Fact Check: Could white group really infect black people with HIV?
- Danish filmmaker Mads Brugger has stirred controversy after releasing a film claiming that a group of white mercenaries plotted to devastate the black African population
- While this supposed plot allegedly took place during the apartheid era, the method that these mercenaries used has come under immense speculation
- Brugger claims that the plan had been to spread HIV through the population, but Briefly.co.za takes a look at what scientists have to say
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Mads Brugger has put forward claims that white mercenaries used vaccinations as a cover to spread HIV among black citizens in his new film, Cold Case Hammarskjold.
Speaking to Alexander Jones, who is an ex-member of a paramilitary group with supposed ties to the apartheid government, Brugger hears how the group allegedly undertook research during the 1980s and 1990s.
The research allegedly aimed to carry out a white supremacist plot to cull black communities with the virus, with Jones telling Brugger:
"We were at war. Black people in South Africa were the enemy."
However, scientists have not hesitated in casting doubt on the claim, which they say is medically dubious, reports EWN.
Dr Salim Karim, a renowned AIDS researcher who worked in the country during the 1990's and is director of AIDS research centre in South Africa, Caprisa, has commented that the probability that the group were able to carry out their plot is 'close to zero'.
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Karim says that in order to do this, the group would need access to millions of dollars and infrastructure that resembles the cutting-edge Centres for Disease Control in America.
Rebecca Hodes, director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit at UCT, says that the allegations are dangerous in themselves:
“One dangerous consequence of these allegations is that they have the potential to sow mistrust and suspicion of doctors and the medical establishment, and that they may confuse people about how HIV is transmitted."
The New York Times reports that, at the time, only a handful of labs around the world would have had any hope of conducting these types of experiments, and the white mercenaries would have had a difficult time successfully carrying out their supposed plot.
The filmmakers themselves have admitted that they could find nothing to confirm Mr Jones' account, which has been dubbed medically impossible by global specialists operating both today and during the height of segregation in South Africa.
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Source: Briefly News
