The tragic infection of a young Melbourne schoolgirl with the AIDS virus when receiving blood during an operation, was an accident waiting to happen.
The bureaucratic inflexibility of the Victorian health system in refusing direct donations from family members is partly to blame. The practice is permitted in South Australia and is the only way to be sure of the integrity of the blood being received. But the inadequate screening procedures of the Red Cross are also to blame. In 1990, in the legal case, PQ v. The Australian Red Cross Society and Others, Counsel John Rush argued that the medical profession had known since 1983 that an infectious person could give blood without knowledge of being infectious.
The third issue that the tragedy exposes, is the utter inadequacy of the response by governments and health authorities to the advent of the AIDS epidemic. That response has been dictated by the political clout that the gay lobby enjoys. Despite the knowledge from the earliest time of the outbreak, that AIDS was limited to homosexuals, authorities bowed to gay political pressure and publicly embraced the notion that the outbreak was a threat to the community generally.
Homosexual men were disproportionately represented amongst blood donors, because donating blood was a way of securing free, regular monitoring for hepatitis, a disease that is rife amongst promiscuous homosexuals. Yet, when Dr. Gordon Archer, Director of the NSW Blood Bank, announced that homosexuals would no longer be accepted as blood donors because of the risk of AIDS, the Sydney Blood Bank was picketed by gay activists and Dr. Archer was denounced as a “bigot” and a “homophobe”. Subsequently, the Government announced that homosexuals would not be “discriminated against” by preventing them donating blood. Instead, a leaflet was produced for intending donors, asking those in high-risk groups not to donate blood. Moreover, blood banks were not allowed to ask questions to ascertain sexual preference in the screening process, because it was “discriminatory”.
This silly, weak-kneed nonsense from governments is only one example of the way in which the gay lobby has formed itself into a militant and powerful political force, able to exert pressure on cowardly governments of all persuasions and oblige them to dance to its tune. Staggering sums of money have been spent on AIDS research and establishing and maintaining a vast array of mini bureaucracies, often competing with each other, to serve the AIDS lobby. The gay lobby has used the advent of AIDS to secure government validation of the destructive “gay lifestyle” and win a degree of access to public money and state resources out of all proportion to the significance and impact of the disease. It has used its new influence to effect social change in the wider community through health and public education policies, including those affecting social mores, gender roles and the family. Vast sums were, and are, spent on promoting “safe sex”, without once mentioning that the only truly safe sex is chastity before marriage and fidelity afterwards.
But it has been achieved at the expense of the health system generally and, in particular, at the expense of those who contract less fashionable diseases. Breast cancer, for example, is a major killer of women, of whom more than 4000 die each year from this disease, over ten times more than the AIDS toll. Yet, during the last ten years, national funds allocated for breast cancer research have been just over half of those allocated to AIDS. It seems incredible that such a failure of public health policy could occur in Australia, brought about by an activist lobby pushing “gay rights” to the exclusion of the rights of other citizens.
It might take the tragedy of that little girl in Melbourne, to get those charged with responsibility for safeguarding the public health to bring some order into the chaos.
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