For anyone else following along, all of the above is factually wrong.
Emtricitabine/tenofovir is used to treat and prevent HIV infections, and is on WHO's list of essential medicines. Literally millions of people are using it to control their HIV infections and prevent it from developing into AIDS. It can be bought on online pharmacies for $15 per month, so it's not exactly a trillion dollar drug.
It's 100% certain that HIV causes AIDS. This is uncontroversial. It's true that scientists continue to learn more about how it infects humans and causes disease. This is why treatments are so much more effective than they use to be.
Absolutely amazing progress has been made in treating AIDS. There are medications available now that are able to reduce your viral load to below the limits of detection, you can live a reasonably normal life as someone HIV positive. A small number of people have even been cured.
Discrimination within the medical profession is real and a problem, but I have to doubt the sincerity of your concern for marginalized people when you spread FUD like this. I am forced to conclude you have some bone to pick with the medical profession and are deploying marginalized people as ammunition.
That's not cool. I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't do that.
You've failed to demonstrate that this is authoritarian. And I haven't criticized you for criticizing the FDA. I've criticized you for defending your position with misinformation, and for deploying marginalized people as a smokescreen.
If your best rebuttal is to put words in my mouth and frame my criticism as censorious, it's time to reevaluate. It's a form of motte-and-bailey argument, you've abandoned your position that no breakthroughs have been made in the treatment of HIV in order to defend something more vague and less falsifiable ("the FDA is authoritarian"). You can choose to either consider whether your position was flawed (my recommendation in this case) or to discard your arguments and find better ones, but if you can't defend your position, there's a problem with your argumentation.
Marginalized people? What are you talking about? The first cases of AIDS was identified in homosexuals. That's a fact.
My position is not that there have been no breakthroughs in the treatment of HIV at all. My argument is that HIV does not cause AIDS.
When you don't have empirical evidence to support your fake claim that HIV causes aids then yeah, you need to go authoritarian. Hence endless government and para-government agencies dictating truth through biased and hopelessly flawed studies.
When your argument is built on BS you need to argue at the upper levels and never look at the foundation.
This is too far a leap, that haven't said anything overtly homophobic. It's likely they aren't homophobic, who knows.
When we make leaps like this we risk the conversation devolving into something where the germane criticisms are lost. It's a lot easier to critique their position and rhetoric than to interrogate the content of their soul, and they will always have the home court advantage there.
I'm not the rhetoric police, but that is my advice.
You got it exactly right. Simply stating a fact is not an attack on anyone. In any scientific inquiry one needs to consider all the similarities and differences in the data. Most notably, if HIV is spread through sexual contact, why was it most prevalent in gay men of a particular lifestyle in a particular place? If it were straight white Amish people that it was attacking, I would say the same thing.
Not that it matters, but my sister is gay and I am going to be in her wedding this October. I have a much more nuanced understanding of homosexuality as my twin falls into this category.
> if HIV is spread through sexual contact, why was it most prevalent in gay men of a particular lifestyle in a particular place?
You've answered your own question. Because they were a community of people in sexual contact with each other, and/or sharing needles.
Please consider that, whether or you are homophobic, you are repeating homophobic talking points. The idea that HIV was caused by "lifestyle" rather than a virus was invented to discredit the idea that it was an epidemic requiring urgent medical intervention. It's rhetoric which was invented to frame a disease as a moral failing in order to deny or delay the development of lifesaving care to a population some would prefer to see suffer and die (as well as deny or delay interventions like educating people and distributing protection). This is "gay plague" stuff. Frankly, I can understand why the other commenter took the impression you are homophobic.
Sincere congratulations to your sister. I hope the wedding is lovely.
The LGBTQ community doesn't at all benefit from you spreading misinformation about HIV. You are using their marginalization to your unrelated rhetorical ends, because for whatever reason you have a gripe with the FDA. That's messed up.
> My position is not that there have been no breakthroughs in the treatment of HIV at all.
That's rather at odds with this statement you made:
> It's a multibillion dollar industry and 0 progress in the treatment of AIDS for decades.
"At all" is a goalpost you've introduced, but the difference between "at all" and "for decades" is negligible at any rate.
> When you don't have empirical evidence to support your fake claim that HIV causes aids then yeah, you need to go authoritarian.
I think it's interesting that you say that, when you haven't responded to the specific and factual claims made by 'kstrauser (https://hackertimes.com/item?id=37057357). 'kstrauser, I will readily admit, made the superior argument to mine, and responded more directly to your empirical claims.
If the empirical evidence is on your side, I have a hard time understanding why you're talking to me and not them.
> When your argument is built on BS you need to argue at the upper levels and never look at the foundation.
It's been my experience that people with BS arguments are likely to gish gallop between incredibly narrow and specific claims, which are often true or half true, and broad sweeping generalizations. This gives the impression of supporting the generalizations, but when they're placed in the proper context it becomes clear they are massive leaps.
There was a large gap between discovery of HIV in human populations, including people getting AIDS and dying of trivial infections due to their immune systems being wiped out. Once people started looking deeper it was also discovered that it was far from a "gay" disease. All of this happened before a single human tried AZT for an HIV infection.
Beyond all the scientific evidence we have real world Darwin Award trials: various HIV denialists infected with HIV have refused to take drugs to treat HIV and they have died. Others got very sick and were cured almost immediately after starting standard treatment.
We also have numerous clinical cases of people with undiagnosed HIV infections getting sick from common bacterial/fungal infections, get diagnosed as HIV positive, start the standard drug regimen, and their problems go away.
Not to mention SIV (the simian relative of HIV) causes an AIDS-like disease in some primate species which gives us both another line of direct evidence and almost certainly the original source of HIV.
You're just plain wrong.
We can squirt HIV in a dish and watch it kill the normally unkillable T cells. We know 100% what happens when your T cells collapse: your immune system stops working and some normally benign organism takes over your body then you die. We've sequenced HIV. We know how it mutates so rapidly. We know why it is able to attack T cells.
There is no mystery and no need for conspiracy. All lines of evidence point to HIV as the culprit.
Immunocompromised people die from opportunistic infections that don't normally cause illness at all. They would acquire immunocompromised status from HIV. Hence nobody would die "from AIDS", they would die from complications with the annual flu. They would be dead and still be HIV positive.
That's why you haven't seen your goal because you have an unfalsifiable viewpoint where there is no competing information to alter your view because it is an impossible standard. AZT has bad side effects and is antiquated technology. Okay. Yes, there was a lot of hysteria in the 1980s and pharma companies aren’t held accountable for their role in that. There is also competing information that can be reproduced easily regarding HIV to immunocompromised status and opportunistic infections killing people.
I would implore you to look at the things that are substantiated. In the 21st century, there are now drugs that keep your t-cell count high, such as PrEP. These aren't killing people and prevents progression to immunocompromised status, it also prevents spread of HIV.
I'm sorry you'll never get to your resolution about drugs from the 1980s, but there is nothing to build upon with that information and you’re extrapolating from a position thats been a dead end for a long time, in comparison to what we can build upon with successfully protecting t-cells.
