The Conspiracist's Dilemma

 



Between 1970 and the early 1990s, an estimated 30,000 people in the UK were given blood or blood products infected with HIV or hepatitis C. Some 3,000 died as a direct consequence. An inquiry commenced in 2018 has finally produced its report, and it is damning.

Blood was not routinely tested for HIV until 1986, hepatitis C following 5 years later.  A significant source of the contamination was imported blood, particularly from America which paid donors, incentivising donation from drug users, for example. 

Brian Langstaff's report lays much of the blame for the problem with Government, but medical staff and the NHS as a whole come in for criticism.

All of which will be music to a conspiracist's ears. A nice juicy medical scandal, involving government, undermining trust in the medical profession... those who call for a similar inquiry into harms from vaccination - a call I would not necessarily oppose - will see many parallels,  and vindication of their suspicions that 'they' are never to be trusted.

For a particular flavour of conspiracist, however, this presents a dilemma. Many on the vaccine-sceptic side of the argument have lent their voice to the growing fringe notion that there is no such thing as a virus. No-one ever caused a disease by passing a virus from one person to another, and the things themselves are anyway artefacts; illusions. So, what's the contaminant? What caused these people to develop the diseases, some to die? Why did the contamination stop when they started testing for these specific viruses?

The tests for both HIV and Hep C involve both antibody and nucleic acid tests - the latter presumably PCR. This is the test that PCR inventor and HIV/AIDS denier Kary Mullis is routinely quoted as saying "will find almost anything in anybody". The falsity of his statement can be demonstrated by the fact that we don't throw away 'almost all' blood donations due to false positives. As to antibodies, if viruses don't exist, what are the antibodies antibodies to? Why does the body produce them, and why do they frequently co-occur with specific nucleic acid sequences?

A familiar refrain from the virus denier is that viruses have not been proven according to 'the scientific method'. They imagine that the latter consists solely of experiment (and gloss over the fact that their preferred Terrain Theory has absolutely no experimental support!). The kind of experiment they have in mind is the ethically impossible infection of a healthy volunteer with HIV or Hep C, in a random trial against placebo! Well, that will  never be done for obvious reasons, but here is an 'experiment' inadvertently performed: people were given products contaminated with HIV and Hep C and went on to harbour the virus. Both of these viruses are capable of living in the body for decades.

So, that's the dilemma. If one continues to reject the existence of viruses, this scandal is a complete nothing burger. Government and the NHS have brought themselves into disrepute purely to maintain the wider fiction that viruses are real, and the opportunity to revel in their discomfort must be relinquished. On the other hand, if you want to use this as evidence for the nefariousness of government and medicine, viruses must be accepted as real.

I look forward to people trying to push both buttons simultaneously.



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