OVER the holiday period we are re-running our ten most-read articles of the year, in reverse order. This is No 4 and was first published on March 25.
IF YOU are British and of a certain age, you’ll remember the doomily portentous 1986/7 Aids warning campaign promoted by the UK government.
The slogan ran ‘Aids: Don’t Die of Ignorance.’
Here’s the most memorable ad. It featured the gravelly voice of John Hurt warning: ‘There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all. It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure. The virus can be passed during sexual intercourse with an infected person. Anyone can get it, man or woman. So far it has been confined to small groups. But it’s spreading . . . so protect yourself.’
I remember it well because I was at exactly the right age – early twenties – for it to mess up my sex life. It didn’t kill sexual activity, quite. But it definitely put a dampener on it. You still did the deed, when you could find a willing partner. But you worried about it afterwards especially if, like me, you had hypochondriacal tendencies. Clearly there was a serious risk: there had to be! Why else would the government spend millions on this lavish, in-your-face campaign if Aids wasn’t a major problem?
But it wasn’t. Every word of that campaign was either a lie, an exaggeration or a misdirection. ‘Don’t die of ignorance!’ it declared. Yet ignorance was exactly what it was promoting.
How do I know this? Well, it has been a long, long journey.
The first stage was gentle cynicism. After the initial shock of those ads, it became increasingly clear that the government had been overstating the case. Yes, Aids did indeed appear to be taking a terrible toll among those ‘small groups’: haemophiliacs, intravenous drug users and homosexual men, primarily. But there was no evidence that the disease was spreading significantly to the broader community.
At the time, those of us who realised this tended to give the government the benefit of the doubt. Yes, the government had, strictly speaking, been lying to us. But it was a good lie. A noble lie. It was pretending Aids affected everyone in order to spare the blushes of those it did affect. If you were gay or a haemophiliac or an intravenous drug user you wouldn’t feel isolated, marginalised. You could feel that the whole country was united with you, sharing some of your pain and anxiety.
I can’t remember how far I subscribed to this argument myself. Probably, knowing me, not greatly. I’ve never been a fan of ‘unless one of you owns up you’re all going to suffer’ collective punishments. And this felt very much like one of those: as if we were being treated like children who couldn’t be trusted to be told the whole truth lest we misuse that information for our own selfish ends. It was collectivism, communism basically, and I’ve never been into any of that, not even in my youthful idealism phase.
The second stage of my Aids awareness didn’t come till much later. It’s so recent, in fact, that if you had told me two years ago that Aids didn’t really exist and wasn’t caused by a virus called HIV, I would probably have rolled my eyes and changed the subject. What converted me was first my experience of the ‘pandemic’ and my recognition of the obvious parallels with the ‘Aids crisis’, which – from the Fauci connection to the suppression of effective drugs and the promotion of dodgy ones – was a dry run for Covid-19. And secondly, the informed wisdom of Robert F Kennedy Jr and of my most recent podcast guest Jon Rappoport.
Rappoport is the author of a 1988 book we all should have read (it would have spared us so much bother) called AIDS Inc. He began his researches in good faith, assuming – as any rational person would – that Aids was a genuine phenomenon. Little by little, though, he came to realise – as his subtitle put it – that this was the Scandal of the Century: a scam, effectively concocted by Big Pharma, the US Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, to push unnecessary, expensive and dangerous medical treatments on desperate, captive victim groups in the guise of ‘public health’.
Unless you’re very open-minded, impossibly cynical or irredeemably red-pilled, it’s a hard thesis to swallow. Among the obvious questions it raises are: ‘So what were all those people dying of?’ and ‘C’mon, if Aids was a fiction, surely we’d all know by now?’
The answer to the first question is it depends what victim category you are talking about. In Africa, for example, ‘Aids’ was – and still is – rebadged malnutrition. Its original nickname (as fans of Bob Mould and Sugar will know) was ‘The Slim’. With the diabolical genius we’ve since come to expect of Big Pharma, millions upon millions of starving Africans were turned into a problem the industry could lucratively solve simply by pretending that their emaciation was the result of a deadly new virus (probably spread from having sex with monkeys: nice dose of cheap racism there, Big Pharma liars!) rather than from not getting enough to eat.
With gay men, according to Rappoport (who was told this by front-line community workers) it was the bath houses. These were the orgiastic dens of iniquity, popular at the time, where you could take any number of drugs, have sex with any number of men, and stay up partying any number of hours till your immune system finally gave up the ghost and left you prey to all manner of fatal infections.
But what about the gay men who didn’t go to the bath houses? This is where the story gets truly shocking. Many of them were killed by the very drug that was supposed to save them, the much-lauded AZT. Designed as a cancer drug (but abandoned because it was so toxic, killing more people than it cured), AZT was heavily pushed by Anthony Fauci as the solution to the Aids crisis. In fact it made it much worse. As RFK Jr reports in his book The Real Anthony Fauci, once AZT was introduced the death rate ‘from Aids’ rose precipitously.
What’s particularly sad is that a lot of these victims were not even sick before they moved on to their fatal courses of AZT (the average survival time for those taking it was four months). They’d simply taken the test, been found to be ‘HIV-positive’ and had been frightened by the general hysteria into imagining that this would save their life. Among those who made this mistake were ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and tennis player Arthur Ashe.
A treatment more dangerous than the disease itself. Shrill public health campaigns dispensing misinformation. More effective, cheaper treatments being deliberately suppressed. An obsession with case numbers over fatality rates. Whistleblowing scientists, such as Peter Duesberg and Claus Köhnlein, silenced and proscribed by a corrupt medical establishment. So much of what happened during the Aids crisis seems with hindsight so eerily familiar. And with good reason: it was organised by the same people.
What’s frustrating is that even when you lay out the information as clearly as RFK Jr and Rappoport have done, there will be those – and perhaps they are even the majority – who prefer to believe the fabricated narrative to the uncomfortable truth. This is understandable. To comprehend fully what happened during the Aids crisis you must inevitably abandon many of the cosy assumptions that make our world seem nicer and friendlier than it actually is. These assumptions include some of the following notions: that doctors are all in the healing business; that the regulatory authorities are there to protect you; that drugs are not released on to the market without rigorous testing. The idea that medical doctors and scientists, in collusion with government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, would make up a disease in order to push a cure which killed you but made them rich is such a hard thing for most of us to grasp that we find it easier to believe the reassuring lie than accept the reality.
There’s another reason too, why the inventors of Aids have never been properly found out, let alone brought to justice: gaslighting. We’re talking about an entire system – the media, Hollywood, publishing, TV, schools, academe, the scientific institutions, big business, the political class, finance etc – all pushing the same message. Try questioning the Aids/HIV narrative as a specialist science or health journalist and see how far you get: you’ll find that ‘experts’ will no longer wish to speak to you, institutions no longer prepared to co-operate with you. Or try to get funding for a movie blowing the whistle on what really happened . . .
No one likes to think that they’re the hapless dupe of a massive psy-op. But the evidence is all around us, if only you know where and how to look. For example, I suspect it’s probably not coincidental that, at the height of the ‘pandemic’, Channel 4 treated us to a period drama series about the UK experience of Aids, written by Doctor Who showrunner/reviver Russell T Davies, called It’s A Sin.
Now I happen to think Davies is a hugely talented and watchable screenwriter, brilliant at creating likeable, believable characters, snappy, memorable dialogue and entertaining story arcs. But this, where an issue such as Aids is concerned, is what makes his fiction so dangerous. Of course, as an Establishment figure, Davies is going to promote the Establishment narrative. It’s A Sin achieved various nefarious objectives: it reinforced the notion that Aids was a thing; it got audiences talking once more about their memories and experiences of that era; it enabled politicians and commentators to pontificate about the period, drape themselves in rainbow flags and so on; and it hinted at contemporary parallels – that Covid-19 too is a genuine health crisis that we would do well take seriously and which the government really should do more to address . . .
When you analyse how the system works it just sounds like yet more conspiracy theorising. But it’s precisely this level of attention to detail by the progenitors of the Aids scam which explains why so many of us still think, against all the evidence, that it wasn’t a scam.