Right-wing radio host claims gay men weren’t ‘pariahs’ during Aids crisis – but unvaccinated are now

‘I have not seen in my lifetime any pariah group like this’

Dennis Prager, the conservative radio host and founder of media company PragerU, claimed that Americans who refuse to be vaccinated against Covid-19 are modern “pariahs” – more than gay men and drug users during the Aids crisis.

“How did people get governed by irrational fears?” he told Newsmax on 8 November. “Whether it is of the non-vaccinated, who are the pariahs of America, as I have not seen in my lifetime, any pariah group like this.”

He added: “Can you imagine, during the Aids crisis, if gay men and intravenous drug users, the vast majority of people with Aids, had they been pariahs the way non-vaccinated are? It would have been inconceivable, and should have been inconceivable.”

His alarming revisionism compares some Americans who refuse to be inoculated during a public health emergency to people who were denied medical care, ostracised by society and demonised under homophobic administrations and public policies that once defined Aids as a “gay plague” and “gay-related immunodeficiency disease.”

Mr Prager himself has previously written at length about the “heterosexual ideal” and claimed “heterosexual Aids” has been “entirely manufactured by the left.”

More than 1.2 million people are living with HIV in the US, and there are more than 35,000 new infections each year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

More than 700,000 people in the US have died from HIV-related illness since the onset of the outbreak.

Mr Prager also claimed during his appearance on the right-wing cable network that concern about the climate crisis is an “idiotic, irrational, sick fear of extinction of the biosphere.”

“I mean, do you understand the nonsense that we live with?” he said. “If we survive this as a free country, historians will just ask, ‘How did this happen?’”

The Independent has requested comment from Mr Prager.