Harvard Scientist: Pope Benedict’s Correct - condoms have been proven to be ineffective in mass AIDS prevention

Folks, this from National Review Online:

‘We have found no consistent associations between condom use and lower HIV-infection rates, which, 25 years into the pandemic, we should be seeing if this intervention was working.”
So notes Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, in response to papal press comments en route to Africa this week.

Benedict XVI said, in response to a French reporter’s question asking him to defend the Church’s position on fighting the spread of AIDS, characterized by the reporter as “frequently considered unrealistic and ineffective”:

I would say that this problem of AIDS cannot be overcome with advertising slogans. If the soul is lacking, if Africans do not help one another, the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem. The solution can only come through a twofold commitment: firstly, the humanization of sexuality, in other words a spiritual and human renewal bringing a new way of behaving towards one another; and secondly, true friendship, above all with those who are suffering, a readiness — even through personal sacrifice — to be present with those who suffer. And these are the factors that help and bring visible progress.

“The pope is correct,” Green told National Review Online Wednesday, “or put it a better way, the best evidence we have supports the pope’s comments. He stresses that “condoms have been proven to not be effective at the ‘level of population.’”

“There is,” Green adds, “a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded ‘Demographic Health Surveys,’ between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction ‘technology’ such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by ‘compensating’ or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology.”

The emphasis is mine. Please continue reading here.

Comments. "Experts” from all over the world, with their own axes to grind – like say, those who write for the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet – have distorted and the panned the remarks Pope Benedict XVI recently made regarding the effectiveness of condom use to stop the AIDS epidemic in Africa. It so happens that there’s significant scientific evidence supporting the Pope’s statement. But what is really BS in my opinion, is The Lancet’s statement to the effect that "Whether the Pope's error was due to ignorance or a deliberate attempt to manipulate science to support Catholic ideology is unclear.” They just simply misread, or probably, didn’t read or purposefully distorted the Pope’s view to suit their ends and what is worse, their attack against “Catholic ideology” belies their own.

If these attacks were not made by serious people, they would be pretty funny. As it is, they are sad, and tragic, and illustrative the depths these “experts” are willing to sink in order to attack the Church.