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The Lancet Politicizes Science
Posted by Tom McFeely
Monday, March 30, 2009 3:09 PM
The British medical journal The Lancet weighed in last week on condoms, criticizing Pope Benedict XVI’s recent assertion they have aggravated AIDS transmission in Africa.
In so doing, the journal was guilty of precisely what it accused the Pope of doing — politicizing science by misrepresenting as fact something that contradicts the known empirical evidence.
In an editorial dated March 28, The Lancet excoriated the Pope for allegedly making “an outrageous and wildly inaccurate statement about HIV/AIDS” during his March 17 comments with journalists on a flight to Cameroon March 17.
According to the editorial, “The Pope has publicly distorted scientific evidence to promote Catholic doctrine on this issue.”
In writing their editorial, The Lancet’s editors implicitly represent themselves as a credible medical and scientific authority that by virtue of its scientific credentials is qualified to disparage the Holy Father.
In reality, they have no such credentials.
The Catholic Church, in contrast to The Lancet’s editors, is eminently reasonable. The Church always stresses the necessity of relying on good authority when making any judgments, so let’s reference the person who is probably the world’s best authority on this matter: Harvard professor of public medicine Edward Green.
Green’s professional lifework has been the analysis of empirical data regarding effective and ineffective means of combating AIDS. Prof. Green said this March 18 to National Review Online about what the evidence says about condom use as a means of fighting AIDS:
“The Pope is correct, or to put it a better way, the best evidence we have supports the Pope’s comments,” said Green, who is director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.
Added Green, “There is a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded ‘Demographic Health Surveys,’ between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates.”
Prof. Green knows what he’s talking about, and The Lancet’s editors don’t. It’s as simple as that. And he says the Pope is right.
Why do The Lancet’s editors believe they, and not the Pope, are the ones who’ve got it right regarding AIDS transmission? Because they’ve fallen into the trap of politicizing science by accepting the supposed “authority” of the many groups who propagandize ceaselessly for condom distribution as the best method of preventing AIDS transmission in Africa. It should be noted that in The Lancet’s editorial, the authorities cited are either political leaders or politically influenced organizations like the World Health Organization, UNAIDS and the UN Population Fund — not informed researchers like Prof. Green.
The plain fact that their approach doesn’t work doesn’t matter to these folks; driven by an ideological distaste for what really works — abstaining from sexual activity before marriage and remaining sexually faithful after marriage — they insist that condom distribution has been successful in fighting the spread of AIDS in Africa when in fact it’s been an abysmal failure.
A reliance on politics instead of science is the only way anyone, including the editors of The Lancet, can arrive at this false conclusion. The Pope is the voice of reason on condoms, and his critics are the ones guilty of publicly distorting the scientific evidence.
| Filed under aids, benedict xvi, condoms, the lancet
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