Kentucky lawmaker shares false claim of ISIS terrorists injecting people with HIV
A Kentucky lawmaker shared a hoax on Facebook Tuesday, passing on a chain message that falsely claims terrorists are knocking on doors to inject people with HIV.
State Rep. George Brown, D-Lexington, shared the chain message, which started by listing a phone number with a Maryland area code. When dialed, a recording said the number could not accept calls.
“Attention ....” Brown’s post said. “If Someone comes to your doorstep and says we are from the medical college want to test your blood sugar for free, don’t give the test. call the police immediately. They are I.S.I.S terrorists, they are to inject H. I. V. AIDS virus into your blood. Share this to friends and relatives.”
The message closed by saying “By Police.”
Brown said he shared the post because he was worried about people trying to take advantage of the elderly. When asked if he truly believed that ISIS was trying to inject people in Lexington with HIV, Brown said he wasn’t sure if the message was accurate.
“I don’t know if that’s on point, but I thought it was too important not to pass on,” Brown told the Herald-Leader.
The Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, which has a task force focused on scams, said there is no evidence that terrorists are running a scam to inject people with HIV.
Brenna Angel, a spokeswoman for the Lexington Police Department, said the department has received no reports that resemble what Brown alleged.
The claim has circulated at least since 2017, according to the website Hoax Slayer. A similar version of the message appeared in India in May 2017.
The idea of people injecting unwitting strangers with HIV has occurred in scams before. In 1998, Snopes debunked a claim that people were giving people HIV by stabbing them with infected needles in movie theaters.
The scams fixate on the stigma surrounding the HIV virus, which can lead to AIDS. While infection rates have decreased since the peak of the epidemic, the virus disproportionately affects men who have sex with men and people who are black — 46 percent of all new HIV diagnoses in 2017 were among people who are black, according to the Center for Disease Control. There is a large black population in Brown’s district.
Brown was first elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives in 2014.
This story was originally published November 12, 2019 at 2:28 PM.
