TABLE 1—

Excerpts Regarding the Origins of HIV/AIDS From Public Discourse and Focus Group Interviews

Year	Quotation	Source
1992	“I’m convinced AIDS is a government-engineered disease. They got one thing wrong, they never realized it couldn’t just be contained to the groups it was intended to wipe out. So now it’s a national priority. Exactly like drugs became when they escaped the urban centers into White suburbia.”	Spike Lee, in an advertisement for Benetton, in Rolling Stone magazine42
2001	‘‘People eat chimpanzees,’’ Dr. Hahn said. ‘‘We expect that transmissions occurred through the exposure to blood through hunting or preparation of meat.’’	Excerpt from a New York Times article by Gina Kolata43
2012	“I heard that [the government] took people, Black people, gay people, and made them do research … experiments, and said, ‘You guys will get paid for this’ and actually they’re given the virus.”	A woman in a focus group interview with African American participants
2014	“This is probably not true, but when I was young I heard that somebody had sex with a monkey who had it, yeah—not that I believe it, just a funny story.”	A man in a focus group interview with White participants

Note. The 6 focus group interviews were conducted by the author in 2012–2014, with members of a college community in the northeastern United States. The interviews were segregated according to the self-identified race/ethnicity of the participants: 2 interviews each for Whites, Hispanics, and African Americans.