Watched as much of last year’s HIV: The Neglected Pandemic | VICE VERSA as I could get through, about ten minutes. Men dressed in see-through women’s clothes as narrators are a provocation, not a debate point. Nevertheless, it’s clear that this video demonstrates one of the key factors which help to maintain this horror in the species; HIV is promoted as a civil rights issue, aimed at protecting a demographic from “stigma”, instead of the most urgent medical crisis of the era.
HIV/AIDS is a real pandemic. It’s the most horrifying, incurable disease in modern history. Although there have been many advances in symptomatic treatments, it’s been ravaging the human population and has destroyed millions of lives for over 40 years.
HIV is a retrovirus that hides in the genomes of immune system cells in humans and some other primates (there are two known strains, distinguished by differences in DNA sequences and the primate species from which they were originally transmitted to humans). The appalling symptoms of the destruction of the human immune system should have long since been all the motivation civilization needed to do whatever it could to stop it.
The ”civil rights” approach to HIV mitigation is prevalent everywhere in Western countries. A recent ad for a new AIDS treatment features men kissing, rather than any suggestion that behaviors that aggressively promote transmission of this terrible disease should be restricted in any way. The US government promotes arrangements which not only permit homosexual couples to claim marriage status, but to adopt and raise children. The current occupants of the current US administration famously include openly homosexual, as well as “non-binary”, and “transgender” individuals.
Despite marketing to the contrary, HIV/AIDS is still very much a “gay disease”, at least in Western countries. I have checked in with the US CDC site for the statistics of periodic surveys of HIV infection in the US since at least 2010. I have often shared their pie charts of the sources of new infections in the US to social media. These typically show that over 60% of new HIV infections in the US are the result of male homosexual contact in a given year. CDC doesn’t seem to show the percentage of the US population represented by this demographic in the US, so I’ll guess it’s less than 1% (I think popular estimates of the US “gay” population of 3% include females).
That’s about one percent of the US population, directly responsible for 60% of new HIV cases in a year!
Now, this is the table for 2020, from:
See New HIV Diagnoses, by Transmission Category
Basic arithmetic shows that the portion of new cases of HIV in 2020 in the US and its territories due to male homosexuality (including men reporting both homosexual contact and IV drug use) was about 71% of a total of 30,635 reported cases. The CDC cautions that there may be some distortion of the statistics by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, but that doesn’t make this an improvement.
I have to suggest an unpopular conclusion from these facts; the “civil rights” approach, to mitigate the “stigma” of the disease, rather than meaningful discouragement of the voluntary behavior that largely transmits it has kept HIV in circulation for 40 years. It’s also clear from these data that promotion of condom use and “gay marriage” have not worked. The approach of the principle media has usually been to simply not report this real pandemic, perhaps to prevent “stigmatization” of its primary constituency. This has also helped to insure that its primary victims will continue to suffer, often unnoticed.