I get more concerned every day about the future of freedom in this country.
In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stepped up their campaign to have everyone in this country tested for HIV. Specifically, they want all routine blood tests to include an HIV test – doesn't matter whether you're young or old, male or female, gay or straight, sick or healthy, "at risk" or not. Why would they do such a thing? Because they claim (without any proof) that there are about one million people in the U.S. who are HIV-Positive, but perhaps some 300,000 don’t know it! So they want to test 300 million Americans to find those 300,000, and then intimidate them into taking HIV medications.
Sounds like a great plan to sell more HIV test kits (for which the government gets a royalty), and more HIV drugs (to add to the billions of dollars of profits for the pharmaceutical companies). But it doesn't sound very good for the American people, because, based on past statistics of 80% or more false positive test results, to find 300,000 HIV Positives means we're going to have 1.2 million others who test false positive on one or more of the HIV blood tests. That's correct. We're going to tell 1.2 million people they might be HIV-Positive and put them through as much as six months of hell, when in fact they will not be Positive when all the tests are said and done.
Even the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services is honest enough to admit on their website that the risks of taking an HIV blood test – note: not being found HIV-Positive, but just taking the blood test – are:
- "Taking the HIV antibody test is a stressful event, regardless of the results.
- Disclosures of an antibody test result, or sometimes the disclosure that a person even took the test, may lead to discrimination, denial of health coverage, stigmatization and violence." [italics added]
However, that's not the worst of it. In Washington, D.C., a program is already underway at government expense to test every resident between the ages of 18 and 84 for HIV, and it is now part of standard clinical practice to test all newborn babies and their mothers for HIV. If either the baby or the mother tests HIV-positive, antiretroviral drugs are given to the baby. If the mother or family objects, the parent(s) will most likely lose custody of the child and the drug therapy will continue.
But perhaps most alarming is that the New York City Department of Health is proposing a plan to treat HIV the same way they treated tuberculosis. For those who don't remember, it went like this, according to a June 27, 2006 op ed piece in the New York Times: "Thanks to a major infusion of federal financing, New York health officials took an active approach [to tuberculosis], getting as many patients as possible on directly observed therapy, known as D.O.T., in which outreach workers administered tuberculosis medications in clinics, patients’ homes and on the street. For patients who u2018failed' D.O.T., the health department employed forcible detention, either at Bellevue Hospital or at Goldwater Hospital…" where you were "detained" for as long as two years. They called it the "TB Jail."
In case you missed it, New York City is proposing the same thing for people who test Positive for HIV but "fail" or refuse to take the prescribed HIV medications, even though there is ample evidence that the medications themselves make people sick. They want to create an "HIV Jail" in Bellevue and lock you away if you don't comply. Yes, this would include HIV-Positives who had AIDS, but also HIV-Positives who are perfectly healthy, with no symptoms of AIDS or any other disease, who simply didn't want to take the dangerous HIV drugs.
The author of this New York Times' op ed piece is Professor Barron H. Lerner, who obviously supports the idea of an HIV Jail. I have only one suggestion for Professor Barron Lerner: you might want to think about changing your name before writing another article that clearly makes you sound like an HIV-NAZI. And I certainly hope other freedom-loving Americans will decide that it's time, in the words of William Shakespeare, to "take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them."
