientists work with scientists all the time.

Likewise the Soviet accusations of the US Gov't poisoning the water supply in Afghanistan, along with many other equally ridiculous accusations made by the Soviet Gov't during the Cold War years. The sudden disappearance of a piece of propaganda is not evidence.

What evidence? Evidence which is frequently alluded to, but never revealed or sourced, is also known as bullshit.

Recorded where? What lab?

Unsourced and unverifiable.

Unsourced and unverifiable. If FIV was created in a laboratory, as the author alleges to know, where was it? When? "The mid-1970s" is not workable here: he's claiming detailed knowledge of this.

Assumes a foregone conclusion: that AIDS was introduced. Unproven, unsourced, and unverifiable.

I could go on, Strange, but this "source" of yours is a joke, besides being irrelevant to the question I asked in the first place. It keeps insisting that certain things happened simply as a matter of course, without providing any evidence that they did. Put bluntly, this source states that the sky is brown because a meteorite destroyed Madagascar in 1996, but without any further elaboration or proof of any of the alleged facts. As a lawyer would say, this entire source is an exercise in assuming facts not in evidence.

A good portion (well over half) of the sources for that article comes from the published works of Dr. Alan Cantwell, Jr. From his Wikipedia entry:

Actually, BG, the article -itself- is one of Cantwell's works, and as you point out seems to draw most of its' source material from the author's own previous works. Circular logic.

Oh, I missed that. Regardless, it appears his theory has been actively dismissed by at least one medical practitioner/researcher. A guy who specializes in vaccines, no less.

Lets talk about the facts.

Do you deny that the US and the Soviet Union both were doing WIDESPREAD research into biological weapons in the 1970's and 1980's?

Or do you accept as I do and most people do that both "superpowers" did research biological weapons?

This the first question...does the suspect have form?

_

And when I say that it is widely held that AIDS is man made, I do not mean that is in some way an "artificial" or "manufactured" virus... I mean that the circumstances that lead to the AIDS epidemic were in fact testing in biological weaponary which got massively out of control. This was an animal virus which was communicated to humans as a result of US military testing.

"Man-made" quite clearly means that humans created it.

You're saying isolated military testing created a sweeping disease epidemic?

If it's widely held that it came as a result of military testing, then why isn't it widely held?

Do you mean it is widely held amongst conspiracy theorists?

You're moving the goalposts, Strange. I asked you to support your contention that:

ie; Lots of people know something for a fact...

Your contention was that lots of people know for a fact that AIDS was man-made. The how/why of that "making" are irrelevant to the question at hand: "Is it 'widely known' that AIDS is man-made?"

You also create a false dichotomy here with this statement:

If the virus was not manufactured in some way, it was not man-made. If it -was- man-made, it would by definition have to be manufactured. Now, if you meant that the -context- of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic was man-made: ie that HIV may have been a naturally-occurring pathogen which was accidentally released into a non-native habitat (similar to Africanized bees in the 1950s), this passage might make some sense.

You have not answered my original question, Strange, so I'll ask again:

Please provide some source to back up your contention that it is widely known that AIDS/HIV was man-made.

It's not out of the "realm of possibility" that our Military Industrial Complex would secretly monitor the tracking, testing & sampling of the AIDS Virus. C'mon now... Let's not be too naive. I met an ex military medical staffer back in the early 80s who absolutely swore that it was tested & controlled by the US Military. I will not say who they were targeting, because it is so negative and against everything I believe in and I have no real proof to support theat "medical professional's story".

Suffice to say this information is way beyond sad and totally deplorable and I hope that ex military medical C.O. was totally wrong.

If you never hear from me again, then you'll know that guy was correct.

The Origin of AIDS and HIV May Not Be What You Have Learned

This website thinks it was caused by the Hepatitis B vaccine trials in the mid 70s. The vaccine was given to gay men in NYC/SanFran/LA and men in Africa. Those demographics were at risk for Hepatitis B, so it made sense to give them the vaccine. ***Puts on conspiracy hat... I know that the government and drug company would not want to info to not be found out if it were true. Imagine the lawsuits, the lack of faith in vaccines, the knowledge that some company introduced a scary virus and put the public at risk) And I wouldn't be surprised with who was in the White House when AIDS was discovered***

That sounds more credible than an ineffective bio-weapon or the rapid escalation in cases that wouldn't occur from a cut hunter or money-banging one-off transmission (You would have seen HIV/AIDS for decades in order to get to the numbers in the 80s). The military probably would have wanted to study air-borne viri with week long gestation, but communicative, periods and 100% mortality in a month.

http://www.whale.to/b/rappoport.html

If you read the bottom of the page from the last bolded title down, it goes into another conspiracy theory. That the doctors in the 70s knew the Hepatitis B vaccine would cause problems with the immune system. Then there was a big campaign for gay men to get tested. The tests would give false positives for people who received the vaccine. Then they went on drugs that would kill off bone marrow and the immune system, which would cause AIDS, and make lots of money for the drug companies and doctors...

Interesting conspiracy theory for a Friday night. And exactly the type of real investigative reporting our media should be doing. I don't know what happened, but it proves you never know who to trust.

To be clear, although I think already my statement was understandable to most people, I am stating that the AIDS EPIDEMIC is man made, not that the virus itself is man made.

This is "widely held" in the same way that it is widely held that the US govt murdered John F Kennedy. The proof has been hidden, and so many theories about how and why exist, but in their guts most people believe this to be true.

And you know this....how? Where do you get your notion that most people believe this to be true?

-That- is my question, Strange. You have a habit of declaring that huge percentages of people agree with you on a given topic (99% of TFP, etc), and then being unwilling or unable to substantiate your claims of support. You simply keep falling back on "everyone knows" and "it's common knowledge" and "XYZ(huge) percent agree with me" rather than providing support for any of the things you state. If you're going to claim that huge percentages of people agree with you, you need to be able to substantiate those claims or else they're going to be treated as nothing more that hot air, especially since you have a distinct propensity for claiming this during discussions where -nobody- agrees with you.

Even when we're discussing conspiracy theories, Strange, that doesn't float. Even conspiracies require -some- kind of workable standards of proof, or else we might as well all go whole-hog and subscribe to David Icke and his "Reptilian" nonsense. It's one thing to discuss secret societies and their impact on world affairs or the conduct of wealthy families: it's quite another to state that the members of those families are actually telepathic shape-shifting 7-foot lizards from another planet...and EVERYone knows it!

If you believe that a lone gunman killed JFK thats a view you are entitled to, but not one the majority of people hold.

It is the same around AIDS theories. People do not know the truth, and the true spread of the disease spreading into humans is mysterious... but most people suspect and believe that the US govt and biological weapons testing was involved.

We know the US Intelligence forces were active in the area at this time. We know that both the US and USSR were involved in trying to develop biological weapons. We know that these kind of things have happened in the past (the US govt has admitted to delibaretely infecting and withholding treatment to black civilians with syphilis, something that was still going on in the 1970's)

So to summarise for you

We know that the spread of the disease into humans is NOT explained by any conventional scientific explanation

We know that the US govt has done things like this before

We know in that the US govt actively was researching biological warfare at ths time

We see the smoking gun, and the majority of people draw the most likely conclusion from the available facts. Perhaps you find it more comforting to hide from the truth when it is frightening or disturbing... this is your choice.

I like to think I have a wide base of people I know well, and I've never heard any of them say JFK was capped by the government or more than one person. And that's coming from people who like him and people who dislike him.

For every piece of "evidence" you have, there's another piece of real evidence that proves otherwise.

I'd like to know where you get your information from, using words like "majority" and "most" can be backed up with a source of some sort. Maybe in your British circle of paranoid friends most of them believe in an AIDS conspiracy, but the outside world does not believe what you say.

Your wild assumptions are just not facts, Strange.

right,and you regularly ask your mates for their views on who killed JFK do you?

I do not regularly ask them, no. But I do know their opinion about it, and it's not what you say it is.

I still want to know why you think these ideas are "widely held" and where you get your information from. It seems you're just making all of this up. No one is buying your bullshit claims.

And I am sure the US state is very happy that some people are very happy to accept "two legs bad, four legs good" as their understanding of the world.

However, some people choose to question authority.

Allow me to summarize for you.

We know that you are outraged by the IRA

We know that you are not in favor of affording the same rights to those with unpopular opinions as to those whose opinions you find acceptable (according to quote in The_Dunedan's signature)

We know that several weeks before you were born, the European Court of Human Rights found the British government guilty of mistreating prisoners in Northern Ireland

We know that the day after you were born, a massive blizzard hit New England, dumping over 27 inches of snow on major cities, killing over 100 and causing $560M of damage ($1.7b adjusted for inflation in today's dollars.)

We know that Boston in particular has a disproportionately high number of people of Irish descent compared to the rest of the US.

We see the smoking gun, that your birth brought about the violent storm that avenged the mistreatment of their ...

Wait, no, this makes no sense, just like your bioweapon argument.
I've discussed it several times with people over a few drinks. None of them accept the second gunman theory.

Yes, lets talk about facts and not silly, uneducated speculation.

1. Correlation does not imply causation.
   
2. A fact is another way of saying demonstratable truth. That any percentage of a population believes in something does not automatically make that something true.
   
3. In the way you use the term, "common sense" is a fancy way for the uneducated or willfully ignorant to attempt to give their unfounded opinions weight via unanimous opinion. See #2.
   
4. That you cannot distinguish between the virus (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) and the corresponding syndrome (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) certainly doesn't help your cause.
   
5. ALL biological weapons that I know of require an aerosol delivery system. HIV can only be transmitted via bodily fluids because it requires a very specific environment to avoid structural degradation - making it a poor candidate for weaponization.
   
6. There is no "debate" amongst the global scientific community regarding the origins of HIV. All empirical data indicates that present-day HIV was initially a zoonotic retrovirus that was transfered from one of the Ape species (most likely the Pan genus) to humans (it is suggested that this took place in/around Congo). Exactly how, when and where the virus mutated have yet to be determined. Anyone who tells you otherwise has both willfully ignored mountains of evidence AND cherry-picked data to support a pre-formed, prejudicial conclusion.
   
7. An op-ed written by a discredited dermatologist for the purposes of self-promoting his books DOES NOT constitute "debate".

Now it's your turn to supply facts.

This might be a second topic, but would scientists ever admit to causing something that would harm the publics view of them?

Saying Nature caused it is an easy out. From them losing their jobs, lack of trust in vaccines/medical research, trails/lawsuits/lawyers, and scorn for years and years, admitting it was an accident would never fly. And neither would admitting a conspiracy targeting certain people (but I would only put that at a 4% chance).

So, what empirical data is there that proves that this would spread in the way it did in the first few years?

By "spread", I assume you mean how did the virus "jump" from chimpanzees to humans? Once established, the human infection spread like wildfire due to many sociological factors.


HIV/AIDS Basics | Questions and Answers | CDC HIV/AIDS

Origin of HIV-1 in the chimpanzee Pan troglodytes ... [Nature. 1999] - PubMed result

Direct evidence of extensive diversity of HIV-1 in... [Nature. 2008] - PubMed result

The origins of acquired immune deficiency syndrome... [Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2001] - PubMed result

The evolution of HIV-1 and the origin of AIDS. [Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2010] - PubMed result

http://www.aidsreviews.com/files/1999_1_4_238_249.pdf

There seems to be trend to blame some select group for an attempt of de-population at the root of, or to substantiate the conspiracy theory of the release of AIDS.

I have tried to pick it out of the links, but there seems to be an assumption that the motive is obvious. It isn't to me. Can anybody explain why such elaborate conspiracies would be hatched and controlled? What is the motive, and what is to be gained by the depopulation of Africa, or the decimation of (currently) gay men & women?

To me it violates the law of parsimony (Occam's Razor) and I cannot entertain it.

Then why does it show up in blood from the 1930's?

It would be the worst biological agent in the history of man. it's not airborne, its frankly hard to contract HIV, and it requires bodily fluid exchange.

You sir, have no idea what you're talking about.

Science is not a secretive cabal of men in white labcoats and scientists are not a single-minded group of individuals with identical motivations, codes of ethics, and principles of action. Asking if scientists would ever do something is as invalid of a question as asking if blondes would ever do something or whether black people would do something. They are a cross-section of (well-educated) humans. They would act as you could expect anyone to.
Racism and discrimination against "deviant" sexualities are powerful motivations.

HIV-infected people were observed and documented in the 1950's.

Vaccines disrupt and suppress the immunodefense system. That is, by definition, how they work.

I'm not sure if I'm following you. Chemotherapy disrupts the shit out of the immunodefense system. So do the anti-rejection drugs that accompany organ transplants and skin grafts. That is why people recovering from said treatment are at a very high risk of opportunistic pathogens. A weakened immunodefense system is not the same thing as AIDS.

Were your statement correct then people infected with HIV that did not recieve treatment would not develop AIDS. Conversely, people who had not been infected with HIV but had recieved chemotherapy would somehow "miraculously conceive" AIDS.

--------------------------------------------------

The author of your article makes reference to shadowy, secret government representatives, provides no verifiable evidence to support his claims and even goes so far as to state quite plainly that "there is no connection between HIV and AIDS."

No, they do the opposite. They introduce a weakened or killed infectious agent that activates the immune system and causes it to produce antibodies specific to that agent.

Yeah, dude. Which disrupts the immunodefense system and can cause both signs and symptoms of disease.

-----

Edit: Yeah, I see what I did there. You're right and I'm a dick.

Timeline of early AIDS cases - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I never knew about this Gaëtan Dugas slut. That is what I meant by spread rate. It went from one or two people here or there in the late 70s to 248 in a few years in the early 80s.

Then again, maybe he is a patsy... ;)

I still have doubts about them actually finding HIV in the 50s. (And since this is paranoia, maybe 'they' infected people earlier than 1977 in order to test the virus. ;) )

I did come across that 1977 date yesterday when I went to donate blood. One of the questions was if I had sex with a man since 1977. I wasn't alive then, but I'm surprised they didn't care about 1976 or 1975. How would they know that there were no cases of HIV in the USA prior to 1977 (besides the fact that they would probably be dead)?

This report that just came out today ties into this thread nicely, I think. That said, I don't think this story helps someone like Strange Famous in their battle for exposing the truth, as this is not biological warfare, something Strange claims was the purpose for developing/spreading AIDS.


US apologizes for infecting Guatemalans with STDs in the 1940s - CNN.com

I think what we're saying is a difference in semantics rather than opinion or understanding of facts. I think we're looking at the meaning of your use of "disrupts" differently but are clearly on the same side.

I saw this today as well. I'd bet that even if it was an accidental infection from the 1977 vaccine trials, that they would have had to come up with a good plan to cover it up. There would be too much fallout which I mentioned before (lawsuits, anti-vaccine public, scientists careers ruined...)

Threadjack:

Marlboro Reds were invented to kill heterosexual men.

And menthols are clearly targeting blacks for genocide.