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By Terry Vanderheyden

LONDON, May 24, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – British pop music star Elton John has attacked the Catholic Church and its position on condom use as a reason for the demise of 60 of his friends to the sexually-transmitted disease, AIDS.

Speaking at a business awards ceremony, he said, “We don’t have a medical vaccine but we have a social vaccine and it’s called education.” He failed to include in his so-called education platform that condoms may be a leading reason for the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Even leading health experts at the United Nations have acknowledged that condoms have an estimated 10% failure rate.

Edward C. Green, a senior research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health explained in 2003 that the one in ten failure rate of condoms protection from AIDS is “not good enough for a fatal disease.” He added, “The way condoms are marketed in Africa and other developing parts of the world is as if they were 100 percent safe.”

Uganda’s AIDS campaign, which stressed abstinence first and being faithful second and condoms only if one was crazy enough to forego the first two, has been seen as the only successful program in reversing the AIDS tide in Africa.

Appearing before the African subcommittee of the U.S. Senate on May 19, 2003, Green stated: “Infection rates [in Uganda] have declined from 21% to 6 % since 1991. Many of us in the AIDS and public health communities didn’t believe that abstinence and faithfulness were realistic goals. It now seems we were wrong.”

See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
  United Nations Report says Condoms Fail to Protect against AIDS 10% of the Time
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/jun/03062303.html
  AIDS Specialist and Former Condom Advocate Speaks on Switch to Abstinence
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/dec/05120804.html