Simon says, The Pope distorts science
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Some of us can remember when AIDS was not yet a problem, back when the public health game was to get all young women on the Pill -- ostensibly to reduce pregnancy, in reality to justify the emancipated sexuality of the advocates. In that period Science (i.e., spectacled men in white lab coats grasping Erlenmeyer flasks) was droning on about the high failure rate of the condom. Condoms were ridiculed by public health advocates as a crude backwoodsy expedient that only the naive or the unscrupulous would employ. Has the science changed in the meantime? No, only the terms of flattering the People Who Count.
Take a look at the persons who really care, as opposed to persons for whom "caring" is an ideological posture. Mother Teresa's nuns have been running AIDS hospices in Manhattan, San Francisco, and elsewhere since the 1980s. The caregivers are nuns who come mostly from third world backgrounds; their patients come mostly from first world cities. The nuns are chaste and healthy; yet it's their patients, not they, who came of age surrounded by free condoms, sex ed, and the full force of the public health propaganda machine. If the Lancet were right it should be the other way around: the little sisters would be wasting on the cots and the Manhattanites would be tending to them. Can't help but think that what the Lancet calls the "Pope's error" is a very felix culpa.
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Take a look at the persons who really care, as opposed to persons for whom "caring" is an ideological posture. Mother Teresa's nuns have been running AIDS hospices in Manhattan, San Francisco, and elsewhere since the 1980s. The caregivers are nuns who come mostly from third world backgrounds; their patients come mostly from first world cities. The nuns are chaste and healthy; yet it's their patients, not they, who came of age surrounded by free condoms, sex ed, and the full force of the public health propaganda machine. If the Lancet were right it should be the other way around: the little sisters would be wasting on the cots and the Manhattanites would be tending to them. Can't help but think that what the Lancet calls the "Pope's error" is a very felix culpa.
Unsigned comments will be deleted. Permission is given to re-post or reprint with attribution for non-commercial use only.
The stats bear it out, as this item from Catholic Culture makes clear:
ReplyDeleteThe 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.
http://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/blog.cfm?id=383
Mark, excellent info! Thanks for posting this. If there is an example of Culture of Death ideology trumping scientific fact in our day, it is in the fight against AIDS.
ReplyDeleteAnd the condomaniacs get away with it because John Q Public doesn't understant that probability is multiplicative, not additive; the odds (of preventing infection) go down as he continues his risk-taking.
ReplyDeleteNIH advertises an 86% effective rate for condoms in preventing pregnancy. Lets put that in terms we can understand:
Would you jump out of a plane with 99 others skydivers, knowing that 14 parachutes wouldn't open? then get in and do it again and again and... the probability of surviving 10 jumps is only 22%, 20 jumps and its down to 4%, and there is only 1% chance of surviving 30 jumps.
The probability of surviving 100 jumps is .0000282%.
Now, no one will tell you the probability of a condom's effectiveness preventing HIV infection (because to run a test would be highly immoral and even considered unethical by the secularists), so the only thing we can go on is the high failure rate of condoms in preventing pregnancy.
So, why not stay on the plane and wait for it to land?
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.
ReplyDeleteI have found this quote all over the internet but have been unable to find the document from which the quote was taken. This sounds very impressive but unless we can reference the actual document it amounts to something which may or may not have been fabricated, changed or taken out of context and thus easily challenged by nay sayers.