Майкл Фументо: Американский журналист и исследователь спорных вопросов

American journalist (born 1960)

Michael A. Fumento (born 1960) is an American author, analyst, attorney, and investigative journalist who currently resides in the Philippines.

Fumento grew up in Champaign, Illinois. He is the son of Tobey and Rocco Fumento, the latter being a professor emeritus in English, film, and creative writing who has worked at the University of Illinois. Fumento's father is Italian American and Catholic, and Fumento's mother is Jewish. Fumento is Catholic. A graduate of the University of Illinois College of Law and a member of the Pennsylvania Bar Association, he has a bachelor's degree in political science from Fayetteville State University, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which he earned while he served as a paratrooper in the US Army. He embedded three times in Iraq and once in Afghanistan and observed combat operations of the Navy SEALs and the 101st Airborne Division. His work comprises over 70 subject areas. Google Scholar has almost 1,200 citations of his work. Publishers Weekly stated that he has "knack for debunking popular beliefs and revealing the true state of things," and The New York Times Book Review stated, "His arguments, statistics and perceptions appear almost as irrefutable as they are controversial." After he was fired from Scripps Howard News Service in 2006, he was described by Science as "a vigorous defender of the pharmaceutical and biotech industries over the years". He is best known for science and health issues, especially what he considers faux crises, including the 1987 "heterosexual AIDS explosion," swine flu and the alleged epidemic of runaway Toyotas.

Fumento has argued that the perception of infectious disease outbreaks becomes exaggerated or distorted by those who exploit them to serve various agendas. In November 1987, he published an article, "AIDS: Are Heterosexuals at Risk?" in Commentary that in 1990 became the basis of a controversial book, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics. He wrote dozens of subsequent pieces on the subject. In Commentary, he challenged the presumption of Life magazine, whose July 1985 cover declared in bold red letters, "Now No One Is Safe from AIDS." By 1987, the theme had become common. A January U. S. News & World Report cover story declared, "The disease of them is suddenly the disease of us finding fertile growth among heterosexuals." A New York Times headline that month read: "AIDS May Dwarf the Plague," citing remarks of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Otis R. Bowen, that AIDS could be worse than the "Black Death," which is estimated to have killed 30 percent to 60 percent of Europe's population. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop made remarks giving rise to the term "heterosexual AIDS explosion." Oprah Winfrey told her audience, "Research studies now project that one in five—listen to me, hard to believe—one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years." Fumento challenged that orthodoxy for which he and even those who wrote about him were condemned and even threatened. He did so by interviewing and citing the work of epidemiologists, including the top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) AIDS epidemiologist, Dr. Harold Jaffe, who told him, "Those who are suggesting that we are going to see an explosive spread of AIDS in the heterosexual population have to explain why this isn't happening." Although he would be accused of claiming heterosexuals have no AIDS risk, the back cover of his AIDS book stated, "The 'myth' of heterosexual AIDS consists of a series of myths, one of which is not that heterosexuals get AIDS. They certainly do get it " Rather, he argued that while white middle class heterosexuals were the target of AIDS propaganda, "the profile of the typical victim of heterosexually transmitted AIDS is a lower class black woman who is the regular sex partner of an IV drug user." As of 2007, the CDC's "estimated numbers of cases and rates (per 100,000 population) of HIV/AIDS," was 60.6 for black women but only 3.3 for white women. In a theme discussed in Commentary and in his book, Fumento described various agendas served by promoting "AIDS hysteria:" "On the opposite side of the spectrum Christian fundamentalists deploy it in order to underline their vision of morality," he wrote in Commentary. He also discussed it in a 1988 New Republic cover story.

On January 13, 2006, Scripps Howard announced it would terminate its business relationship with Fumento and cease carrying his column. At issue were opinion columns Fumento had written concerning the biotechnology firm Monsanto Company while he was a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. The connection between Fumento and Monsanto was first revealed by investigative reporter Eamon Javers in Business Week. General manager Peter Copeland explained that Fumento "did not tell SHNS editors, and therefore we did not tell our readers, that in 1999 Hudson received a $60,000 grant from Monsanto Our policy is that he should have disclosed that information. We apologize to our readers." He told The Washington Post that he didn't disclose the Monsanto grant in his book because "Monsanto asked me not to", that he had no obligation to inform Scripps Howard or its readers about the past payment, and that he had feared that disclosure would lead his critics to call him a "corporate whore".

During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, Fumento opined in a February 2010 Forbes article that the World Health Organization (WHO) had faked the pandemic and that "The agency needed to bounce back after the avian flu embarrassment." In an August 2010 The Philadelphia Inquirer article, Fumento said in response to the WHO declaring the swine flu pandemic over that "the WHO had no business labeling it a "pandemic." It did so purely for its own interests, wreaking worldwide havoc."

In a May 2012 essay, Fumento said that he considered himself part of the "Old Right" but that he rejected the "extreme right," which, he wrote, had taken over the Republican Party and dominated conservative media. He wrote, "I'm horrified that these people have co opted the name 'conservative' to scream their messages of hate and anger."

In a January 23, 2020, New York Post opinion article, "Don’t buy the media hype over the new China virus," he called concerns about COVID 19 during the COVID 19 pandemic "tinfoil hat paranoia" and wrote that "there appears to be nothing very special about this outbreak". In a March 8, 2020, followup opinion article, he decried the "pure hysteria" about the virus," noting that there had been only 19 deaths in the US at the time, and maintained that "the spread of the virus continues to slow."