HIV Conspiracy

Conspiracy beliefs about the origin of HIV and the role of the government in the AIDS epidemic are prevalent, particularly in the African American community. Klonoff and Landrine (1999) found in a random door-to-door survey of African Americans in California that 27% of African Americans endorsed the belief that “HIV/AIDS is a man-made virus that the federal government made to kill and wipe out black people”, and a further 23% were unsure. More recently, Bogart and Thorburn (2005) conducted a random telephone survey of African Americans living in the contiguous U.S. They found that “AIDS is a form of genocide against blacks”, (5-point Likert scale, strongly agree to strongly disagree) over 20% of men and 12% of women somewhat or strongly agreed; for the question “AIDS was produced in a government laboratory”, over 30% of men and 24% of women agreed. Both studies note the history of the Tuskegee syphilis study (Jones, 1993) and its potential role in generating mistrust of the government with regard to treatment and racial discrimination and disparities in the health care system.

These beliefs have potentially dangerous consequences for HIV prevention and AIDS treatment: Bogart and Thorburn note that HIV/AIDS conspiracy beliefs were significantly associated with negative condom attitudes and inconsistent condom use, and may represent a facet of negative attitudes toward condom use among black men.

Findings from a recent study on HIV vaccine acceptability among communities at risk suggest that conspiracy beliefs may be widespread and reflect substantial mistrust of the government and health care system among both African Americans and Latinos (Newman, et al, 2004). In this study, a higher percentage of Latinos expressed their mistrust of the government and physicians when compared to other ethnic groups. Approximately 55% of Latinos and 50% of African Americans, for instance, reported believing that the government secretly had an HIV vaccine. HIV vaccine acceptability, in addition, was lower for those who believed physicians experiment on people without consent (Latinos 38%, African Americans 25%, Whites 15%).

This recent study suggesting that both Latinos and African Americans report HIV/AIDS conspiracy beliefs indicates that a sole focus on the African American community may obscure the possibility that conspiracy theories may be common in other populations at risk. Indeed, if they are a facet of negative condom use attitudes, they might be expected to occur in other racial and ethnic populations. We analyzed data from a study in which HIV/AIDS conspiracy beliefs were investigated in order to determine (1) their distribution in other racial/ethnic groups, and (2) their relationship to reported condom use.