What 'everybody knows'-- but it's wrong

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 20, 2009

The fashionable world "knows" that the Pope is wrong about AIDS and condoms. Pundits assure us, again and again, that the Pope is simply, flat-out wrong about the facts. Condoms do prevent the spread of AIDS, they tell us; it's an established scientific fact.

Curious, isn't it, that the evidence to support that "fact" hasn't yet arrived in Cambridge?

"‘We have found no consistent associations between condom use and lower HIV-infection rates, which, 25 years into the pandemic, we should be seeing if this intervention was working.”

 Edward C. Green,

Director, AIDS Prevention Research Project,

Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard University

If the distribution of condoms is the "compassionate" response to AIDS, it's a kind of compassion that kills. Maybe condoms usually work, but "usually" isn't good enough when you're dealing with a fatal disease. The stubborn statistics belie the ideological claims:

In Thailand, Dr Somchai Pinyopornpanich, deputy head of the Disease Control Department in Bangkok, said that 46.9 per cent of men and 39.1 per cent of women who use condoms are infected by HIV-AIDS.