The Magic's gone

National Review, Oct 19, 1992 by Michael Fumento

SAYING THAT President Bush had "dropped the ball" in the fight against AIDS, on September 25 Earvin "Magic" Johnson tendered his resignation from the National Commission on AIDS (NCA), to which the President had appointed him last November. The resignation, accompanied by a formal endorsement of Bill Clinton for President, came as no surprise: Johnson began threatening to quit the Commission shortly after his appointment, and he has already participated in celebrity fund raisers for Clinton. Johnson, as USA Today reported a few weeks back, "feels he was used because of his name." Perhaps this came as a shock to a man who earns about $12 million a year lending his name to everything from shoes to soft drinks to discount stores. Perhaps he was under the impression that he had been appointed to the NCA because of his expertise in retrovirology and epidemiology.

No matter. He did tell USA Today that, "They [the Commission] came up with all the data he [Bush] wanted. And he cut them down, left and right, in funding." If that's true, it does matter. And it does matter that the man who may be our next President has concurred, saying, "He [Johnson] knows that this Administration has not done anything on AIDS. We've got a good AIDS commission, a good AIDS report, good recommendations--no action."

Just what are this Commission, its "report," and its recommendations?

As with all wars, the war on AIDS has its propaganda unit, to help ensure that we remain united, and that is the NCA's function. It was rounded in 1988, including representatives chosen by Congress and the White House. Originally headed by Admiral James Watkins, it is now headed by June Osborn, who is also Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. "I think we are still at an impasse with the American public," she said last September. "Particularly in the center of this country, if you ask, 'Who does AIDS impact?' you still get the 1982 answer of: 'Gay men, intravenous drug addicts, and not me.'" Said Dr. Osborn on a later occasion, "This has permitted too many to detach from the fray... and retreat to indifference."

To counter this, the NCA and the AIDS establishment-- which includes Federal Government health agencies, AIDS activist groups, and the media--have worked tirelessly to spread the perception of an epidemic growing by leaps and bounds and increasingly spilling over from the original risk groups to the population at large. In the AIDS alarmist lexicon, some persons might be more at risk but nobody is less at risk. Thus, it's PC to say that blacks and Hispanics are at greater risk, and the NCA has done so, but it is not at all PC to say that whites are at less risk.

One group specifically targeted in NCA reports is women. For all the hoopla over the first interim NCA report released in December 1989 (the front page of New York Times; co-lead on the ABC nightly news), one would never know it was a mere seven pages long and contained only conclusions with no substantiation. One of those conclusions, trumpeted by the media, was that "the epidemic is reaching crisis proportions among women." Yet then, as now, women accounted for only about 10 per cent of AIDS cases. While it's true that the female percentage has grown, this reflects far less a growing crisis among women than a reduction in the growth rate among men. The key point is that all portions of the epidemic are going flat. Reported female cases from 1989 to 1990 increased 33 per cent. From 1990 to 1991 they increased only 15 per cent. Why a dramatically declining increase in female AIDS cases is cause for slamming the panic button is difficult to see.

HIV-infection data show no greater cause for alarm among women than data on actual AIDS cases. A 1989 study of more than 16,000 students at 19 U.S. college campuses showed an overall infection rate of 1 in 500. Of these, 95 per cent were male; the female rate was 1 in 5,000. A study which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released this past June and which was virtually ignored by the media was filled with bad news for A/DS alarmists, including the finding that HIV prevalence in childbearing women across the country "has remained unchanged over the past two years [and] similarly, the HIV prevalence in women's reproductive health clinics has shown no evidence of change in this period."

So much for "crisis proportions."

Indeed, statistics across the board belie the NCA's claims that, as Commission Vice Chairman David Rogers put it last September, "we have a steadily mounting crisis on our hands . . ." Last year's total cases were 5 per cent over the total of the year before, and the increase so far this year is even smaller.

The current hot topic in the AIDS establishment is teenagers. U.S. News & World Report warns that "the AIDS epidemic has taken an ominous turn toward America's youth," and that "AH)S and HIV infection are rising fastest among teens and college-age kids." Newspapers carry headlines like "AIDS Runs Wild among Teenagers," and Newsweek ran a cover story on this exploding new epidemic. In fact, in 1990 there was a grand total of 170 such cases diagnosed, and this number dropped to 160 last year. AIDS cases among college-age kids showed a similar drop, and data on I-HV infections, such as that presented in a June 1990 report from the CDC, indicate that: "For both men and women, infection is most prevalent in persons in their late twenties and early thirties."