Today, December 1st, is World AIDS Day – held annually since 1988. This year, we want to draw attention to and express our solidarity with those who took part in a die-in protest held by ACT UP London today, echoing a protest conducted in 1989. Stav Bee, ACT UP activist, is quoted by ACT UP London in their press release about the World AIDS Day die-in saying: “It is the 21st century and although a lot has changed, some has not and it’s in urgent need of elimination, via education, laws and radical and direct action. I am talking about the stigma of HIV and AIDS which is still prevalent in many countries including the West. This ignorance and apathy is dangerous and unacceptable. Therefore, as a gay political woman, I support and participate in direct action, radical and using my body. I yearn for an HIV/AIDS free world, full of knowledge, acceptance, kindness and love. For all people of all persuasions affected by the politics of the virus and the virus. And I bellow: ACT UP, Fight back, Fight AIDS!”
We also want to take the opportunity to address the misinformation about HIV/AIDS that is presented in The Light – the contrarian paper distributed nationally – including by the ‘Stroud Info Hug’ stall that is present on Stroud High Street almost every week. Briefly, The Light promotes the theories of people who believe that HIV does not cause AIDS, or that it was a manufactured virus, or see it not as a virus that has led to disease and death for millions of people and emotional harm and trauma for whole communities as a result, but as a part of a plot to control people – connecting it to wider paranoid ideas about the SARS-COV-2 coronavirus and COVID-19 pandemic similarly being conspiracies to control rather than causes of death and disability. Read on below the graphic for our full article.
To provide a few examples – in the latest issue (27) contains a front page banner advertising an article inside with the text “HIV was the rehearsal for COVID”. The page 3 article, by Serena Wylde includes the false claims that HIV was laboratory made, that there is no causal link between HIV and AIDS (or indeed between viruses and disease at all) and that “the persistence of the theory that HIV causes AIDS is attributable entirely to the campaign of fear, discrimination and terror that has been waged by a powerful group of people whose sole motivation was and is behaviour control.” This is denial of reality, pure and simple – known as HIV/AIDS denialism. The claims are based on a mixture of dodgy reasoning and misinterpretation, and pseudoscience, and have been thoroughly debunked by scientists. The ideas aren’t harmless – the adoption of HIV/AIDS denialist ideas by the South African government through Thabo Mbeki have been estimated to have led to 330,000 to 340,000 AIDS-related deaths by public health researchers. And as well as discouraging people who are infected from utilising effective treatments, HIV/AIDS deniers routinely stigmatise those with the disease – explaining it not through viral infection but by victim-blaming.
This is the case in Issue 24 where Jo Waller writes that AIDS is “a collection of symptoms caused by oxidation, poppers, drugs, malnutrition and poverty, and not by ‘HIV’. AIDS cannot be sexually transmitted by ‘HIV’?. Indeed on page 20 of the same issue, Dawn Lester and David Parker go so far as to claim there is “No such thing as a sexually transmitted disease” (the headline of their piece). These false ideas might sound bizarre, but – again – it’s easy to see how they can lead to harm if infected people do not take precautions or treatments, and instead both spread disease and worsen their own health.
These aren’t the only examples. In Issue 20 Niall McCrae Reviews the Film “The Viral Delusion”, approvingly noting that the film covers “the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health warned of a new plague. However, the existence of the disease and its supposedly causative virus HIV was based on dubious evidence… A vast AIDS industry emerged, abetted by mass media.” The absence of any concern for those who died as a result of the pandemic is palpable. Characterising activism by groups such as ACT UP – who campaigned against Big Pharma and for research into pharmaceutical treatments and access to them rather than the prioritisation of profit – as ‘A vast AIDS industry… abetted by mass media” is gross, dehumanising, and shows an astonishing lack of solidarity.
Why does the paper repeatedly platform these ideas? An article in Issue 9 by long-time HIV/AIDS denier Vernon Coleman provides insight. As we wrote in our article on how The Light promotes homophobia and transphobia, Coleman is infamous for declaring “AIDS the “hoax of the century” in his Sun newspaper column as it would not be of significant risk to heterosexuals” in 1989, the year that over 300,000 people had AIDS and an additional 5-10 million HIV. In Issue 9 of The Light, published in May 2021, Coleman writes “They’ve been trying to introduce the Great Reset for many years… The AIDS scare was probably the first time an infection was used in an attempt to frighten us into obedience.” Again, there’s no compassion or solidarity here – just yet another desperate attempt to deny reality and exploit suffering to draw people into conspiratorial ideas. Of course, given the impact of HIV on gay people particularly, these idea are dependent on forms of homophobia that crop up in other ways in the Light too, with the paper publishing an article referring to Pride month as “a rainbow-festooned festival of the Globohomo Cult” in July 2022’s Issue 23.
Community Solidarity Stroud District stands against all forms of hate. We have friends who witnessed a lot of AIDS-related deaths in the 1980s, we have friends with stable HIV thanks to antiretroviral medication. Falsehoods used to mislead people about the causes of disease, to stigmatise or ‘other’ people based on gender and sexuality hurt everyone. This World AIDS Day we stand with those taking action – like ACT UP activist Andria Mordaunt, whose life partner was diagnosed with HIV in the 80s. She joined both the original die-in in Trafalgar Square in 1989, and the action today. In an article for Dazed magazine explaining why protesters staged a ‘die-in’ she says:
“We are armed with the tools to fight HIV and to massively slow down and halt further infections but this is being severely hampered by government austerity and cuts, the closure of sexual health clinics and services for people living with HIV… The idea of replicating the protest in the same location was to send out the message that “it was definitely a nod to the past and a warning about repeating it… Sexual health education for young people is wholly inadequate and there is still, after 40 years, a huge stigma around HIV. We are here today to let this government know we will not sit by and watch this happen.”
Community Solidarity Stroud District 