Official explanations in HIV/AIDS are RACIST

HIV/AIDS specifies that infection by an immune-system-destroying virus, HIV, is a death sentence, by making way for lethal “opportunistic” infections which cannot overcome normal immunity. HIV is said to be transmitted sexually; and since gay men were the first-identified high-risk group, something about homosexual practices seems to be more conducive to transmission than heterosexual practices are.

If any group of people are consistently and significantly more frequently HIV-positive than other groups, obviously they must practice homosexuality more commonly and less safely than other people do.

It is a fact, consistently for about four decades, that within any group, those testing HIV+ far more frequently than others are not gay men but rather those of relatively recent [1] African ancestry, those regarded as belonging to the “black race” [2]. Thus black people are inevitably judged to be guilty of promiscuous, very frequent, unsafe, homosexual practices.

The implied difference from other racial groups is not small, it is a significantly large multiple: in the United States, something like ten-fold; in the United Kingdom, the same or a bit more; in the  Republic of South Africa, something like 50-fold.

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) make this implication of black misbehavior quite explicit. Their specific explanation is that homosexuality is so disapproved of within black communities that bisexual black men keep their homosexual activities (the “down low”) secret from their female partners; which supposedly explains why not only black men test HIV+ much more often than other men, so do black women test HIV+ much more frequently than other women, because they are unwittingly infected by their HIV+ black male partners.

Thus the CDC, an official agency of the U.S. government, promulgates an explanation that is precisely the old racist stereotype of unbridled, promiscuous, aggressive black male sexuality.

That explanation is not only racist. It is unsupported by any empirical evidence, and in fact is clearly disproved by available empirical evidence.

(It seems, on purely a priori grounds, highly unlikely in postulating that people of African ancestry, in communities anywhere and everywhere in the world, are more likely to have a large proportion of bisexual males with a very high frequency of promiscuously unsafe homosexual activity.)

Indeed, the CDC authors themselves later found that the “down-low” explanation was not supported by the evidence: “high rates of HIV infection for Black MSM . . .  were not attributable to a higher frequency of risky sexual behavior, nongay identity, or sexual nondisclosure” but were “partly attributable to a high prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases that facilitate HIV transmission and to undetected or late diagnosis of HIV infection” [3].

But “undetected or late diagnosis of HIV infection” is not a reason for any particular, or any unusually high, rate of testing HIV+; so we are left again with a behavioral explanation — black men have venereal diseases more often than others, once again (or still) the racist stereotype of the sexually irresponsible, uninhibitedly aggressive black man.

So despite recognizing (almost recognizing) that their explanations are no good, CDC cannot bring itself to understand the clear actual reason: the “HIV” tests are quite unreliable as indicators of viral infection.

By contrast, an evidence-based explanation for the large racial disparities in HIV+ test-results cites (1) the known lack of specificity of HIV tests, and (2) the potentially higher activity of African immune-systems, leading to a high proportion of false-positive HIV tests.

The above is a summary of a full discussion with complete source-citations just published: Henry H. Bauer, “Racial disparities in HIV tests: Better explanation needed”, Journal of the American Physicians and Surgeons, 29 (2024) 55-7; https://www.jpands.org/vol29no2/bauer.pdf; press release at https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/racial-disparities-in-hiv-testing-require-explanation-according-to-journal-of-american-physicians-and-surgeons-262889ff.

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[1]   ALL homo sapiens are of ultimate African ancestry, many tens of thousands of years back

[2]   “The case against HIV”, https://thecaseagainsthiv.net; sections 3.4, 6.1.4

[3]   Gregorio A.  Millett,  John L. Peterson, Richard J. Wolitski, & Ron Stall, “Greater risk for  HIV infection of black men who have sex with men: A critical literature review, American Journal of Public Health, 96 (2006)1007-1019. doi:10.2105 /AJPH,2005.066720)