Health Care BS

Remember the heterosexual AIDS scare? No? Well, throughout the 1980s, the WHO and the “news” media issued a seemingly endless stream of apocalyptic warnings about an impending worldwide AIDS pandemic. Turns out it was just another load of BS:

In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO’s department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

In other words, there was never any real danger of a heterosexual AIDS epidemic in the developed world. Thus, huge amounts of money and resources that could have been put to good use in Africa (where there is an actual epidemic) were wasted on low risk populations.

Of course, anyone who dared to point this out at the height of the hysteria was instantly denounced as knuckle-dragging moron. It was obvious to all right-thinking people that a generalized catastrophe was at hand. Sound familiar? It does to James Taranto:

The AIDS epidemic that wasn’t is one reason we are skeptical of global warmism, another purported cataclysm that is supposedly just around the corner, that is purportedly based on science but about which one may not ask questions, and that dovetails conveniently with pre-existing ideological agendas.

True to form, the World Health Organization is now hyping what it claims is a worldwide health catastrophe allegedly tied to global warming. Which prompts Taranto to ask the following question:

Ten or 20 years hence, will we be reading articles about the U.N. admitting that global warming wasn’t all it was cracked up to be?

Yep.