HIV deliberately created?

Was HIV deliberately created? That’s what the newest Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Wangari Maathai, claims:

Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, today reiterated her claim that the AIDS virus was a deliberately created biological agent.

“Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys (since) time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that.

“Us black people are dying more than any other people in this planet,” Ms Maathai told a press conference in Nairobi a day after winning the prize for her work in human rights and reversing deforestation across Africa.

Here’s the text of the article that the citation above is referring to (before it disappears entirely), from East African Standard, August 2004:

Assistant Minister Prof Wangari Maathai yesterday claimed that HIV/Aids was a biological weapon manufactured by the developed world to wipe out the Black race from developing countries.

Maathai’s comments, while addressing a public workshop in Nyeri, are bound to spark off a major controversy on the origins of HIV/Aids, which continues to wreak grief and devastation on the African continent.

She started by giving her academic orientation as a student of biology. She said for decades Africans had been naive in not questioning where the disease had come from, saying that the theory that it originated from monkeys was a white lie.

“We know that the developed nations are using biological warfare, leaving guns to the primitive people. They have the resources to do this,” Maathai charged.

Defending her stand the assistant minister for environment and natural resources said if Adolph Hitler was capable of wiping out six million Jews by burning them, what if he had weapons of mass destruction.

“That is why Iraq was invaded. Whoever went there knew what such weapons look like. You can not go to look for something you have never seen,” she argued. She argued that the victims of these “biological weapons” have been naive in accepting any theories advanced without any questions.

“Do not be naive. Aids are not a curse from God to Africans or the Black people. It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but we may not know who particularly did,” she said.

Maathai wondered why if the virus was from the Congo Forest where it allegedly infected monkeys, how come the locals did not succumb to it until it in the 1980s.

She countered that Aids was a deliberate machination of some scientists whose sole aim was to exterminate some races from the surface of the earth. She told the workshop that the most effective control method by scientists was faulty because condoms could not effectively keep the virus at bay.

“If a doctor operating an HIV Aids infected patient puts on three pairs of gloves when operating, how is just one condom is expected to prevent the disease. These gadgets have been known to burst and to tear,” she continued.

She said the masses had very few choices but to use condoms. She said it had taken Kenya more than 15 years to realise that Aids was worse than any other external or internal enemy.

“Kenya is still along way in dealing with stigma and discrimination meted out to those affected. Some of the money used to fight Aids should go towards this area,” she concluded.

I won’t bother to refute the many logical fallacies in Wangar Maathai’s statement but since I’ve heard this claim many times before made by both Africans and African Americans, it’s clearly a conspiracy theory that’s making the rounds. There’s not a shred of credible evidence to support it. There is a lot of innuendo, slander, and paranoia, however.

Yet it’s a story that has a tiny kernel of truth behind it. AIDS has taken the strongest foothold in the African countries in which the WHO had the greatest presence in the smallpox eradication program in the 1970’s. And AIDS showed up shortly thereafter. It’s possible that poor hygiene practices by WHO personnel contributed to the early spread of the disease. But the idea that it was done deliberately is far-fetched. And the notion that it was a product of bacterial warfare is outright ridiculous.

I think that this story tells us more about the Nobel Prize committee than it does about either Wangari Maathai or the causes of AIDS. Since this story appeared in the East African Standard in August, 2004 either the committee agrees with Wangari Maathai, or they didn’t exercise due diligence in scrutinizing the candidates closely enough, or they thought that their prize winner being a conspiracy theory crank wasn’t relevant to their deliberations. Or they were so desperate to give the prize to a black African woman that it overwhelmed all other considerations.

UPDATE: I see that Wizbang has taken note of this as well.