As another World AIDS Day dawns this morning, prepare for the usual media blitz of stories designed to promote more spending on failed approaches to HIV/AIDS, and more bashing of the Bush Administration despite increases in spending by the billions each year.
Here are some of the questions that the media probably won’t ask the professional HIV/AIDS lobby, which grows ever fatter while the human tragedy rises:
• What have American taxpayers gotten for the $20 billion per year (and rising) government spending on HIV/AIDS?
• What has happened to the more than half a billion condoms that the United States taxpayers have distributed to Third World countries during the past seven years, even while the media have attacked the Bush Administration’s emphasis on abstinence?
• Federal funding for HIV/AIDS has increased dramatically every year since 1993, yet the number of new infections has not declined. Why do we spend more money every year on prevention programs that have failed to prevent new infections?
• Why do billions of dollars continue to flow to organizations and programs that have been a colossal failure by any yardstick?
• Why does the government spend far more on AIDS than cancer or heart disease, which each kill more than 10 times more people annually in the U.S.?
• After 25 years, why don’t the AIDS experts even know how many people are really infected? Just last week, UNAIDS admitted it had overestimated the global numbers by millions and CDC is expected to announce that it undercounted the number of U.S. cases by tens of thousands.
• Why is the onus on potential victims to take personal responsibility for having “safe sex” instead of the people who are already infected with HIV/AIDS, as is the case with other medical epidemics?
• Why are health officials in major cities like Washington, D.C., Chicago and San Francisco allowing the reopening of gay bathhouses, which facilitate the promiscuous sex that fuels the epidemic?
• With CDC statistics showing that HIV/AIDS in the United States is still astronomically higher among men who have sex with men (MSM), why are AIDS officials getting away with saying all Americans are equally at risk?
• Why have most of the media ignored studies, such as one in the American Journal of Public Health in June 2003 about a program among African-American female adolescents that reported that “17.8 percent of the adolescents acquired an STD despite 100 percent condom use.”