This could be a new low for the Beacon of Speech Blog, so I apologize ahead of time, but I think we’re going to slander a dead man today.
Not a random dead man, not even a dead man I have even met, but a man who illustrates how Donald Trump got elected. This man is a not-so-innocent victim of the AIDS Crisis who was martyrized in the liberal press. Why does Patient Zero garner so much attention from Beacon of Speech weeks after the election and months after the “clearing of his name?”
Let me expound a bit….
The Urban Legend that I learned as a teenager was if you had pre-marital sex, you would die a gruesome and hideous death due to the new disease of AIDS. Where did AIDS come from? Well, apparently a guy had marital relations with a monkey in Africa, then that guy had sex with a male flight attendant from America, then the scourge was seeded in all of the great cities of America. Again, 100% not true, but that was the rumor in the neighborhood.
This illicit behavior was taking place way back in the early 80’s, in the infancy of modern DNA tracking. Now, what in the heck does this have to do with the 2016 Election? Well, during the heated final months of the Trump/Clinton race, I started to notice stories popping up that scientists have cleared Patient Zero of being the most vilified person of spreading a plague since Typhoid Mary.
Investigative Scientists now peg Haiti, in the late 60’s, as the source of the AIDS epidemic in America. I’m not saying they’re wrong, I believe the advances of science can more accurately track the way AIDS was spread, the problem I have is, Patient Zero was not an innocent victim.
If you don’t want to read it all, just read these synopses:
CNN: The man blamed for bringing HIV to the United States just had his name cleared. (10-28-16) http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/27/health/hiv-gaetan-dugas-patient-zero/index.html
Daily Beast: The man who was identified as "patient zero" for the HIV epidemic in the U.S. was wrongly accused. (10-26-16)
USA Today: (His) strain was circulating throughout New York City around 1971, years before (he) visited there. (10-27-16)
N.Y. Times: But after a new genetic analysis of stored blood samples, bolstered by some intriguing historical detective work, scientists on Wednesday declared him innocent. (10-27-16)
NBC News: …and it also clears the name of a gay flight attendant long vilified as being "Patient Zero." (10-28-16)
Patient Zero is even one of the prominent characters in the book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987). The problem is, the gentleman in question, though cleared as being the specific, now fictional, Patient Zero, he still had sex with thousands and helped spread the plague through North America and Europe. He was far from an innocent victim. He was a just a victim. I’m not a high and mighty, Bible-thumper by any means, but he had sex with about the same amount of people that would fill a minor-league baseball stadium. Pick a religion, any religion, they all would be aghast at his pure quantitative nature of his sexual conquests. But the liberal media picks up a thread and runs with it. All of ‘em.
This week, Donald Trump pulled in dozens of news executives and excoriated them for their left leaning coverage. They all shrugged their shoulders and were confused “who, us?” The reason I brought up the Patient Zero story is because all the stories were basically the same and they all contained the same narrative. Pure Scientific Research, covered by the same group of outlets around the same time, then slanted to the left. This is what the populace was rebelling about when they voted for Trump. People are going to see what a knucklehead Trump is in a few months, but just using the Patient Zero story, you can see how a non-political story becomes yet another example of media bias. Here’s some help for the News Outlets in the future. Using the Patient Zero example, this is how the story should have been covered: Gaëtan Dugas did unwillingly spread the AIDS virus, but was not Patient Zero.