A human white blood cell (CD4) being attacked by the HIV virus; an AIDS prevention advertisement by The Ministry of Education Training, Vietnam. Colour lithograph, ca. 1995. Wikicommons/Wellcome images. Some rights reserved.One of the most pervasive conspiracy theories to have arisen during the Cold War that continues to spread until today is the HIV-as-US-bioweapon thesis – namely, that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was engineered as a biological weapon by the US Government. This conspiracy theory persists, especially on the internet, although scientists have concluded – as many already hypothesized in the 1980s – that HIV originated naturally in Africa after a related virus or viruses jumped the species barrier from non-human primates in the early 1900s.
Conspiracy as virus
As I wrote about the origins and spread of the HIV-as-US-bioweapon conspiracy theory, I found it striking that its evolution and diffusion in various directions paralleled that of a virus. The basic conspiracy theory that the US government somehow stood behind the spread of AIDS arose within the gay community in the US and was published in gay newspapers no later than 1983. After statistics began to show that Haitians and African-Americans were overrepresented among those infected by HIV, similar conspiracy theories about the government’s construction of the virus began to spread within the African-American community and to appear in print in black newspapers by 1985.
