News Roundup—Can DOGE spell the end of the chokehold the HIV AIDS story has on the collective consciousness?

& Puppy update

Before we dive into the news this week, I want to thank you all for your feedback on the puppy! It took us until today to finalize his name—he is Luke Apollo, and he may make an appearance on this substack again when he’s a little bigger.

Onto the news:

Today we’re going to look at four stories in the news about “HIV;” the last three discuss the funding cuts to public health research that are happening thanks to DOGE, which are affecting funding for “HIV” prevention and research.

First, we’ll look at a little piece about PrEP possibly becoming over the counter in Georgia.

HIV prevention medicines could soon be over-the-counter in Georgia

Georgia lawmakers are hoping to pass a bill before the legislative session ends Friday that would allow pharmacists to distribute HIV prevention medicines without a prescription, a policy change that would allow quicker access for people who lack insurance or who live in rural Georgia.

I’m actually not upset about this; as a libertarian, I think you should be able to buy whatever you want over the counter, with no prescription needed, even if it can be dangerous. All the information about the drugs should be available to the public, and we ought to be able to get, say, Xanax or amoxicillin without going through a doctor. That’s just my personal opinion though, and reflects only my beliefs. However, PrEP is just such a ridiculous concept on its face.

I’m going to spend a little bit of time on this next piece, because it encapsulates so much of how the HIV AIDS story’s ridiculousness has become accepted as normal; the anthropomorphization of this alleged virus is really wild. This particular lady is not a full time government employee, but she did lose a grant to cover research on “HIV” in young adults. Pay attention to the words she uses.

An Interview With An Epidemiologist Who Lost Her Job Because Of The DOGE Layoffs

Here is the background (emphasis mine):

The Trump administration is going full steam ahead on its terrifying project of dismantling the country's defenses against HIV. In February, it gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development, which plays a crucial role in supplying other countries with HIV treatments.

Why do we need to be supplying “HIV” medications to other countries? Isn’t our national debt (whatever that even means) in the trillions? In that case, wouldn’t that be irresponsible spending on the part of our government?

On March 21, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services terminated the Adolescent Trials Network, or ATN, which is the only national research network focused on adolescents and young adults who live with, or are at risk for, HIV. The National Institutes of Health terminated grants related to PrEP, medications that can prevent HIV infection. And this week, the administration laid off scores of workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who focused on HIV prevention.

The infectious disease epidemiologist Tara Kerin had started working on an ATN study focused on the antibiotic doxycycline, which has a growing reputation as a "morning-after" pill for STIs. Last year, the CDC recommended this STI-prevention strategy—called doxycycline postexposure prophylaxis, or doxyPEP—for cis men and transgender women, citing evidence that it has been shown to reduce syphilis and chlamydia infections by 70 percent and gonorrhea by about 50 percent. Although evidence suggests that doxyPEP would be effective in other populations, such as cis women or transgender men, the CDC did not yet have enough clinical data to recommend the drug to these other populations.

I’ll include a few quotes from the interview itself. We begin:

“The first ATN study I was on was looking at recently [HIV] infected young adults. HIV is this wildly—I mean, it's kind of cool—wildly smart virus. First it attacks your immune system. It just goes right for the jugular: You can't fight us, because I'm directly going to fight what you fight us with.”

These are not serious people. “HIV” is a “wildly smart” virus? To be totally honest, I actually find it extremely funny when the mainstream treats “HIV” like it’s some kind of magical entity, capable of going where no virus has gone before. All the while, “HIV” is, at best, a run of the mill retrovirus (either endogenous or exogenous); at worst, it isn’t even a coherent entity but rather a laboratory artifact, its lack of consistency—to the point that no two identical “HIV” strands have been “isolated” even from the same AIDS patient—is explained away by assigning magical mutation powers to this “virus,” despite the fact that no other similar “viruses” have been shown to do anything at all. Has “HIV” been given divine powers?

I’ve included fairly long quotes because some of this stuff is really ridiculous.

“But now we have these antiretrovirals, right? So you take these pills, and it keeps your detectable level of virus gone. We now know that if you do not have a detectable level of virus—so if you take your pills pretty much every day—you take a blood test and there's no virus. You can't spread it. So you can have sex. You can have babies. You can do all of that stuff that we thought that people with HIV would never be able to do.

There have been reports of some children being able to go off the medication, and the virus doesn't appear to come back. The reason why the virus comes back is because it hides. A section of it will hide away in this little reservoir—HIV reservoirs, we call it—so the medication can't get to it there. It just stays there. And it just waits and waits and waits. It'll kind of pop its head out and be like, "All clear?" and then it will, boom.

It pops its head out? This 9,000 nucleotide alleged virus has body parts now, apparently. And what are these reservoirs that they are incapable of being penetrated by the immune system? It’s never explained where these “reservoirs” are located; something is off about this explanation.

So children who have had HIV, their immune systems are a little bit more pliable. Those reservoirs might be smaller. The idea is, all right, so what if we catch people right when they get sick, these young adults that still have these moldable immune systems, and see if we can shrink these reservoirs so at some point they can go off medication? Because the meds aren't great. I mean, it's like, just take a pill. But they're not just a pill. They have side effects. They have issues. It is a pill, or a set of pills, that you would have to take every day for the rest of your life. So you know, you're looking at the way to eliminate that entirely.”

Hold up: these children who “have had” “HIV?” Did they just inadvertently admit that “HIV” positivity can be reversed, or was that a typo?

This last paragraph is actually very significant—“they’re not just a pill. They have side effects.” Yes, the 26,000+ victims of the Truvada disaster would certainly concur that the meds are not “just a pill.” I’m surprised she admitted it.

I also just had a weird spidey sense about it. Then she texted me right after, she was just like, call when you can. And I was like, oh, this is not going to be good.

They told me it was canceled. I'm not gonna lie, I knew HIV would be on the chopping block. It deals with populations that a lot of that administration does not like to admit exist. So not a huge surprise. But it was a surprise how quickly it happened.

As we know, the entire HIV AIDS story has as one of its main goals the “retention in care” on ARVs or PrEP of exactly those “populations that a lot of that administration does not like to admit exist.” What this researcher fails to grasp is that the HIV AIDS story and the drugs associated with treating it has been used for decades to enslave, frighten, and poison just those populations.

When you stop taking medication, the HIV pops out of the little reservoir, and it takes a look and it's like, oh, the pills are gone. Let's get going again. But it's smarter this time, and it becomes resistant to the medication you were taking. This is a problem with people who tend to stop and start their medications a lot. They become resistant to the medications to the point that the medications are a lot less effective. Back in January, when USAID was told to stop giving HIV medications to everybody, my first thought was not just that people are going to die, but: Oh crap, we're going to get a medication-resistant strain of HIV.

I have a serious question. Given the lack of universal coverage of “HIV” positive individuals on ARVs—estimates say that about 1/3 of these individuals are not on treatment—wouldn’t a resistant virus already be a problem? There is some deceptive language being used here, but that’s par for the course in “HIV” research.

Also, this lady really likes to refer to “HIV” as “popping its head out.” Serious question: which part of “HIV” is the “head?” And why do these people always talk about “HIV” like it’s an actual person? It’s really, really weird.

It's not just the HIV grants. And it's not just all of the other ones that are being stopped. The dismantling of the NIH—and I won't even get into RFK Jr. and all that bullshit—it puts us back for so many years. Because it's not something that, in the next four years, if we get in a different administration, we can just turn this back on. Again, all of these things have been in in the works for years. Particularly if we're going to keep going back and forth on this and having an administration that wants to give money, that doesn't, that does, that doesn't—it is going to hurt our chances of research in general.

You know, I’m actually surprised at how little negativity I’m seeing in the news about RFKJ compared to what I was expecting—most of the vitriol seems aimed at Mr. Musk. Also, in what way does the “dismantling of NIH” set us back many years?

We used to be the best in the world at this. Without our influence, other places will have the stronger influence. When we lose influence, we lose not just power—we do—we lose ground. We lose the ability to protect ourselves. Everybody wanted to be getting the American drugs for COVID. But the next COVID that hits, we'll be begging Europe for theirs.

This is so divorced from reality I don’t know what to say. The argument is so nonsensical. Everyone wanted the American drugs for Covid—really?

Someone else who lost funding for “HIV”:

UCLA professor loses millions in funding for HIV research project

After a decade of laying down the scientific groundwork, UCLA professor of epidemiology and infectious diseases, Dr. Pamina Gorbach, was launching an ambitious project. The National Institutes of Health awarded her a five-year, $3 million grant to find solutions for one of the most vulnerable groups of patients.

"This program was helping to keep people living with HIV healthier, out of the emergency rooms and off the streets," she told Eyewitness News.

On March 20, her birthday, Gorbach got a notice canceling her funding and ordering her to cease her work with her community partner, the Los Angeles LGBT Center.

I’m sorry this happened to her on her birthday.

She said the letter implied her study was unscientific. It said the research provided a "low return on investment" and ultimately did "not enhance health, lengthen life or reduce illness."

"It's kind of insulting. We are scientists. It was reviewed by a panel of scientists who also agreed that this was meritorious," Gorbach said.

It went on to categorize her work as a diversity, equity and inclusion study that are "often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race" which "harms the health of Americans."

"My research was about racial inequity in HIV and substance abuse and that was targeted," she said.

I’m sorry that their little DEI project was cancelled. Racial inequity in “HIV” positivity is indeed a topic worth investigating; however, the results might surprise some, if we recall that in every risk group including groups at no risk, Blacks consistently test positive at a higher rate than do whites or Asians; the consistency across risk groups implies that something perhaps genetically linked is going on and this has nothing to do with an STI at all. I don’t have a lot more to say about this piece, so let’s move on.

Next up, a mural for HIV AIDS awareness? No comment on this; if you want to check out the link it’s pretty bizarre.

‘We know we have work to do’: New Phoenix mural raises HIV/AIDS awareness

And finally, thanks to the revelations regarding USAID, here’s a panicked video about “HIV” clinics shutting down in Africa because the U.S. is no longer paying for them? What? Can you imagine if say, France were funding “HIV” clinics, why on earth would we expect France to pay for ours? So why are we paying for “HIV” clinics elsewhere, with our enormous national debt (does anyone else feel like that number is basically nonsense?).

As always, drop your thoughts in the comments. Do you think DOGE might actually be doing some good here with canceling a lot of federal financial assistance for anything related to “HIV”, or is something deeper going on?