Category: Public Health Conspiracy Theories

• Patient Zero HIV Myth

  This theory held that the government, public-health authorities, or shadow actors intentionally seeded HIV through a specific person and then tracked the epidemic’s spread through his social and sexual network. In popular form, that person became “Patient Zero,” most famously identified as Canadian flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas. The strongest historical record shows a different process: Dugas was not the origin of HIV in North America, and the term “Patient Zero” grew out of a misreading of “Patient O,” where the letter meant “Outside of California” in an epidemiological cluster study. The myth was intensified by media, especially Randy Shilts’s 1987 book And the Band Played On, and by a wider desire to personify the origin of a frightening new epidemic."