However, these ARVs only helped the individual and communal bodies who got the drugs. And in the US, this largely meant that white gay men got the drugs early and often, while black gay America largely never got them. The inability to end HIV/Aids isn’t a failure of medicine, but a failure of racial capitalism.
…
Hiding this epidemic is a choice, and Mike Pence and Donald Trump have made it worse. Denial, stigma and shame don’t help. This crisis requires using treatment as prevention, increasing sexual education, and undoing the homophobic health disparities caused by racial capitalism in general and the apartheid-like US healthcare system in particular.
Apologies as it is necessary to be a tad crude here.
To avoid HIV as an epidemic – there are other infection routes but they’ll not cause an epidemic – it is necessary to abstain from two behaviours, sharing needles to inject and taking it up the bum without a condom being used.
Neither of these have anything to do with race or capitalism.
Steven W Thrasher is a PhD candidate in American studies at New York University. He contributed to the recently published book The Unfinished Queer Agenda After Marriage Equality and was formerly writer-at-large for Guardian US. Twitter @thrasherxy
Ah, we’ve a PhD thesis to complete and a campaigning book to write, career to launch….
But just as how the estimated 35 million people who have died of Aids, the 37 million people currently living with HIV, and the million people who still die from Aids every year globally are guilty of no moral failure
Well that is an arguable statement right there. If people do not break the law by using drugs, sleep with African men or have unprotected anal intercourse their chances of getting HIV are roughly zero. I make no comment on sleeping with African men but using illegal drugs is illegal. That is a moral fault. And having sex with other men is widely seen as a moral failing by pretty much everyone not brow beaten by the Left. So, no. Not at all.
Indeed, black gay men have “fewer partners and lower rates of recreational drug use than other gay men”.
No. They report lower rates.
It’s just that not enough of us got the drugs,
That anyone gets the drugs is a triumph of capitalism. One might notice the complete absence of HIV drugs being produced in the socialist or Islamic worlds.
and the things that structurally make people most at risk for HIV – homelessness, incarceration, and a lack of access to good education, employment and medical care – are experienced at high rates by black people.
People with short attention spans rarely have good socio-economic outcomes. This we know. They are also probably not very good at consistently using condoms, avoiding paid sex work or picking good partners. This we also know. Causation is hard to prove.
Denial, stigma and shame don’t help.
Actually they do. As does stoning. Not suggesting we try the last one but it does actually work. Condoms do not.
Apparently, all the fault of something called “racial capitalism”! Thus, clearly no need for these poor “victims” to change their behaviour then?
The aids epidemic predicted in the 1980s still hasn’t happened. Because of it being so hard to get.
As you say, needles being shared and unprotected sex.
Government and charity programs arrange fresh needles. Government supply condoms.
What else can be done to protect people from themselves?
“What else can be done to protect people from themselves?”
Eliminate restriction on sale of needles.
Government says you can’t buy them. Causing trouble. Government solution? “We’ll give them away.” Intellectually vacant.
‘Steven W Thrasher is a PhD candidate in American studies at New York University.’
I strongly resent this credential escalation. He is a graduate student. He has not earned a PhD. Using PhD* with his name is fraud.
Conspicuous fraud perpetrated by the Guardian.
*Though a PhD in ‘American studies’ doesn’t sound like any accomplishment, anyway.
AIDS is eminently preventable. Condoms do work, as long as you’re not too lazy or thick to use them. You can get high as a kite in many many ways without risking AIDS.
Best not to think of it in moral terms, just more people aiming for the Darwin Awards.
I do find it hard to aviod the conclusion that, with HiV, nature/evolution was trying to achieve something. Trying to tell us something. No idea what, obvs.
@Ned
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
Rudyard Kipling: “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”
Also. Watch out for icebergs.
I remember the government adverts of the times. Something about not sitting in the tip of an iceberg.
As others have said, we were told to expect Aidsmagedon. Never happened. Turned out Aids was quite a lot harder to catch than first thought.
Normal for the Guardian.
Racial Socialism – Taxpayers Money To Bribe Blacks To Be Green
Will Norman, Sadiq Khan’s new cycling tsar claimed.
Too few females and people from ethnic minority backgrounds are taking to two wheels around the capital and the Mayor’s office could introduce ‘diversity targets’ to combat the figures.
…
The way in which the gap will be filled, Mr Norman says, is through projects cycling courses and grants for community groups who do not typically cycle.
If bribes don’t work to meet diversity targets; then what?
An alternative view:
“At first sight, that HIV does not cause AIDS must seem unbelievable in light of the officially promulgated view that has so thoroughly pervaded the media and the public sphere. How could medical science be so wrong for so long about something so important? Moreover, haven’t the miracle antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) saved countless lives and changed AIDS from an invariably fatal death sentence into a chronic, manageable, condition? Aren’t Africans dying in hordes from AIDS only because they can’t get enough of those drugs?
Those questions can all be answered, but not in any brief way. The comprehensive case against HIV has to be made along several mutually reinforcing lines:….”
http://thecaseagainsthiv.net/
‘Mike Pence and Donald Trump have made it worse’
The Left has made an odd change. They lambasted George Bush. Not Dick Cheney and George Bush. I guess they are working on the 2024 campaign already.
That was a very odd article wasn`t it
There is probably a class related health deficit but quite how you can argue there is an ethnic group that “contracts “aids more often that its economic peers without themselves choosing to behave differently is a mysterious thing
What does this mean ?
“using treatment as prevention”
I`d like a balanced view on this
Newmania – “What does this mean ? “using treatment as prevention” ”
I have no idea. But there are combination HIV drugs like Truvada which reduce the viral load significantly. To the point it is hard to infect others.
So the aim seems to be to load everyone with HIV up with as much Truvada as possible and then they can sleep with whomever they like. Because saying they should not bare back with random strangers in a truck stop is, like, so oppressive.
I am highly dubious about “black” as a worthwhile demographic for study anyway, this is not really a group is it , its a colour .What the writer understandably wishes to avoid are comparisons with the cultural problems in Africa and the place of gay men in black American life ( Having the so called white man`s disease ….).
Much better to ask such questions and shed light I always think but whatever the reason it is a terrible thing . If it is exacerbated by lonely shame then that is even worse
Let have some humanity …
Newmania – “I am highly dubious about “black” as a worthwhile demographic for study anyway, this is not really a group is it , its a colour .”
Black people are genetically distinct from White people. All the major racial groups are actually real distinct genetic groupings. And Black people do not react to all medicines in the same way White people do.
“Let have some humanity …”
Being homosexual is about as dangerous as smoking. Half Black homosexuals will die of it. Clearly humanity demands we treat anal intercourse the same way as smoking.
“Let have some humanity …”
One must be quiet while the Left dismantles Western Civilization.
Anecdotal, I know, but when AIDS was the next big thing a close friend of mine was appointed to a a research role in which he interviewed everyone diagnosed as HIV-positive in a large chunk of the country. A little later I asked him about the forthcoming AIDS epidemic, to be told, “don’t worry about it, it’s not going to happen.”
He said that by far the most important factor in the best model then existing for the disease’s spread in a given population was average number of sexual partners per year. Which is why normal straight people (not much more than one new partner per year) were and are pretty much unaffected, and club-going homosexual men (often several new partners in a single evening) died in droves. And he’d spoken to many of them.
Of course there are other issues, but extreme promiscuity was key.
@Fen Tiger
+1
That’s true of all STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) – so one (very serious) side-effect of the contraceptive pill is a near-epidemic of STDs.