<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Monday, December 06, 2004

If All Your Friends Jumped Off a Cliff, Would You Do It, Too?
On ABC's This Week yesterday, the topic was the bogus information being ladled out by certain government-funded abstinence programs, including the nugget that tears and sweat can transmit HIV. The guest was Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Host George Stephanopolous asked, "You're a doctor. Do you think tears and sweat can transmit HIV?" Weirdness then ensued.
Frist: "I don't know . . . I can tell you . . ."
Stephanopoulos: "You don't know?"
Frist: "I can tell you things like, like . . condoms . . ."
Stephanopoulos: "You believe that tears and sweat might be able to transmit AIDS?"
Frist isn't a doctor like some wingnuts are doctors, with a degree from some mail-order college and auto supply warehouse in New Mexico--he's a cardiac surgeon whose father established one of the biggest hospital chains in the country, Columbia/HCA. And he doesn't know if tears and sweat can transmit AIDS?

Frist later conceded it would be "very difficult" to transmit AIDS this way--but the transmission mechanism for HIV isn't one of those scientific theories wingnuts can claim is not definitively settled. It's settled as definitively as anything in science can be, and so Frist's concession is as wrong as his original contention.

It's a safe bet that the person they hire to swab the operating room floor after a cardiac procedure knows how AIDS is transmitted and how it isn't. And Frist knows it too--but it was more important for him to stay on the Repug message yesterday than it was to answer the question truthfully.

Ladies and gentlemen, the party of moral values. These people are playing politics with your health, my health, and the health of kids all across the country--and people are going to die because of it. And I'd like somebody who voted for them--preferably somebody not drunk on religious-right Kool Aid, but just a regular Republican voter, if there is such a thing, to explain to me why that's OK.

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?