Michael Fumento

For years, I and a handful of others have dared write that worldwide HIV and AIDS figures have been grossly exaggerated; that the official authorities have been lying. I first criticized the African doomsaying in my 1990 book, the Myth of Heterosexual AIDS - 17 years ago! For our troubles we critics were hung, drawn, and quartered.

Now, as I discuss in my new article in The American Spectator Online, "An Epidemic of Falsehoods," the UNAIDS program has admitted its HIV estimate from last year was over six million too high, dropping it from 39.5 million to 33.2 million. The agency also now admits the number of new HIV infections per year peaked way back around 1998.

Trust me; the "corrected" figure is still a gross exaggeration. And as I make clear, the inflated figures were no mere mistake in methodology, as the official and unofficial alarmist groups would have us think. It was a concession that our trusted officials (Trusted by the mainstream media, anyway) could no longer maintain such a massive fiction against the onslaught of reality. It's a sordid tale, but an interesting one. And it's far from over.

Now, when will they admit they've grossly exaggerated the risk of pandemic avian flu?