This seems to be in at least the top 5 list of most widely talked about conspiracies (Along with 9/11 truthers, moon hoaxers, Kennedy assassination, and maybe the one about crack cocaine being invented by the CIA): That the US government engineered HIV to suppress the homosexual community.
But it seems to me that creating a virus, or heavily altering an existing one would have proved nearly impossible given the level of research into it at the time AIDS first surfaced. Granted, I don’t know a whole lot about the history of genetic engineering, especially in regards to viruses, so I might be mistaken.
Not that I expect to change the minds of anyone who genuinely believes the conspiracy, I’m just curious.
I doubt even Duesberg could have begun to do it, and he was the foremost expert on retrovirus in the 1970’s. (And of course, HIV was later found to be much older, but the conspiracy theorists won’t buy that.) We have some inkling of how to do viral gene therapy now, but something like this? You’d probably have to fake it: have a lot of hospitals in on a long-term conspiracy–or given enough bad info to unwittingly perpetuate one–to poison people and blame an obscure virus (which, oddly enough, is pretty close to what Duesberg thought was going on when they said a retrovirus was killing people).
The earliest confirmed case goes back to 1959. There is evidence of earlier cases in the 30s and a number of references to a similar type disease in 1890 in the Belgian Congo.
People like to make a big deal out of how HIV/AIDS came out of no where, but look at Marburg and Ebola to see, it happens
Given that it wasn’t until 1977 that any organisms’s genome was sequenced, the first pathogenic human retrovirus (human T-cell leukemia virus) was not discovered until 1981, and the first creation of a virus in the lab was in 2002 (a very simple virus that nonetheless took two years to create), it is ludicrously improbable to think that mad scientists could have acccomplished genetic engineering of HIV in the early 80s (or earlier).
Even if you accepted that there were Mad Homophobes fiendish enough to try it, being clever enough to engineer the virus should have ensured enough cleverness to realize that effective treatments would be discovered soon enough to thwart their evil extermination plan - or that the virus would be able to spread to unwitting heterosexuals and thus threaten all of humanity, including the Mad Homophobes.
Of course, facts and logic have never seriously threatened conspiracy theorists; they are immune to all our evidence-based batterings.
People attribute magical powers to the CIA, Trilateral Commission, or whoever is planning to take over the world next. Considering the CIA did not see the Iron Curtain falling, did not see the Arab Spring coming - do you think their science department is any better? Someone who could have done that work would be nobel prize material, not languishing in a private government lab. We know all we do today about sciences from the work of millions across the globe publishing and verifying results; a small lab in the middle of nowhere in total secrecy is more likely to be at the level of goat-staring research than better-than-cutting-edge new virus development. Besides - where and how do you test a virus that takes years to manifest itself?
We just don’t know that much about how to design a virus, although each new disease, like AIDS, is like a crash course (after the fact) in some aspect of how viruses work. However, that much was NOT known in 1980 or earlier. It just turned out that San Francisco for sociological reasons was the ideal incubator for this disease, yet healthy enough that the victims were no longer just “background noise” of overall poor public health. Like other STD’s it may have been a low level pandemic for decades beforehand working its way from Africa to Europe to North America.
Heard an interview with a writer on the radio who claims that a major cause of AIDS spread was likely Belgian public health initiatives in the Congo. He did research on the number of distribution of these public health groups and their procedures for cleaning their needles and other equipment. The government health groups went from village to village administering vaccines etc. with equipment that was probably poorly sterilized; an infection in one monkey hunter could have been spread across the district in a matter of a few years. As good a theory as any and less crackpot than most.
We can’t predict something as deterministic as the weather further out than a couple days even with extensive initial state data because it’s too complex a system and tiny causes can lead to large variations.
Human populations are a teensy bit more complex and fickle than the weather ; not to mention obtaining extensive, reliable data on the population of foreign countries or what happens behind closed doors abroad is problematic to say the least. You do the math.
Quite a few Wall Street “experts” who did do math did not even see the 2008 economic collapse coming. Not to worry, the CEO’s still got their bonuses.
It’s a matter of identifying both economic trends and social attitudes. This may be difficult for any intelligence agency, but oddly you do pay them to gather this data and analyze it. None of them issue reports stating “we don’t have a clue what will happen”, except maybe in the case of North Korea.