In forty years reporting on HIV/Aids, I have never seen any evidence that it is a disease of Irish heterosexuals. Against overwhelming evidence, our medical profession and our media told us, for decades, that “we are all equally at risk” and “Aids does not discriminate”. If you were to point out that the data showed HIV infections in Ireland to be concentrated among immigrants and Irish homosexual men, as I did, you would be called a bigot and a homophobe, as I was.
So let’s look at the latest Health Protection Surveillance Centre annual report (2022). Of a total of 884 people diagnosed with HIV, 791 are immigrants and 93 Irish.
We’ll take the Irish first. Of the 93, 56 are gay men, 22 heterosexuals and the remainder is made up of injecting drug users and people who say they don’t know how they were infected. So HIV/Aids, after all these years, continues to be concentrated in risk groups. Aids discriminates.
Even the tiny amount of HIV infection reported among heterosexual Irish people is, in my opinion, bogus. Too many of them are men. Of the 22 in the most recent report, 15 are men and 7 are women, and this despite the fact that women are far more likely to be tested for HIV infection (routinely during pregnancy) than men are. So, among Irish people, women, it would seem, are infecting men with far greater efficiency than men are infecting women. Why so? Is there something particularly dangerous about the Irish vagina? I think the more plausible answer is that homosexual men sometimes lie about their route of infection and class themselves as heterosexual cases.
And we can’t leave the topic of putative heterosexual HIV infection without noting that, as the HPSC tells us about its HIV data, “gender is based on gender identity”. So, thanks to the biology-denying “trans” ideology that has captured our health service, we must now reasonably wonder how many of the people recorded as heterosexual women infected with HIV are, in reality, gender- dysphoric homosexual men.
Now let’s move on to HIV among immigrants. Once again, gay men figure in hugely disproportionate numbers but the immigrant figures also include what would appear to be genuine heterosexual cases. Many of these immigrants are from southern African countries where large parts of the general, that is, heterosexual, population test positive. How can it be that a disease that has proven virtually intransmissible among heterosexuals elsewhere in the world can have spread rapidly and generally in Africa? That’s precisely the question that was posed, in May of 2000, by the then-president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki likes to quote Irish poets and, in addressing Aids, he quoted Patrick Pearse. “As the wise men have not spoken/I speak who am but a fool” . Mbeki continued: “Being a fool, I don’t understand how a disease that is mainly of a homosexual nature elsewhere in the world can have spread rapidly and generally in Africa. We need to understand why.”
I wrote to President Mbeki at that time to tell him that he was right to say that, in Ireland, for one, there was no heterosexual Aids epidemic and that the doctors here were lying. But Mbeki got a lot more critics than supporters for his Aids stance. The medical/political/media/gay/
So how do we answer Thabo Mbeki’s Patrick Pearse question? First, the wrong answer. ”Plainly speaking, they have far more sex in Africa than in the rest of the world.” So said Dr Mike Meegan, described as an Irish Aids expert, interviewed by the Irish Times at the Durban Aids conference in July of 2000. And Meegan has not been alone in this view of Africans.
Actor Gabriel Byrne was on RTE’s Late Late Show in September of 2004. Speaking as Unicef Ireland’s ambassador to Eswatini (then called Swaziland) he told host Pat Kenny: “By 2010, half the people there (Eswatini) will be dead from Aids”. And how had that country achieved a 50% venereal disease rate? This was due, said Byrne, to the belief among Swazi men that they could cure themselves of HIV through having sex with a virgin, including “even very young virgins”.
If anyone claimed that 50% of Irish people were venereally diseased, largely due to child rape, it would be challenged. If such a claim was made about any white-skinned people, it would be challenged. It was a ridiculous claim by Gabriel Byrne. By 2010, half of Swazi people had not died but, rather, that country had shown a strong population growth. So far as I know, Byrne has never apologised to the Swazi people for his appalling comments.
The idea that Africans are more sexually active than everyone else is, anyhow, easily disposed of. To take Ireland, venereal diseases (excluding HIV) recorded by the HPSC increased about three-fold in the first decade of this century among heterosexual Irish people. This when we Irish were, in the view of Gabriel Byrne and the like, supposedly behaving ourselves so much better than those sexually incontinent Africans.
So what is the right answer to Mbeki’s Patrick Pearse question? I’ll offer three suggestions.
First, I think there’s strong reason to question the accuracy of the HIV test. In Ireland we have seen wildly varied estimates for HIV rates among heroin users. Two studies by the Department of Justice in 1999 showed infection rates of, in one report 30% and, in the other, just 4%, among addicts in Mountjoy Prison. I was roundly condemned at the time, including by fellow journalists, for asking how this could be, but I got no explanation. In Africa, some dissident scientists say, common pathogens can cause a false positive HIV result. I find this a more plausible explanation of why HIV rates are high among Africans than the idea that they have a higher copulation rate than everyone else.
The second reason, I think, for high Aids figures in Africa is the use of what is called the Bangui definition, which means that doctors can diagnose Aids by symptoms, with no HIV test required. In Ireland, the HSE lists 31 Aids-defining illnesses, that is, illnesses that are deemed Aids, but only if an HIV positive person should develop them. Most African countries seem to list 27 Aids-defining illnesses, all of which are maladies that have long afflicted that continent, since long before HIV was ever heard of. I’m old enough to have worked as a journalist in Africa before most things were called Aids. I once reported on a night drive with medics across rural Ethiopia to a hospital in a town called Sodo with a young mother thought to be suffering from cryptococcal meningitis. Nobody at that time thought her condition needed to be explained by her having first caught a sexually transmitted virus. Today her illness would likely be called Aids.
In practice we see the Bangui definition operating all the time. Irish journalists and pop stars will tell you they have “seen” Aids while visiting Africa. Really? Take a walk around Dublin and you will meet drug addicts. Speak to them and you will find a percentage of them test positive for HIV. But a test is needed. It’s not something you can just see. In Africa, let’s say our visitors from Ireland meet a man with TB, to take Africa’s most common Aids-defining illness. Our visitors will tell you, without any HIV test first having been sought, that the man they have met has Aids because, apparently, they can “see” that he caught a virus through his penis.
The third answer to Mbeki’s question is the one that it took me longest to cop on to but which I now think is the one that explains the most. The reason that Aids figures are so much higher in Africa than they are anywhere else is because these figures are not true. Take Unicef Ireland again. In 2009 they launched a TV campaign fronted by actor Liam Neeson and then-RTE presenter Ryan Tubridy. Each of these men looked into the camera and told us, solemnly: “Every six seconds a child in Africa is orphaned by Aids”.
I asked Unicef Ireland for a source for this claim. They wrote back to tell me it was based on “well-established science”. Not satisfied, I continued to press them and eventually they explained that they knew that there were five million children orphaned by Aids every year and that they had divided that figure by the number of seconds in a year, hence, one child orphaned every six seconds. So where did the starting figure of five million come from? They refused to say and, when I persisted, they eventually told me they were ending their correspondence with me. I wrote again to them last week for purposes of this article but I have got no reply.
The Neeson/Tubridy claim was a woozle, that is, one of those “facts” that everyone thinks, wrongly, that someone else has a source for (it’s from a Winnie the Pooh story if you want to look it up). Figures for Aids in Africa have always been woozles. The assertion that journalists and politicians used for decades that “there are fourteen thousand HIV infections a day in Africa” was based on a notional figure of five million a year divided by 365. That gave this baseless figure an illusion of precision. That’s how woozles work.
So, finally, what should concern us about the latest HIV figures? The immigration-driven increase is of concern as our health service will bear the burden. And if you’re worried about being infected with HIV then, if you are a sexually active gay man or an injecting drug-user, you are right to be worried and you need to take care. But if you’re from neither of those risk groups you are very unlikely to be infected with HIV. And you won’t catch it from immigrants either.