If HIV AIDS is not a ponzie scheme, aren't we justified in thinking it might be?
Right now, a killer fungus threatens to destroy our stock of [Cavendish] bananas, that most common brand of banana in our local stores. An earlier fungus outbreak spread in the 50's. Scientists are more confident than the farmers, reports indicate. Scientists assure us some-such-something will be developed to kill once again this fungal pandemic; they say we've learned a lot since the 50's.
Farming practices, to put it carefully and cautiously, have evolved. Yields have increased. Various pestilences have been mitigated. Now, the ways these things have been done should sometimes make you sick, and they do. The Monsantos of this world have engineered resistant seeds that can withstand all kinds of onslaught, but the effect on the body is besides the point to our business morality. But organic and commercial farmers have also learned new techniques to deal with encroachments onto their crops that have nothing to do with Monsanto.
Medical science has continued to make - again, to put it cautiously - strides. Antibiotics and vaccines have done much to mitigate the side effects of civilization. When curable diseases became least profitable, yuppie drugs, like for hair growth or restlessness or to supplement your ineffective anti-depressants, were developed.
The point is not to laud these achievements as such. Aside from the clear controversies in these so-called advances, science cannot be said to have stopped and stood still over the last 50 or 100 years.
And yet, in the so-called HIV-AIDS field, we have gone from potent poisons like AZT, which killed people in the 80's and 90's, maimed others by destroying their livers and other vital organs, to less potent poisons which have a slower corrosive effect on the body is purported to save. People are still dying, moneys are still being spent on a variety of activities - from the pharmaceuticals inventing another brand of Coca-Cola to the HIV bureaucracy of "counselors" and research "assistants."
But where has this budget produced an advancement except in pharmaceutical companies? Why hasn't anyone convened a congressional inquiry into the fraud of billions spent and very little to show for it? Why are World AIDS Day festivities and "Get Tested" promotionals become our obsession rather than good, old fashioned scientific discovery and cures?
Why 30 years of bullshit?
The disturbing writing on the wall is while HIV drugs are profitable for the drug companies, these drugs are also prohibitively expensive: without insurance not even a middle income person could afford them, let alone the growing numbers of working-class and poor: and I am referring to the working class and poor in the global North, the so-called First World.
As our middle income and mid professional jobs disappear in favor of low-wage service industry and underemployment, who will pay for these drug companies to continue to reap profits with these expensive medications? Will ObamaCare pay for HIV meds for an underpaid WalMart or fast-food worker?
Since we have no functioning civil society in our opulent countries, the nexus of this debate will happen not in a public square but on Wall Street, and, as always, they will construct the message and the morality which will not want to address this mystery virus at all, will blame its victims - the gays, Africans, you know - and no inquiry will be made into the heart of this so-called epidemic - viz, who caused it, why it fails so many established scientific theories, why the Reagan administration unilaterally chose one HIV theory over any others while the scientific community was busy with several hypotheses, etc.
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