On this anniversary, you will read many stories about the medical research on AIDS which -- however remarkable in itself -- has failed to produce an effective vaccine let alone a cure for the disease. This failure was predicted at the very outset of the epidemic, a fact I wrote about at the time. The leading experts on the epidemic warned then that the only way to stem the tide of the epidemic was through public health methods.

You will read many stories about the heroic efforts of activists in the gay community to lobby the government for more AIDS money, and to care for the sick and dying. None of these efforts should be confused with public health methods for combating epidemics, however. What you will not read is a single story about those methods, or how epidemics were combated -- often successfully -- for a hundred years prior to 1981, before gay activists inserted themselves into the public health system. What you will not read is how the proven public health methods were opposed by AIDS activists, and how public health officials surrendered to the activists' demands for veto control over which methods were acceptable and which were not, or how they then colluded in subverting the system that had proved so successful in the past.

What you will not read is any evaluation of the AIDS campaigns -- mainly "education" -- that the activists demanded in place of the proven methods. Yet the harrowing figures released on this anniversary show these politically correct billion-dollar campaigns have failed miserably to contain the epidemic or to prevent it from spreading into other communities, particularly the African-American and Hispanic communities.

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As a result of the obstruction of testing, reporting, contact tracing and infection-site closing by gay leaders and their allies in the Democratic Parties that controlled these cities, public health officials could not warn communities in the path of the epidemic -- in fact, were not able to find out what that path was. As a result by the end of the first decade of AIDS, Hispanics were 14 percent of those infected and blacks were 26 percent. A decade later Hispanics were 19 percent of those infected and blacks an astounding 45 percent.

What you will not read in the 20th anniversary coverage of the epidemic is any story on the fact that today -- as we move into the third decade of the epidemic with infection rates rising and the death toll climbing -- the subverted public health system still does not require reporting of individual cases, testing of at-risk communities, contact tracing to warn individuals of possible infection or the closing of sex clubs and other potential sites of infection.

Thus, in addition to being a grim anniversary from the vantage of the dead and those who loved them, this is a disheartening occasion for those of us who have paid attention to the course of this contagion and have watched in disbelief the criminally ineffectual efforts that have been deployed in the name of political correctness to contain it. This anniversary also makes clear that, as a nation, we have learned nothing from the follies of the past, and are headed into the next decade still prisoners of orchestrated ignorance and still relying on the remedies that failed.

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