INTERVIEW WITH LEE EVANS ABOUT AFRICA & AIDS

 

                                     
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Lee Evans [1] and I have been friends since 1976 when we discovered a common love of fishing at the staff club of the University of Ile-Ife in western Nigeria, where I was a lecturer in microbiology and Lee was the national track coach who used the fine facilities of the relatively new university for his training camp. Over the decades our friendship has grown, and in 2004, shortly after my "very scientific" biography of Peter Duesberg was published, Lee agreed to send a few words about it to Amazon.

Considering his well-known name, it is a little, but only a little, surprising that no one from the media ever noticed it, and out of curiosity at least telephoned to find out what was up with this odd bit of endorsement. [2] Lee was understandably concerned about this eventuality when I asked him to please contribute something (for personal reasons having nothing to do with my imagining his name could be used to sell books -- all, I am holding my sides laughing, profits of which go to the The Virtual Library of Biotechnology for the Americas in any case). But I assured him that the chance of Sports Illustrated calling was almost as slim as contracting HIV [3] from a random sexual encounter with the boys of the Castro of San Francisco or the girls in the hotels of the Ikeja of Lagos, and we even jokingly thought of some artful dodges he might employ in the event of the highly unlikely inquiry ever materializing.

But once again I was optimistic in my estimation of the attention popular media pay to the "HIV/AIDS debate", and the number of inquiries he has received in the 16 months since his "customer review" appeared is exactly the number of AIDS patients cured since the "new disease and its cause" was announced by the US government 26 years ago, i.e. zero.

Very recently, however, Lee decided, for reasons explained below, to allow me to interview him about HIV/AIDS and Africa.


Harvey Bialy: The first question in anyone’s mind who has even glanced at my book online is "did you actually read this?"


Lee Evans: (Laughing). I read it the same way you read
Frank Murphy’s new biography of me when we asked you to look at the manuscript. You skimmed the technical parts about hundredths of a second 100 meter splits, and leans and redirecting vertical energy into horizontal movement, etc., and just read the story. And just like Frank’s book did for you, your book brought back a lot of memories for me, and also reminded me the struggles of the 60s are not over even though there are more black millionaires.


HB: Why did you decide that now was the time to go more public (anticipating that this website will be visited more frequently than the Amazon listing for my book)?


LE: I don’t know exactly. Maybe it’s because over the past couple of years I’ve become more cynical about a lot of things. (Laughing) Getting old I guess. But seriously, the more I see what is going on in Washington and with the foreign policy of the United States, the more I’m reminded of the ways the government lied about Viet Nam and the way it messed with Black people, including me (laughing again), during those times. The whole picture fits so well with what you have been telling me about AIDS since "the Motherland is dying from too much sex" became a gold record song, I got angry enough to want to say something about racial politics in this country again after hoping for 35 years something might really change. And then I read the stories of that NIH doctor
Fishbein, and a few days ago Bush scared the hell out of me when he said in his sorry State of the Union speech that he wanted a new federal effort to make sure millions more African Americans were tested for HIV! [4] So I decided the next time you asked me to go public I would.


HB
: What first made you suspicious of mainstream African AIDS reporting?


LE: I have been all over Africa for almost 30 years and when I first heard there was a new sexually transmitted disease epidemic I was alarmed and began looking for what the television said was everywhere. All I ever saw was more and more of the same diseases we saw in 1975, and it was obvious the increase was because of the worsening living conditions, and the pennies instead of dollars governments were spending on health care. Sure, I have seen TB wards at hospitals and lots of misery, but nobody except the media and the people living off AIDS money ever called that AIDS. And isn’t it true that except for South Africa no country uses an "
HIV test" before it names some old disease AIDS? And what’s all this about an epidemic? Even before you showed me the real numbers, I knew nothing had happened in the United States after 20 years of "sexually-transmitted" HIV. And as far as I remember, AIDS was discovered here in the "most sex and number one-loving country in the world". And then they decided it must have come from Africa.

click here for part 2
reprinted with permission from AIDS WIKI, copyright by Harvey Bialy, used with permission.

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