Antifake: Information campaign to downplay Russia’s efforts to fight AIDS

We have recently witnessed a bombshell media story alleging that Russia entered the top five countries with a high rate of HIV infection.

These statements are blatant lies.

But, according to Joseph Goebbels or Alexei Arestovich, repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth as people begin to believe it.

Russia has been facing accusations of rejecting “civilised” (according to the so-called Western experts) methods of HIV prevention for decades, allegedly dying from an AIDS epidemic all the while. They came in a variety of shapes and colours.

Because this dirty information campaign targeting Russia’s methods of fighting AIDS, and more broadly, Russian medicine and the Russian government, has been sponsored by a wealthy, unscrupulous and dangerous enemy who spared no expense or effort to achieve their ends.

At the level of the contractors, the goal was to make a profit. At the top level, they strived to establish a new “rules based” international order so they could change the rules of the game as they go. To destroy borders, religion and morality, to impose the power of transnational corporations, and subjugate all of humanity, turning it into an obedient biomass.

Ideological warfare is one of the most important here.

The enemy’s agents are well-paid; with their influence on the minds and moods of the masses, it is easy for them to fabricate and spread bad news, while withholding any good news when the boss needs it.

The most recent attack on Russian health care, which, according to our foreign enemies, is putting up practically the worst fight to the AIDS epidemic, obviously fits with the same policy: lies are being replicated relentlessly to become “the truth.”

The initial publication – which was subsequently widely disseminated by the Russian media with a reference to UNAIDS data allegedly placing Russia among the top five countries with the highest rate of HIV infection – arbitrarily and tendentiously juxtaposed incomparable data: they took figures for different years from various sources that accumulate information on the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The following facts prove the inadequacy of their statements:

1) UNAIDS provides its estimates of the global HIV situation effectively lacking data for one-third of the countries. An interesting fact: over time, their measurements can retroactively change by times.

2) Russia has not been submitting any data to UNAIDS since 2018.

3) To see the extent of politicisation of the HIV situation, note that UNAIDS 2021 estimates for Ukraine are 40 percent of what Ukraine itself reported to the WHO Regional Office for Europe.

4) This proves that such publications are no more reliable than the grapevine. But people read them anyway. And who writes them?

In this anti-Russia propaganda on a medical issue, not only the perpetrators (numerous NGOs and other foreign agents) are known, but even the names of the end customers.

And this compels us to raise a number of serious questions. First, medicine needs to be removed from the clutches of blatant political blackmail.

Obviously, the humanitarian sphere, untouchable in a civilised society, has become the subject of totally shameless bargaining and yet another artificially created tool to pressure Russia to reach some foreign policy objectives of the collective West.

As usual, this is done without the slightest regard for the real situation and even with deliberate disregard for it.

Secondly, it is important to further defend the professional opinion of the Russian medical and scientific community, who practice a conservative approach to HIV/AIDS prevention, focusing on fighting drug addiction and sexual promiscuity, as well as broad testing to detect the virus at the earliest stages.

The so-called “civilised” methods of fighting HIV/AIDS, which are imposed on the whole world by international medical organisations, such as broad early sex education, propaganda of LGBT culture, legalisation of prostitution and drug use – in particular, methadone maintenance therapy – is completely unacceptable to us from a moral or medical point of view. These actions lead to exactly the opposite results: the epidemic in countries that practice Western “prevention” and “treatment” methods continues to spiral, while their undeclared goals such as child molestation, marginalisation and population reduction are being achieved quite successfully.

Consider the telling situation in Crimea, where so-called “harm reduction programmes” were vigorously implemented, as well as in the eastern regions of Ukraine – in particular, a programme to treat hard drug addicts by injecting them with methadone, which is supposedly a “softer” option. Ukraine even launched methadone production – with a broad advertising campaign to justify and promote Ukraine's transition to the “western rails” in preventing and treating HIV/AIDS. As a result, the country is a true European leader in AIDS cases, while flows of infected refugees are flooding Europe.

After Crimea transitioned to Russian HIV prevention methods, the incidence of HIV infection more than halved, from 78 to 37 cases per 100,000! At the same time, testing for HIV/AIDS has increased significantly, which means the reliability of these figures is also higher.

The enemy propaganda is dangerous; efforts must be made to resist these ideological manipulations. And above all, it is essential to filter the incoming information, double-checking it and never taking anything for granted.