Infektion: Behold a Pale Horse pp.445-447

 In the context of this book, the AIDS crisis had crested. Not to say that it was gone, or that the epidemic was over; but that the initial wave had receded. Thanks to the efforts of people like Surgeon General C. Everett Coop; the American population learned a great deal of how AIDS/HIV was spread and how to prevent it. The population learned this despite protests from the Reagan administration and their evangelical base. When Cooper sits down to write the book a few things have occurred: the information about AIDS is out, everyone feels confident about how the disease is spread, and the long tentacles of a Soviet disinformation campaign have worked their way into the American counterculture.

Cooper is doing one of two things, and neither of them are good. He’s either adopted the conspiracy theorists’ strategy of just denying every mainstream or he’s lost the ability to be incredulous about claims that fall into his view. I doubt that he’s a willing player here.

What Cooper is claiming here is that HIV/AIDS is not a virus evolved from a SIV in central Africa that mutated into HIV; rather he is claiming that the US government created AIDS as a biological weapon. I’ve written about the Soviet effort here, so I’m not going to repeat that. Soviet intelligence campaigns were not about trying to convince the American populace that this conspiracy theory was true: they were about creating discord. Create enough unhappy angry people who think that the story could be true. That’s all they needed, it’s why they funded anti-vaccination movements in 2008, and again in 2020; this is why they’ve been funding right-wing extremists podcaster, and why they supported both sides in the civil rights movement. Does Cooper know this? I doubt it, but he’s absolutely doing the thing they want him to do.

Cooper’s first piece of evidence is a Senate Appropriations hearing in 1969 for the fiscal year of 1970. Underneath the title page we actually get some words from Cooper…maybe, but someone typed a header detailing the actual path of the conspiracy. This is interesting, especially for this book to actually have a coherent conspiracy theory story. He writes, “In 1969 (3 years before the World Health Organization’s request) the United States Defense Department requested and got 10 Million to make the AIDS virus in lab(s) as a political/ethnic weapon to be used mainly against blacks.”

3 years before the WHO’s request for what? The HIV virus? It’s unclear what he’s driving at. Conspiracy theorists are going to be as wary of the WHO as they are of the UN so it will not surprise me if he thinks that WHO was also developing the HIV virus, but why the competition? In his world everything is controlled by the New World Order/Illuminati; so, this competition doesn’t make sense.

The conspiracy that the Russians helped spread as the HIV targeted African Americans and homosexuals. Early reporting of the disease called it “GRIDS” or “Gay Related Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome.” The virus obviously doesn’t target people based on their sexual orientation or their ethnicity; but this was the original story and once it was seen as a “gay-disease” the straights were hesitant to admit that they had the condition. This was, after all, the 80s and the culture was not nearly as accepting towards “alternative” lifestyles.

The claim that it targeted African-Americans was based solely on racism. Because needle sharing was an actual vector for transmission and “those people” were all drug addicts the rest of the conspiracy just writes itself. Understand that AIDS was seen by a segment of the population as a disease you got because you deserved it either through your lifestyle or because you were a criminal. It’s independent of the conspiracy theory but if you buy the first one you can write the conspiracy theory as though white people didn’t get HIV at first.

The rest of his Cooper’s intro claims that HIV was inserted into the small-pox vaccine in Africa in 1977. Cooper doesn’t know this, but his position is contradicted by the fact that the first known person to have contracted HIV/AIDS was Arvid Noe, a Norwegian Sailor in 1966. It’s likely that Noe contracted it in the early 60s, but that is speculation. The conspiracy theory is completely contradicted by this known fact.

The Senate Hearing presented as evidence is not specific enough to compel the conspiracy theory. All we can take from it is that the US military wanted funds to pursue biological weapons. Bioweapons, especially those which are self-reproducing (unlike say Anthrax), represent a case where control of the weapon can escape control. Even if we concede that AIDS targeted homosexual populations, there is no reasonable expectation that it would stay there. It is one of the great triumphs of Richard Nixon that he terminated the US bioweapons program in 1969.

The next evidence that Cooper has is a cut out from the LA Times dated “9/26/90” titled “AIDS Taking Heavy Toll of Children.” The article claims that by the year 2000 10 million children could be infected. Cooper disagrees, he thinks the already existing 400,000 cases of child AIDS means that they are all practicing homosexuals or IV drug users. What Cooper fails to realize is that breast milk can transmit AIDS and that in the poor areas of Africa where medical practices concerning AIDS have not arrived yet (remember this was written in 1990) transmission is not limited to the US idea of “risk group.” Cooper also doesn’t understand the idea of a “projection.” While his snippet is brief it’s very clear that it is a concern that so many children could acquire HIV/AIDS if current trends continued. It’s not a report of factual data but rather this is what the data will look like if nothing changes.

One of the simplest methods to prevent transmission of HIV is the use of condoms, a method which the Vatican heavily opposed in the 90s directly contributing to the spread of the disease (and which they are only lukewarm about now).

Cooper isn’t questioning the math, what he’s questioning is how the disease is spread. For a conspiracy theorist there needs to be panic and immediacy, so he needs the virus to spread through touch or air; blood and bodily fluid transmission is too slow. He also thinks that it could be insects, but that’s all we get.

To repeat from every post in the appendix so far: there is no need for this to be here. It could have been inside the proper book. It’s nice that we get a coherent theory but there is so little going on here. Give us more than two pages of a Senate hearing with one page being the title. That is all we have for appendix D. Next week is Appendix E: The New World Order.