“Long Covid ‘is HIV’?”

Is this the first crack in the HIV AIDS/non HIV AIDS fake divide?

Dr. Deborah Birx was interviewed by Chris Cuomo this past week about “Understanding COVID response failures critical for future.” It’s a short clip (less than six minutes long), but I wanted to mention it here because I’ve been seeing more and more in the news comparing “long Covid” to “HIV,” which is fascinating considering the forty year “don’t ask don’t tell” media attitude toward non-HIV AIDS. The nontrivial number of non-HIV AIDS patients that were revealed at the 1990 AIDS conference were then swiftly dealt with by renaming their condition the tongue twister “Idiopathic CD4 Lymphocytopenia” and calling it “rare.”

The emergence of so-called “Long Covid” is similarly controversial, but it is becoming too common to sweep under the rug, which is at least part of why I think Dr. Birx and her ilk are being forced to discuss it.

Deborah Birx on long Covid and HIV

The part about “HIV” begins at about 4:00. (Cuomo, in typically dramatic fashion, asks: “Is this a much darker potential reality than we knew?” Dun dun dun…) She replies by answering that both viruses spread asymptomatically, and cause unseen destruction similarly. She discusses neurological effects of long Covid (Ed.: Now do CFS), including the “unseen effects” of mild and moderate Covid. At about 5:15 there is the predictable gushing over the great, and totally nonspecific, “anti-HIV drugs” and how they turned “HIV disease” into a “chronic, manageable condition.” Birx: “What came out of that was brilliant science that changed how we treat HIV.” You mean the strategy of replacing old, toxic drugs with newer, toxic drugs? How about giving these drugs, en masse, to HIV-negatives?

There’s actually not a lot of meat to the claim that the alleged viral infections are remarkably similar in terms of pathogenicity (frankly, I think not enough is known about long Covid to plausibly make that claim so soon, and “they” know it), as far as I can tell. The comparisons of the two alleged viruses mostly involve their ability to silently destroy the patient’s health in some mysterious way. Of course, the solution to this must be more antivirals, but I can’t help but to feel a bit optimistic that this piece of news is coming out right now. Why?

Since AIDS began, there has been a tacit agreement that non-HIV AIDS is not a thing and must never be discussed for to do so would be to admit that HIV is not necessary for AIDS. Thanks to the existence of long term survivors—and there must be a ton of those, given that on average, 30% of HIV positives don’t even know their status—we already knew that HIV is not sufficient for AIDS. Dr. Birx’s statement represents a small but potentially significant crack in the wall. Now that the cat is peeking its head out of the bag, it may not be able to be coaxed back in. The next few months and years could turn out to be very interesting indeed.

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If you’re a new reader and would like some background as to my views on HIV AIDS, including the “existence” question, please refer to this post and the links contained therein.