How Anthony Fauci and the 1980s AIDS Scare Shaped Public Fear

If you missed our recent exclusive by Michael Fumento, go back and click and read — and share. Share it especially with anyone who, like Michael and I, came of age in the 1980s. It was a great decade. One of the best. I was glad to have been a teen, a high-school and college student, in the ‘80s. There were many reasons for that, which perhaps I’ll revisit in another column. There was, however, an exception to our bliss, and it was this: AIDS.

They wanted to defend non-traditional forms of intercourse. The Bible be damned. I can’t commend the purity of their intentions.

AIDS, of course, was a killer. Its victims suffered terribly. And when I refer to its victims in the 1980s, I mean mainly homosexual men. But at the time, the disease wasn’t being framed that way. There was a push — a scare — to make it sound like everyone in America was at high risk for contracting HIV, including heterosexuals. Michael Fumento exposed that myth — that junk science — with a courageous book called The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, which carried the subtitle, How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics. For writing that book, Fumento was subjected to an early form of the Left’s cancel culture. He was savaged for exposing the truth. Savaged by who?

As Michael noted in his exclusive for us, it was the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci who helped promote fears of rampant heterosexual AIDS. Michael wrote of Fauci:

To understand how a bureaucrat with that background held such sway over public health policy for four decades — through absurd social-distancing metrics and mask-mandate reversals — you have to look back. COVID-19 wasn’t an anomaly in Fauci’s career. It was the logical outcome of a method he perfected decades earlier, during the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In May 1983, Fauci published an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association (now JAMA) that set off a wave of national panic. Reflecting on a handful of pediatric AIDS cases, he wrote that if the disease could pass between family members through routine contact, “then AIDS takes on an entirely new dimension” — raising the possibility that ordinary household contact could spread it.

It was a reckless leap. Even then, the epidemiological data pointed clearly to blood-borne and sexual transmission. But by floating the idea that sharing a dinner table or a bathroom might infect an entire family, Fauci lit a match under public terror. He quietly walked the casual-contact theory back not long after — yet the damage was done, and the strategic value of catastrophic messaging had become obvious. I first reported this study in my 1990 book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, and it still gets lots of play.

Driving much of the bogus “science” was an alarmism aimed at gaining federal funding for research, and especially Big Pharma dollars. Michael Fumento continues:

Having primed the public for irrational fear, the public health apparatus under Fauci faced a new problem by the late 1980s: how to sustain federal funding and public urgency once casual transmission was off the table. The answer was to convince everyone that, as headlines put it, “Now We’re All at Risk of AIDS.” Except heterosexuals were somehow more at risk.

We were told, with total confidence, that a “heterosexual AIDS explosion” was sweeping middle America. The data eventually caught up with the claim: the general heterosexual explosion never happened. It had been manufactured to maximize funding and political leverage. By the time the truth arrived, the panic had already done its job. The budget was secured. The agency had grown. The director had made himself indispensable.

Fumento notes how that “playbook” would get reused repeatedly in the years ahead (right up to current day) by certain healthcare professionals who looked to elevate “low-probability threats” to “existential crises.”

In the 1980s, there were legions of chicken littles who tried to frighten everyday Americans into believing they could get AIDS from everything from toilet bowls to salad bowls. A 17-year-old heterosexual guy with a hot date for the high school prom was deemed just as vulnerable as a homosexual man who frequented bathhouses in San Francisco. Many of us guys were afraid to even kiss the hot girl out of fear of AIDS. Neither the guy nor the girl need be promiscuous. Heck, they could both be virgins! Casual contact was considered a risk. Society was teetering on the precipice of that heterosexual AIDS explosion.

For young progressives foaming at the mouth as they read this right now, scoffing that I’m surely exaggerating, all I can tell you is to talk with people of my age. They won’t scoff. They’ll confirm what I’m saying.

In reality, a teen girl was only at high risk of HIV if she was dating a bisexual boy engaging in a lot of intercourse with other men in a major city like New York. That behavior by him would put her at risk. Kissing her grandmother or sitting on a toilet seat in a public restroom did not.

But alas, the scaremongering was real. And the goal — among liberals in media and Hollywood, among certain parts of the medical community, among advocates like Dr. Fauci — was to gain support for HIV research as well as sympathy for homosexuals. The more they could universalize the disease, the more they could promote their objectives.

I could rattle off examples that I still recall from television alarmism, whether TV dramas or talk-show hosts like Phil Donahue featuring a dying child who got AIDS from a blood transfusion (which was real). One of my favorite TV shows was the series St. Elsewhere, which I related to because I worked at a hospital. I recall Mark Harmon’s character — Dr. Bobby Caldwell, a good-looking guy who did well with the ladies — contracting AIDS through a heterosexual relationship. This led to the character’s sudden, dramatic decline and death — and Harmon’s departure from the series. The message: you could be Dr. Bobby Caldwell.

Of course, depending on a wide variety of scenarios, both you and Caldwell could indeed contract HIV, but the likelihood was very low that you would get it from conventional heterosexual activity. Heterosexuals were not at high risk; homosexuals were. More specifically, it was highly promiscuous homosexual men who were at high risk. (For the record, Magic Johnson contracted AIDS through extremely promiscuous heterosexual activity.)

Nonetheless, the narrative being pushed was that everyone in America was in danger, and this terrified us young folks. I graduated from Butler High School in 1984. In 1986, the year that Dr. Caldwell succumbed to AIDS, I was a sophomore in college. I lived through the height of the hysteria. They hit us with videos, pictures, pamphlets, talks by nurses. They scared the hell out of us.

I must add that, ironically, the promotion of this threat prompted many of us young folks to moderate some of our wilder proclivities: “Hey, dude, that chick has been with a bunch of guys. I would avoid her like the plague. You’ll get AIDS from her.” Well, that wasn’t likely, unless the guys she was with included bisexual males engaging other males, especially in large urban areas.

I wish I could credit secular liberals for prompting some level of chastity among me and my buddies for moral reasons. But as always with secular progressives, religion had nothing to do with it. Quite the contrary. They wanted to defend non-traditional forms of intercourse. The Bible be damned. I can’t commend the purity of their intentions.

Alas, AIDS remains an awful disease. And heterosexuals most certainly do get the disease, including heterosexual women, and probably at higher rates today than in the 1980s. It has been devastating in continents like Africa. In many of those heterosexual cases, the means of transmission is not based on sexual intercourse.

But in the 1980s, when the likes of Dr. Fauci were making their name, HIV was not the heterosexual threat that activists claimed it to be. They spent a lot of time and resources promoting this myth for purposes of money and ideology, and they still do. Michael Fumento was a courageous whistleblower who reported the truth in his books and in this magazine, and he still does.

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