It turns out that Neil Ferguson isn’t only long-time scaremonger to have reached a high position of power.
Michael Fumento takes up the story:
In this writer’s 1990 book, “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS,” he is mentioned on 24 pages. A sample: “Dr. Redfield, amazingly, has declared [the chances of] male-to-female vaginal HIV to be 50 percent per contact.” Yet data already available at that time showed that if neither partner had genital sores or other openings, odds approached zero.
Redfield’s public career has at times seemed to straddle the line between medical research and political activism. In the early 1990s, he backed federal legislation that would have subjected people with HIV to forced testing and the loss of their professional licenses and would have effectively quarantined them — for a disease essentially transmitted by anal sex and transfer of blood and blood products.
Redfield also threw his weight behind an HIV vaccine in 1992 that proved worthless — although an Army investigation (he was a colonel at the time) found no official misconduct.
Who is this guy? A nobody? He is Dr Robert Redfield, and he just happens to be… the current director the US Centre for Disease Control.
And he’s still grifting:
“I think it’s important for the American public to understand about the potential magnitude of the challenge that we have,” he told a Salt Lake City radio program earlier this month. “This [Covid-19] is the greatest public health crisis that has hit this nation in more than 100 years.”
He emphasized, “That’s not a hyperbole; that’s just a fact.”
But wait, he’s not the only one in this category. Consider this scaremonger from the AIDS days:
Back in 1983, one scientist and doctor was sole author of a paper in the prestigious medical journal JAMA which stated that AIDS might be transmissible through “routine close contact, as within a family household.” That turned out not to be true, of course, but in the meantime the media had widely propagated the myth, naturally setting off a wave of hysteria.
Nevertheless, within months the author was promoted to chief of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, a position he still holds.
Who was that person? His name was… Dr. Anthony Fauci.
6 thoughts on “AIDS scaremongers now in charge”
Donkey’s, appointed by wolves, to keep the sheep in a herd.
I observe that professionals in any field who pursue the politics of the professional organisation or the public sector regulation of the profession’s affairs are never ever any good in that field.
Those who can, do; those who can’t, manage.
But I have also noticed that those who become very rich or powerful in any field do so largely because those are the only things they are interested in. Bill Gates, for instance, built the most profitable software company in the world without paying any attention to the technical details of Microsoft’s software – which has often been crude and unreliable.
Microsoft became what it is through unremitting focus on long-term profit. The same may well be true of the most successful firms in any market. Politicians and demagogues (if there is any difference) maintain an unremitting focus on gaining and holding power.
Such priorities leave no time or attention for learning about sordid technical details.
https://dilbert.com/strip/2011-02-03
@Tom
I remember when Emily Thornberry aka Lady Nugee on BBC QT was asked “Why did you become an MP?” by Dimbers
Her answer “Power”
This seems to be a repeating pattern. Paul. Ehrlich should have never been taken seriously again after writing The Population Bomb, but he remains influential, being made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012.
I do wonder if malthusian beliefs are just an innate part of many people. It does seem to be a very significant marker in political views. I feel the need for a venn diagram….
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