Murder by Liberalism

Anti-discrimination kills again. It killed several people in the Washington, D.C. area because police, refusing to admit that the sniper might be a Muslim terrorist or any nonwhite minority, repeatedly declined to search the car driven by John Muhammad. It killed several thousand people on September 11th because our entire immigration and crime-fighting apparatus was geared not to “discriminate” against Arabs and Muslims. And it has apparently killed large numbers of people in Canada because the Canadian Red Cross thought it would be “discriminatory” to refuse blood donations from homosexual and Haitian men. According to a government report published five years ago, and now finally resulting in official charges against the wrongdoers, 60,000 Canadians were injected with HIV-tainted blood through the Canadian Red Cross. As a result, 24,000 people are known to be infected with HIV, and 1,148 are known to have contracted AIDS.

Since the story won’t be online for long, here it is in its entirety:

“What the media failed to report”
by Ted Byfield
Edmundton Sun
November 24, 2002

The wheels of Canadian justice may grind slowly, but they do grind, and that’s why one of the great injustices quietly buried over the last five years may be on the verge of correction.

Five years after the report of Mr. Justice Horace Krever into what is commonly called the “tainted blood scandal,” the RCMP laid 32 charges last week against the people they considered responsible. Krever found that some 60,000 Canadians were injected with HIV-tainted blood through the Canadian Red Cross.

One of the charges was laid against the Red Cross itself.

Also charged were two senior bureaucrats at Health Canada, the head of the Red Cross blood program, a pharmaceutical company and one of its vice-presidents. The charges include criminal negligence with a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment.

It will be interesting to see, however, whether media coverage of the trial will allow the facts to come out.

The media ignored the report’s most damning elements. Three whole chapters of it dealt specifically with the matter of how and why 24,000 people were known to be infected with HIV, and 1,148 are known to have contracted AIDS, though the true toll is probably double that, and a great many of them have since died.

So why?

The judge’s answer to that question, covering 116 pages of his report, was ignored by the Globe and Mail, the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Journal and the Vancouver Province. The Vancouver Sun summarized these pages in a 12-line paragraph, entirely lacking detail and names, though they were supplied in the report. Yet it was these pages that led to the charges.

The explanation for this omission is undoubted. Krever blamed the whole tragedy on the efforts of the Red Cross to escape charges of discrimination against gays, and the newspapers didn’t report it for the same reason. What Krever found was this:

- While evidence mounted that taking blood donations from gay men was extremely dangerous, the Red Cross ignored the warnings because it did not want to be accused of discrimination under the human rights code.

- The Red Cross’s own lawyer advised that it had nothing to fear from the code, but it did have “the moral and legal obligation to protect the blood recipient above all.” The Red Cross ignored his advice.

- Some Red Cross doctors earmarked blood from gay men anyway so that it could be destroyed. One said he dare not tell head office because he would have been ordered to stop.

- A recommendation that male donors be asked whether they had had sex with another male was rejected on grounds of intolerance. A recommendation that donors be asked if they had AIDS was also rejected. They could only ask: “Are you well?”

- When the Red Cross was finally persuaded to put out a pamphlet warning gay men not to contribute, the pamphlet generally went unread by blood donors. When Red Cross employees assured Krever they had widely distributed the pamphlet, Krever satisfied himself they could not have in fact done so. In other words, they were lying.

- The consequence of all this was that Canada was two and a half years behind the Americans in adequately responding to the AIDS epidemic. Krever found many lives could have been saved if the response had been more prompt.

“It is understandable the Red Cross should not want to offend donors,” said Krever. “Discrimination against groups such as Haitians and homosexual men was anathema to the Red Cross and, in its eyes, inconsistent with its identity as a humanitarian organization … At the same time, it was essential for the safety of the blood supply that effective measures for risk reduction be implemented, even if they created controversy.”

None of this got into our liberal newspapers, though it was obviously a major story. The coverage was restricted to the report’s other “non-intolerant” chapters. So the question now is: Will the media cover-up continue when these cases come to trial?

What the situation evidences is Canada’s deep commitment to “tolerance” and “human rights”—so deep that it borders on criminal lunacy.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 02, 2002 12:42 PM | Send