Looking back on the early years of the epidemic, I now see how easy it was to dupe the gays, the doctors, the intellectuals and the media. The leading government virologists were all in accord regarding the African origin of AIDS and the green monkey theory. Those rare scientists who doubted the story were ignored. But, at best, the decade-old green monkey story remains theory and not fact. Nevertheless, it is exceedingly difficult to argue against the monkey story.
Virologists use scientific jargon and technical language to justify their beliefs.
However, the virologists wanted to assure the public that the new gay disease had nothing to do with cancer. And leukemia and lymphoma are forms of cancer. AIDS was definitely contagious and the cancer establishment had always insisted that cancer wasn't. After several years of study by a committee of microbiologists, the HTLV-3 virus was reclassified and renamed for a final time. Some of the sick men had purple cancerous skin tumors identical to Kaposi's sarcoma tumors commonly seen in Blacks in Central Africa.