Says Dr. Anthony Fauci planned the AIDS epidemic.
A 39-second TikTok video with background music suggests that it shows Dr. Anthony Fauci laying out an evil plan to create the AIDS pandemic. Not only that, but laying out the plot to an audience at the U.S. government's National Institutes of Health. Yes, it is false and ridiculous. 'You take an infectious agent and you introduce it into a population in which the spread among those individuals - if it's sexual-contact spread - it's a perfect set-up to spread,' a decades-younger Fauci says in the video, which is labeled: 'AIDS/Dr. Anthony Fauci (NIH, 1984).' An Instagram user who shared the clip wrote: 'This maniac needs to serve multiple lives behind prison bars, but that's not nearly enough of a punishment for his #crimesagainsthumanity.' The Instagram post was flagged as part of Facebook's efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) The clip is from a lecture Fauci gave at the National Institutes of Health on Nov. 4, 1984, on AIDS. He talked about how the disease first emerged in the United States in 1979 and how it was recognized as a new disease in 1981. At the time, Fauci was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a title he holds now along with being chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden. Here's the relevant part of what he said; the portion that was shared in the Instagram post is in italics: 'I'll get to in some of the later slides how this disease, which we surmised early on, started off in the male homosexual population in this country. Not that there was anything intrinsically different or wrong or what-have-you about homosexuality. It was very simple; it's straightforward epidemiology. You take an infectious agent and you introduce it into a population in which the spread among those individuals - if it's sexual-contact spread - it's a perfect set-up to spread.' Fauci continued by referring to the first 4,000 cases in the United States. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, called AIDS, was first recognized as a new disease in 1981 when increasing numbers of young gay men succumbed to unusual opportunistic infections and rare malignancies. HIV is the virus that can lead to AIDS. HIV infection in humans came from a type of chimpanzee in Central Africa and may have jumped to humans as far back as the late 1800s. The virus has existed in the United States since at least the mid to late 1970s, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Our ruling The suggestion that comments Fauci made in 1984 are evidence that he plotted AIDS - which emerged in the United States several years earlier, but whose roots date back decades - is false and ridiculous. Pants on Fire!
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