Federal health officials are now
admitting their 10-year campaign to frighten heterosexual
Americans with the threat of AIDS was intentionally
alarmist and deceptive. And
the new candor has members of Nevada's AIDS community
apprehensive that public support for federal funding of
anti-AIDS programs may decline. "My concern," one Nevada man with
AIDS told Electric Nevada, "is that if people
had a choice between straight women and gay men, they'd
give the funding to the straight women and just as soon
that the gay men just go ahead and die." But, according to some scientists, that has
turned out to be precisely the consequence of the
anyone-can-get-AIDS public relations offensive sponsored
by the federal government, and dominating U.S. mass
media, since 1986. Not only, they say, was the campaign launched
by the federal Center for Disease Control fundamentally
dishonest -- greatly exaggerating the actual risks faced
by people who weren't homosexuals or intravenous drug
users -- but it also effectively ensured that most
AIDS-prevention funds will not go where most needed. "You can't stop this epidemic if you
spend the money where the epidemic hasn't happened,"
Ron Stall, associate professor of epidemiology at the
University of California at San Francisco, told Wall
Street Journal reporters Amanda Bennett and Anita Sharpe.
And government figures now show that is what
happened. While it is technically true that any human
being can be infected by AIDS, the actual risk from a
single act of sex for most heterosexuals is smaller than
the risk of getting hit by lightning, researchers say.
And even though epidemiological studies had made this
clear to U.S. Public Health officials, those same
officials then made conscious decisions to launch a
massive public relations and advertising campaign,
misleading the general public on that key point. Today acknowledging the government campaign
exaggerated the risks to average Americans, the U.S.
Public Health officials justify the deception as
something they believed would do good in the long run. "As long as this was seen as a gay
disease or, even worse, a disease of drug abusers, that
pushed the disease way down the ladder" of people's
priorities, CDC virologist Walter Dowdle told the Wall
Street Journal in an interview published May 1. The first major CDC misinformation released to
the public was an unsigned paper appearing in the journal
Public Health Reports, following the Public Health
Service Coolfont conference in June 1986, held in Berkely
Springs, West Virginia. The report, which was unsigned, lumped various
unresearched categories called "undetermineds"
-- including people who had died before being interviewed
or simply had not been interviewed yet -- in with
heterosexuals to provide a highly questionable
statistical projection of probable future heterosexual
AIDS victims. According to the CDC's Chief Statistician, Dr.
W. Meade Morgan, the projection was a "worst
case" scenario. And he told author Michael Fumento
that if the media had called for verification, "we'd
set them straight." However, said Fumento, writing in The Myth of
Heterosexual AIDS, "calling for verification .. is
something the media almost universally neglected to do. "Armed with statistical 'proof' of a
dramatic increase in heterosexual cases," wrote
Fumento, "the alarmists and the media went
wild." For example Oprah Winfrey was announcing on
her TV show -- the most popular daytime show in America
-- that "research studies now project that one in
five -- listen to me, hard to believe -- one in five
heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the
next three years. That's by 1990. One in five. It is no
longer just a gay disease, believe me." The cover of Life had announced, "Now No
One is Safe from AIDS." U.S. News & World Report
declared, "the disease of them suddenly is the
disease of us. ... finding fertile growth among
heterosexuals." And then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop
declared the disease to be "the biggest threat to
health this nation has ever faced." "AIDS cases over all," said Koop,
are "going to increase nine-fold ... between now and
1990. But among heterosexuals there are going to be 20
times as many cases so that perhaps 10 per cent of the
patients will be heterosexual." But it still wasn't enough public alarm to
suit virologist Dowdle and some of his CDC colleagues. In early 1987, said Dowdle, he and other CDC
officials were still being frustrated by TV networks'
refusal to run ads advocating the use of condoms, and by
Reagan White House objections to the ads on moral
grounds. Focus-group polling by the giant advertising
firm of Ogilvy & Mather for the CDC had also
established that most people weren't that concerned about
AIDS. This included high-risk gays, who were continuing
unprotected sex. So the federal health officials decided to
raise the profile of the disease Top of page
another notch. They also wanted to change
heterosexual Americans' attitudes.
"We thought we should get people talking
about AIDS and we wanted to reduce the stigma," says
Paula Van Ness, who had come to the CDC from the Los
Angeles AIDS Project.
Eventually Ogilvy & Mather was paid over
$6 million for a high-powered national advertising
campaign which intentionally blurred the lines to make
heterosexual Americans appear to be more at risk from
AIDS than actually was the case.
Launched in October, 1987 and pitched to a
general audience, the campaign featured 38 TV spots,
eight radio spots and six print ads. The campaign avoided
specific advice on how to avoid AIDS (i.e., avoid anal
sex and IV drug-needle sharing) and instead focused on
the universality of the disease.
Images were carefully presented to foster the
belief that everyone was at risk. A CDC brochure featured
a blonde middle-aged woman with AIDS, saying "AIDS
is not a 'we' 'they' disease, it's an 'us' disease."
It did not explain she was an intravenous drug user who
had shared AIDS-tainted needles.
Similarly, the son of a rural Baptist minister
featured in a public-service ad said, "If I can get
AIDS, anyone can," providing the keynote of the
campaign. But in actuality the minister's son was gay,
and had been infected through high-risk sex practices.
The CDC/Ogilvy & Mather campaign won
awards and was heavily reinforced by hundreds of stories
in national print and television media. Reporters and
editors, talk shows and magazines, continued to find the
threat of heterosexual AIDS a dramatic aid to circulation
and ratings.
"Clearly, the Public Health Service
misled the media, even if it was just as clear that the
media had wanted to be misled," says Fumento, a
reporter on science issues for Investor's Business Daily
in Los Angeles.
By early 1988, according to polls reported in
the May-June issue of Public Opinion magazine, 8 in 10
Americans believed that AIDS "will become widespread
in the heterosexual population," while only 22
percent believed that the media had exaggerated the
health risk involved with AIDS.
In the years since, millions of frightened
low-risk heterosexuals have sought testing for AIDS,
using up large sums of the available AIDS-prevention
money just to discover they weren't infected.
In 1994, for example, 2.4 million tests were
given at government-funded sites, but 87 percent of the
tests were given to individuals in low-risk categories --
categories other than homosexual or bisexual men, or IV
drug users.
In 1995, AIDS testing, the single largest
prevention program of the federal Center for Disease
Control, the federal government's point man in the war
against AIDS, cost $136 million of the agency's total
$589 million budget.
Yet Eric Goosby, director of the HIV/AIDS
Policy Office of the U.S. Public Health Service, which
oversees the CDC, says the program "was not
efficient or effective in picking up HIV-positive
people."
And while homosexuals and intravenous drug
users now account for 83% of all AIDS cases reported in
the U.S., the federal AIDS-prevention budget still is not
targeted to homosexual and bisexual men, or IV drug
users.
State programs also have been directed largely
toward low risk groups. Patricia Franks, a UCSF
researcher headed a study of California AIDS spending
between 1989 and 1992. According to the study, while 85
percent of the state's AIDS cases were concentrated among
men who had sex with men, programs targeting this groups
got only 9 percent of all state AIDS prevention dollars.
"It's hard to take money away from groups
already receiving grants," the director of the
California Office of Aids, Wayne Sauseda, told the Wall
Street Journal.
In the state's last three-year funding cycle,
he said, "we were .. deluged by proposals from low-
and no-risk population groups.
"We got two proposals for every one from
a high-risk group."
Here in Nevada, AIDS activists are ambivalent
about the CDC's new candor. On the one hand, new drugs
that give the most promise of fighting AIDS are very
expensive, and could become more available if federal
resources were targeted to people with AIDS.
But on the other hand, they fear that the
public will not support funding for AIDS prevention and
research if most heterosexuals believe they are only
minimally at risk.
As an example, one AIDS activist said, here in
Nevada the state is willing to spend allocated federal
funds on AIDS-related problems, but itself refuses to
allocate any state monies for those purposes.
"There's never been enough money towards
AIDS care, or AIDS research or AIDS education," from
the State of Nevada, he said.
"They have never put in a penny toward
those goals."
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