My previous experience with media people was that the man-made story was taboo. The major TV networks are owned and controlled by powerful business interests, and I sensed that pressure was put on the executives not to air the man-made AIDS story. The American public had fully accepted the monkey story. It would be foolhardy to scare viewers into thinking AIDS was another government screw-up.

I was surprised when the producer called a few weeks later to explain that his staff of reporters had checked out my story with government officials. Predictably, the health officials said the man-made story was preposterous and without merit. The producer prodded them for specific information about the hepatitis experiment. What happened to the men who volunteered? How many were still alive? How many died of AIDS? Surely this information was available. The government officials were evasive. The medical records of the gay men in the experiment were confidential; none of that information could be divulged, and certainly not to media reporters.

Without the cooperation of the government, the producer complained he couldn't get a "balanced" story. Did I have any ideas? I suggested that the AIDS biowarfare story was the most covered-up genocide program of the century. Did he really expect to get the cooperation of health officials in exposing the truth? How did his staff expose other government cover-ups? The producer was sympathetic, but he finally admitted the story was too explosive to tackle without more evidence. I protested. What about the body count of dead gay men? Sorry, he said, that could not be used as evidence.

Where was the evidence that six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis? Where were all the bodies? Where was the documentation? The evidence was the fact that, before the war, there were cities and towns filled with Jews. After the war they were gone, and the missing Jews were never again seen alive.

Where were my young friends from ten years ago? Half of them were dead from AIDS? Straight people didn't lose half their friends and lovers from AIDS. Only gay people. But none of this seemed relevant to the producer who repeatedly asked for "evidence" and "documentation" to prove my theory. The body count, overloaded with gay men, proved nothing.

It was true. There was no overwhelming evidence on the published reports of the hepatitis experiment to prove that the trials were designed to kill gay men. But if one searched the medical literature carefully, there were clues that indicated gays in the experiment were severely damaged by the AIDS virus. In fact, the hepatitis group was far more damaged than any AIDS group in Africa, where the experts claimed the disease supposedly started centuries ago. And if one carefully studied the graphs in Cladd Stevens' 1986 hepatitis report showing the rate of HIV infection in the men in the experiment, one thing was clear--all the men in the gay experiment were doomed to die of AIDS.

The evidence was contained in the gay blood stored at the New York City Blood Center.

When a HIV blood test for AIDS virus antibodies became commercially available in 1985, it was possible to determine exactly who was infected with the virus, the epidemiologists tested old gay blood specimens stored at the New York City Blood Center, to determine whether they were infected. When old, pre-1978 American blood specimens from various groups were tested, there were no HIV-positive samples. This clearly demonstrated that the AIDS virus was not present in the U.S. before 1978.

Through the retrospective testing of blood specimens of the 1083 men in the original hepatitis B experiment, as well as the blood of over 10,000 gays screened by Szmuness, it was definitely determined that the AIDS virus was introduced into the gay community sometime around 1978, the same year the gay experiment began.

June Goodfield recalls that Szmuness, in the months before November 1978, had made some preliminary and unreported inoculations into two hundred people, presumably gays. Thus, even before the experiment officially began, some volunteers were already injected with the experimental vaccine.

Was the experimental hepatitis B vaccine contaminated with the AIDS virus? The vaccine was manufactured by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and also by the Merck drug company. During the clinical trials, Szmuness was concerned about possible vaccine contamination. According to Goodfield, virus contamination was suspected in a vaccine batch made by the NIH, but never in the vaccine made by Merck.

The connections between Merck, the military biowarfare establishment, and the NIH, are well-known to medical conspiracy buffs. The Merck Company is no stranger to biowarfare. George Merck, who directed the company during the Second World War, also directed America's germ weapon research program. As part of the War on Cancer in the early 1970's, President Richard Nixon transferred part of the U.S. Army's biowarfare unit at Fort Detrick, Maryland, over to the National Cancer Institute under the direction of the National Institutes of Health.

After finishing a large experiment in which thousands of blood samples are tested and stored, the specimens are usually discarded. However, after the vaccine trials ended, Szmuness insisted that the Center keep all the tens of thousands of blood samples donated by thirteen thousand gay men. When asked why he was keeping so many vials of blood, Szmuness replied, "Because one day another disease will erupt and we'll need this material."

As late as 1983, several infectious disease specialists reported that AIDS might be related to the hepatitis vaccine because it was discovered that 93% of their AIDS patients tested positive for hepatitis B blood markers! Because the hepatitis B vaccine was manufactured from the blood of gays who carried the hepatitis virus, the physicians feared the AIDS virus could have contaminated the vaccine. Health officials at the CDC reassured everyone that the vaccine was safe.

The safety of the experimental vaccine was also defended by Cladd Stevens, who collaborated closely with the Szmuness in the gay trials. When Szmuness died in 1982, Stevens became the official spokesperson for the experiment. In a May 1983 report she claimed that only two men in the experiment had been diagnosed with AIDS. One was diagnosed two years after receiving the vaccine; the other four years after. "There is no excess incidence in the high-risk population," she emphasized.

Stevens' reassurance was premature. In 1983, the year she penned her report, the sad truth was that one out of every three men injected in the experiment was infected with the AIDS virus.

Prior to the official discovery of the AIDS virus in 1984, the CDC and the vaccine makers repeatedly assured the public that the new commercially-available, non-experimental hepatitis B vaccine was safe. However, Abbott Laboratories, the manufacturer of the commercial hepatitis vaccine, was more cautious about its safety. In their brochure urging gay men to take the commercial vaccine, the company advised: "Many people are concerned about the possible transmission of AIDS and Kaposi's sarcoma; it is unknown whether these are conveyed by blood or blood products. The current hepatitis B vaccine, although produced from the pooled blood of chronic (virus) carriers, is manufactured utilizing several processes believed to inactivate all known groups of viruses."

Although the CDC was confident about the safety of the commercial Hepatitis B vaccine, the public was not. Word quickly got around that the vaccine was made from gay blood. As a result, many people refused to be injected with it. Even though the vaccine is no longer manufactured using gay blood, many people still fear the hepatitis B vaccine because of its association with gay men and AIDS.

In 1986 Cladd Stevens' group did a second follow-up study of 212 men who were injected with the experimental vaccine. Amazingly, 6.6% of the men had positive tests on blood samples taken during the period November 1978 and October 1979! By 1981 over 20% of the men were positive; by 1984 (the end of the study period) over 40% tested positive. Most of the HIV-positive men were immunodeficient.

Since the first cases were discovered in 1979, the media has shocked the public with a never-ending number of sensational AIDS stories. Yet never once has the media given credence to the idea that AIDS is man-made. One of the most outrageous and homophobic AIDS stories concerns "Patient Zero."

In October, 1987, the best selling book And The Band Played On was published. Randy Shilts, a gay man and the first newspaper reporter to cover AIDS full time, wrote an exquisitely detailed historical account of the epidemic. He blamed the Reagan administration for ignoring the epidemic, and for its shameful refusal to fund AIDS research and education.

Despite the brilliance of his book, Shilts is likely to be best remembered for promoting the story of "Patient Zero"--a promiscuous, young Canadian airline steward named Gaetan Dugas, who is accused of bringing the AIDS virus to America.

The medical "facts" about Shilts' Patient Zero (along with lurid details of his sexual life) were eagerly supplied by epidemiologists at the CDC and by Manhattan physicians. Gaetan Dugas was diagnosed with AIDS-related Kaposi's sarcoma in June 1980 in New York City. For a year before his AIDS diagnosis Dugas suffered from swollen glands and a skin rash. Shilts' sensational account of Patient Zero, replete with wanton gay promiscuity and bathhouse sex, was shamelessly promoted in a media blitz.

Although Shilts admitted his Patient Zero theory remains "a question of debate and...ultimately unanswerable," he still claimed Dugas brought AIDS from Paris to North America. Dugas "no doubt...played a key role in spreading the new virus from one end of the United States to the other." Unmentioned by Shilts are medical reports that indicate the AIDS virus was already "introduced" into the New York City gay community, two years before Dugas was diagnosed!

The blood tests from Szmuness' experiment show that the AIDS virus was definitely present in specimens dating back to 1978-1979. In blood specimens dating back to 1980 (the year Gaetan Dugas was diagnosed) Cladd Stevens has reported that twenty percent of the men in the experiment were HIV-positive! Thus, it is inconceivable that Dugas could have flown in from Paris and infected such a large number of gays, some of whom were infected as early as 1978-1979. Furthermore, the "source" of Dugas' own HIV infection was never ascertained.

No matter. The media had a field day with the story. Time (October 19, 1987) reviewed And The Band Played On in its medicine section as "The Appalling Saga of Patient Zero." The cover illustration of California magazine showed a shadowy airline steward deboarding a plane, suitcase in hand, as "Patient Zero: The Man Who Brought AIDS to California." The bold headlines of the New York Post (October 6) read: "The Man Who Gave Us AIDS--triggered gay cancer epidemic in U.S." Not to be outdone, the Star tabloid featured Dugas as "The Monster Who Gave Us AIDS," and condemned him "a modern typhoid Mary--the man who infected a continent with AIDS." Even the supposedly scientific AMA publication, American Medical News (October 23) fell for the story, claiming Dugas "may have brought AIDS to the United States."

These accounts of a dead man serve as examples of how AIDS "facts" become propaganda that is then used to suit various political, scientific, social, moral, and even literary agendas.

Along with the Patient Zero story are other AIDS myths which have attained the status of truths. None is more widely believed than the African green monkey story, one of the most powerful fairy tales of our time.

Grown-ups know that fairy tales are never true. But, like children, adults can suspend belief and be entranced by the adventures contained in the world's most beloved fairy stories.

And so we pretend. And we make fairy stories real.

(continued next week---previous segments of this series are accessible in GayToday's archives under Health features)

(Excerpted from QUEER BLOOD: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot by Alan Cantwell Jr., M.D. published by ARIES Rising Press, P.O. Box 29532, Los Angeles, California 90029 $12.95 Phone: 213-462-6458)