On Rev. Wright's HIV Claim

Slate discusses Rev. Jeremiah Wright's charge that the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill blacks.

Barack Obama rebuked his former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Tuesday for giving sermons in which he blamed the government for creating a racist state and "inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color." Wright isn't the first to say that AIDS originated in the White House. Others have attributed the epidemic to a laboratory accident, malnutrition, or even God's divine will. Here's a field guide to the most prevalent conspiracy theories:

Government Involvement
The belief cited by Wright—that the government invented HIV—seems to have originated during the early years of the epidemic. In 1986, crackpot East German biologist Jakob Segal published "AIDS: USA Home-Made Evil." According to the pamphlet, scientists at a Fort Detrick, Md., military lab manufactured the disease by synthesizing HTLV-1 (a retrovirus that causes T-cell leukemia) with Visna (a sheep virus). The scientists administered their lethal concoction to prison inmates, who then introduced the disease into the general population. In case you're wondering, Segal has since been accused of being a Soviet disinformation agent.

Similarly, the aptly named Boyd E. Graves (who calls himself a doctor although he has only a law degree) has postulated that scientists in the employ of the U.S. Special Virus Program modified Visna to create HIV during the 1970s. The government, with help from pharmaceutical company Merck, added the virus to an experimental hepatitis B vaccine, which was given to gay men and blacks in New York and San Francisco.

And then there's Gary Glum, author of Full Disclosure, who fronts the theory that scientists at the Cold Spring Harbor lab in New York engineered HIV, and that the World Health Organization spread the virus under cover of the smallpox eradication program. Glum believes the virus was created to wipe out, or at least control, the black population. (According to a study released in 2005 by the Rand Corp., more than one-quarter of African-Americans believe the disease was engineered in a government lab, and 16 percent think it was created to control the black population.)

The article goes on (briefly) to list other double-dumbass AIDS conspiracy theories.