Medical correctness.

Ninteen eighty-seven. The New York Times tells us, "AIDS May Dwarf the Plague"; U.S. News declares "the disease of them suddenly is the disease of us"; Oprah Winfrey solemnly informs her audience, "one out of five heterosexuals will be dead of AIDS by 1990" (that's about 50 million people); and HHS Secretary Otis Bowen insists AIDS could make the Black Death seem "pale by comparison."

February 1993. The New York Times reports, "the AIDS epidemic will have little impact on the lives of most Americans or the way society functions, the National Research Council [part of the National Academy of Sciences] says. In a study made public today, the Council said AIDS was concentrated among homosexuals, drug users, the poor, and the undereducated .... "Almost simultaneously, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) releases the year-end AIDS figures for 1992. Overall, cases increased only 3.5 per cent from the year before, even less than the 5 per cent increase from 1990-1991. Cases attributed to heterosexual transmission increased 17 per cent, compared to 21 per cent from 1990-1991. The increase in female cases declined from 17 to 9 per cent. Cases diaguosed among teenagers were exactly the same as the year before while those among persons aged 20 to 24 actually declined slightly. Before releasing the figures, the CDC announced a second time that it was revising downward its estimate of future AIDS cases.

Whatever happened to the everybody's-going-to-get-it-especially-your-grandmother epidemic? As Michael Fumento first pointed out in a 1987 Commentary article, it never existed except in the imagination of various special-interest groups, including homosexual activists, the media, politicians, and government bureaucrats. When Mr. Fumento expanded his thesis into the book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS two years later, those same groups declared war. Stores were exhorted to refuse it and many complied; copies were stolen out of libraries; book review editors at usually respectable magazines like Science and Nature gave the book over to AIDS activists to trash it. Science attacked Fumento for calling for the CDC to revise downward its estimate of future AIDS cases, even though the CDC had already done so for the first time after Fumento's book came out but several months before the Science review did. Finally the book was removed from print.

Now the truth is emerging. Last year, responding to a decline in teenage AIDS cases from a total of 170 in 1990 to 160 in 1991, Pat Schroeder's House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families announced a veritable explosion of teenage AIDS cases, resulting in headlines like "AIDS Runs Wild Among Teenagers," a cover story in Newsweek, and U.S. & World News Report calling teenage AIDS one of the top-ten health issues of the year. Responding to the flattening of the epidemic, AIDS activists coerced the CDC into broadly expanding the definition of what constitutes AIDS, which will cause the numbers to shoot up this year before beginning to decline again in the next. Beyond the general broadening, three new illnesses were also added to the AIDS definition that will make it easier for women and nonhomosexuals in general to be included in the diaguosis. And HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, who has no medical credentials, told a House panel the day before the release of the National Research Council report, "We could spend our energy on research and immunization and education and still not have any Americans left unless we're prepared to confront the crisis of AIDS." Not any?

AIDS is a terrible disease; its victims deserve our compassion and assistance. There was never good reason to doubt that the American public would give both. But AIDS policy was driven by the unwarranted assumption that Americans would be coldly aloof to the victims of a disease associated mainly with homosexuality and drugs--and, even less justifiably, by the calculation of some AIDS activists that the myth of AIDS as an epidemic striking all could be exploited to reshape popular morality, replacing such virtues as fidelity, modesty, and chastity with a calculating sexual hygiene (that in some AIDS literature was not always very hygienic). If that myth is now collapsing, we will not reduce our compassion for the sick. But we may be a step closer to getting our morality back.