The US:Haiti Transmission of AIDS:
A Case Study in the Failure of Organized Skepticism in Science
abstract of a Kindle publication by Stephen O. Murray
Posted May 31, 2018
Published May 30, 2018, by El Instituto Obregón
San Francisco, CA
The original identification of a syndrome of opportunistic infections suggesting impaired immune functioning among gay men during the early 1980s provided a basis for re-medicalizing moralistic condemnations of male homosexuality and led to positing homosexual American sex tourism to Haiti as an explanation for the Haitian epidemic without any evidence that Haiti was a favored site for such tourism.
The emergence and repetition of claim-making about homosexual tourism to Haiti during the mid-1980s are reviewed. Removal of a “recent Haitian immigrant” risk group and maintenance of others at a time when behavior rather than identity had been established as the vectors of infection for the Human Immunodeficient Virus show considerable non-scientific influence on public health classification. (Eventually, analysis of stored blood samples showed that HIV moved from central Africa to Haiti to the U.S.)
