If porn performers had a health and safety mantra, "your health is your wealth" would probably be it. Which is why it's worth taking seriously the many "porn stars" who oppose a California bill allegedly designed to better protect their health and safety by mandating condom use and the reporting of sexually-transmitted infections tests in the porn industry.

The legislation – which the state assembly passed in May and cleared one of two necessary state Senate committees here on Wednesday – requires that performers use condoms during filmed anal and/or vaginal sex scenes and employers provide information that they did so; that employers pay for HIV testing; that performers consent to disclose to the state's occupational safety board that they took HIV tests; and that the board can require employers to disclose "any additional information" they require (which presumably will be the results of any positive tests). The stated purpose of the bill is to reduce the transmission of sexually transmitted infections and HIV because, its authors claim, "the industry has never offered a single reasonable suggestion to universally protect its workers and now opposes the very STD testing protocol that they developed and inconsistently use".

Aside from the civil liberties issues raised by reporting highly inflammatory personal health information to a government agency, there are two key questions raised by the legislation. The first is whether the private porn industry really needs to comply with a new law because legislators want to "protect" them, given the low rate of industry HIV infection compared to the population at large. The second is why the California State Senate is so concerned about porn industry rates of HIV infection when, as porn performer Jiz Lee testified on Wednesday, "this effort isn't helping communities who are actually at risk".

Quite simply, the porn-condom mandate is a red herring in the real fight against HIV/Aids. And on pride weekend in San Francisco, you might even call it a sham.

According to the San Francisco Aids Foundation, 1.7m Americans have been infected with HIV since 1981, and California ranks second only to New York in the sheer cumulative number of cases. Approximately 7,000 Californians will become infected with HIV this year, the majority of whom won’t work in the adult industry. Even Senator Holly Mitchell, who voted for the bill in committee on Wednesday, did so only after making the point that the legislation does not seem to address "the demographic actually at risk" for HIV transmission – African-Americans, and African-American women in particular. (Notably, Aids Lifecycle reports that survival rates after HIV diagnosis is is lowest amongst African-Americans.)

The tabloids love to titillate with tales of an infection-riddled Pornland, but the handful of HIV cases that have prompted filming moratoriums in the past decade have been just that – a handful. Any infection that affects performers, whether it originates off-set or on, has to be taken seriously. But to put the industry risk into perspective, as of 2010, there had been 57 documented transmissions and 143 possible transmissions of HIV amongst healthcare workers in the prior three decades, a count described by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as "extremely rare". The porn industry, meanwhile, hasn't had a confirmed case of on-set herteosexual transmission since 2004 and LA County confirmed a total of 22 performers who were confirmed positive between 2004 and 2009.

Supporters of California's condom bill often argue that requiring condoms in porn is akin to requiring hard hats be worn by construction workers. But, as Lorelei Lee put it on Wednesday, "hard hats don't harm their wearers", but condoms do: they can cause "floor burn" (or excessive irritation of performers' mucus membranes), and thereby increase the risk of any STI transmission among performers. Beyond which, condoms (even when undamaged and used properly) don't provide absolute protection against a variety of STIs, including herpes, syphillis, genital warts and pubic lice.

But even if all the arguments in favor of the bill were demonstrably true, all the money and other resources spent to argue for and pass this legislation – let alone defend any resulting law in court – would almost certainly be better spent providing additional HIV education and testing (including addiction care), on more research for a vaccine and/or a cure, for treatment programs for those infected, and on palliative care for those with Aids.

Take, for instance, the district of Assemblyman Isadore Hall, the bill's sponsor: he represents Compton, a Southern Californian district with an alarmingly high rate of HIV infection – where the Aids Healthcare Foundation, which supports Hall's legislation, does not even have a clinic. (The foundation itself prioritizes funding for treatment over any cure-focused research, and its chief, Michael Weinstein, personally denounced the pre-exposure prophylactic drug Trovadour as a "party drug".) Hall's own constituents are far more likely to benefit from money spent on other, proven methods of preventing HIV transmission and caring for those who contracted the virus than they ever will be from forcing California-based porn performers to wear condoms on set.

Registered nurse and veteran porn performer Nina Hartley told the state assembly in April that the bill is "a solution in search of a problem". It's a headline-generating distraction from and a pat solution to a real crisis – ongoing HIV and other STI transmission – that many Californians face, (a crisis that only Senator Mark Leno identified as a compelling reason for opposing the bill). It's also has the potential to actually increase the prevalence of STIs among the population it purports to help, in addition to reducing their privacy and inflating the stigmatization they already grapple with on a daily basis. But, given the existing hostility of many in government to those in the porn industry, charging ahead with a moral crusade is apparently preferable to listening to performers give evidence about their own jobs.

• This article was amended on 27 June 2014. An earlier version of this article stated that the legislation would require that "employees report their test results to the state's occupational safety board." We are happy to clarify.