SEX, RACE, and “HIV”

Proponents of HIV/AIDS theory claim that purported epidemics of “HIV” reflect primarily sexual behavior (except in Eastern Europe, where 85% of it is ascribed to drug abuse — see HIV/AIDS ILLUSTRATES COGNITIVE DISSONANCE, 29 April 2008 — implying a truly inconceivably prodigious sharing of infected needles).

Everywhere in the world, people test “HIV-positive” according to their race. People of African ancestry test positive far more often than others. Asians always test positive least frequently. Caucasians, Native Americans, and non-black Hispanics are in between, but much closer to Asians than to Africans.

Therefore, the orthodox view as to HIV/AIDS postulates, implicitly but inescapably, that members of different racial groups display characteristically different, race-determined sexual behavior.

So egregious is this assertion that I would have thought it sufficient, in and of itself, to disabuse anyone and everyone of the notion that “HIV” could possibly be a sexually transmitted agent. Consider and compare the furor over an oft-claimed association of IQ and race. The claim led to excruciatingly detailed dissection of what IQ tests actually measure. Even those who claim that there is an association between race and IQ also acknowledge that it is only probabilistic, not fully determinant (typically, heredity is said to be responsible for only about half of the variations in IQ). If there is indeed such an association of race and IQ, one could at least speculate about a possible physical or physiological and therefore genetic basis for it, by analogy with the folklore — favored by devotees of table tennis — that Asians tend to have faster reflexes, and that faster reflexes make for better IQ-test scores. But in the purported association of testing “HIV-positive” and race, no careful dissection of what the “HIV” tests measure has been carried through (except, of course, by HIV/AIDS rethinkers). In particular, it has never been shown that testing “HIV-positive” denotes active infection, as the orthodoxy maintains. Indeed, there’s a substantial prize ($25,000, plus a matching amount to charity) awaiting anyone who can produce a publication proving that “HIV-positive” means active infection (http://www.aliveandwell.org/, May 2007 under “News and Updates”). There is an even larger prize for proof of the very existence of “HIV”: the Michael Verney-Elliott Memorial Prize of £50,000 .

As to whether sexual behavior might be determined definitively by race-associated genetics, I am not aware that anyone has been so foolish as to suggest it explicitly. Behavior is determined by culture, learning, environment, within very wide limits set by human genetics. Sexual mores and sexual practices have changed dramatically over short periods of time in several individual cultures without any change in racial composition of the populations expressing those cultures. Monogamy and polygamy have been practiced at times within cultures whose members belong to different racial groups. The notion that any form of behavior is directly determined by race has been thoroughly undermined by understanding and knowledge accumulated in anthropology, sociology, developmental biology, psychology, and so on. Nevertheless, the orthodox view of HIV/AIDS implies such an association, for the racial disparities in testing “HIV-positive” are at least as firmly reproducible as anything else about HIV/AIDS.

Not only does HIV/AIDS theory incorporate by clear implication the extraordinary claim that sexual behavior is characteristic of race, the sexual behavior it ascribes to Africans is implausible in the extreme.

Since the average probability of apparently transmitting “HIV” is about 1 per 1000, to produce an epidemic would seem to call for extensive and incessant orgies, a high rate of intercourse among continually changing sexual partners. In order to save the hypothesis of sexual transmission in the face of this implausible scenario, the speculation was ventured long ago (Anderson & May, Nature 333 [1988] 514-9) — and has since become generally accepted without proof — that when a person is first infected, there might ensue a short period of weeks, at most months, during which the infectivity must be much higher than 1 per 1000.

However, the highest estimates for this putative initial infectivity allowed by actual data on apparent transmission are only 1/50 to 1/250 (Cohen & Pilcher, Journal of Infectious Diseases 191 [2005] 1391-3). Such a rate still requires prodigious feats of sexual promiscuity to explain the levels of “HIV infection” reported for sub-Saharan Africa, which are greater than 20%, remember, sometimes even above 35%, in Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe (21 April 2008, DECONSTRUCTING HIV/AIDS in “SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA” and “THE CARIBBEAN”).

James Chin, former epidemiologist for California and later for the World Health Organization, has carried out the requisite calculations (The AIDS Pandemic: The collision of epidemiology with political correctness, Radcliffe 2007): “epidemic HIV transmission requires a very high level of HIV risk behaviors” (pp. 44, 45). To achieve an epidemic spread over a period of “many years”, 20-40% of adults must have “multiple concurrent relationships” — several sexual partners at the same time, changing to new partners weekly or monthly, totaling to tens of different partners over the course of each year (p. 64, Table 5.1). (Chin does not seem specifically to consider the postulated short periods of higher infectivity. However, doing so would then require even more rapid change of partners to produce an epidemic since the window of opportunity for transmission is so brief.)

That, then — according to the official view — is what must have been going on in “sub-Saharan Africa” for many years. Also on the official view, as one travels from south to north one would observe the level of sexual activity steadily decreasing, until in North Africa promiscuity is at quite a low level, comparable to that in the civilized regions of the developed world; see the maps in DECONSTRUCTING HIV/AIDS in “SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA” and “THE CARIBBEAN”, 21 April 2008.

These staggering estimates, 20-40% of adults in multiple concurrent partner-changing relationships, are not usually cited, perhaps because they are so truly not worthy of belief. Instead, what HIV/AIDS theory implies — actually demands — is masked by abstract jargon not translated into concrete quantitative scenarios: it’s just said typically that the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa results primarily from multiple concurrent relationships among heterosexuals in overlapping networks of partners. That sort of longwinded discourse in sociological jargon allows lay people’s eyes to glaze over and to defer to the experts who surely must know what they’re talking about. But the concrete fact behind that abstract jargon remains what Chin calculated: between 20% and 40% of adults having sex with several partners during the same period of time, all of them changing those partners every few weeks. It boggles the mind. Try to imagine that in your neighborhood: between 20% and 40% of men would have several mistresses, changing them every few weeks or months for new ones, and the women would be no less promiscuous. Just about everyone would have to be doing it, and certainly everyone would know about it.

Moreover, that degree of sexual activity would surely be causing to spread also the commonly known sexually transmitted infections (STIs or STDs) — gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, etc. Those are transmitted with probabilities that are far greater, ten times higher or more, than that of 1 per 50, the highest short-period rate postulated for HIV. Wherever “HIV” is spreading, therefore, the population should have been absolutely swamped by the common STDs. They are not. This in itself offers direct observational proof that HIV is not sexually transmitted, proof available to anyone who looks even cursorily at the evidence.

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Now that HIV/AIDS in the United States is acknowledged to have become a disease of black communities, similar feats of sexual activity as postulated for Africa have to be imagined there as well. A high rate of “multiple concurrent relationships” has indeed been offered explicitly as partial explanation for the purported epidemics now said to be endangering, in particular, young black women, notably in the Southeast and in Washington city, DC; see, among many available examples, Kulik et al., American Journal of Public Health 85 (1995) 1119-22; Hammett et al., Sexually Transmitted Diseases 33 (2006, July suppl.) 817-22; Adimora et al., Annals of Epidemiology 14 (#3, 2004) 155-60.

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The racial disparities in testing “HIV-positive” are clearly, obviously, inescapably incompatible with HIV/AIDS theory. If “HIV” were sexually transmitted, then the racial disparities in “HIV-positive” would mean that human racial groups differ characteristically and drastically in their sexual behavior and mores. Furthermore, if “HIV” were sexually transmitted, then wherever there is “HIV”, there would be vastly greater incidence of gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, herpes, etc.

The notion that “HIV” is a sexually transmitted infection is simply unsustainable in light of the actual data.