Teenagers dying of AIDS?

Is this a way to sell lenacapavir to as many people as possible?

I came across this article about teenagers in Peru suddenly coming down with AIDS, and it is rather interesting from a psychological perspective. We’re going back to the late 1980s scare tactics regarding “HIV.” Perhaps this is happening in an attempt to scare people into taking lenacapavir as PrEP. They’re certainly pushing this drug HARD. I wonder how many people know that lenacapavir was developed to treat resistant “HIV” in heavily treatment-experienced patients. Why then is it suitable as a preventative?

Here’s the latest hysteria:

In a World with HIV Treatment, Why Are Teenagers Still Dying of AIDS?

Right out of the gate, I have questions. Did these teenagers contract “HIV” sexually as teenagers, or did they inherit their mother’s antibodies at birth? There is a story in the article about a teenager that had tested positive at birth:

Rosa, one of Kolevic’s patients, is an example. At seventeen, Rosa had been living with HIV since birth. Her parents had died, and her extended family lived far away, leaving her without any support. Plus, she had a one-year-old daughter of her own to care for. She experienced housing and employment instability and sometimes worked as a sex worker. She struggled with depression and had instances of suicidal ideation and a history of disengaging from care.

It sounds as though Rosa had much more significant problems than testing positive for “HIV.” No mention is made of her health status or what medication she is or isn’t taking.

One theme of this article seems to be the peril under which programs aimed at treating and preventing “HIV” in other countries find themselves thanks to the cuts to USAID and PEPFAR. Remind me again why we’re paying for other countries’ health care.

Regardless, this is just more hysteria, although there are some interesting “tells” that you might appreciate.

“One of the major things we realized was that living with HIV in adolescence or young adulthood is often a marker for exposure to some of the cruelest circumstances imaginable, including sexual abuse and assault, extreme poverty, and absence of caregivers,” Franke says. “All of these factors conspire against treatment adherence in HIV care.”

With conditions like this, who needs a shape-shifting, barely definable “virus” to explain these teens’ poor health? Also, notice how the holy grail is always treatment adherence. Never mind the fact that among fully adherent, virally suppressed patients, up to 40% of those patients are immunological non-responders, meaning that despite being “undetectable,” they fail to mount a sufficient T cell response, and their clinical health does not improve. The perfect picture painted by the media and entertainment industries of these magical, life saving drugs is just more smoke and mirrors. And that isn’t even touching the negative effects of these medications—see AZT and the Truvada disaster.

The rest of the piece says about what you would expect, and here is how we conclude:

The PASEO project is just one part of a suite of effective, creative interventions for young people with HIV that Franke and colleagues have built, including social media campaigns on Instagram and TikTok to try to reduce HIV-related stigma, a rap video about how patients can keep their viral load down, and an AI chatbot to help triage mental health challenges for adolescents with HIV.

A RAP VIDEO on suppressing viral load? I’m sorry—if I have to watch it, so do you. 😇

Well, that seems to be a good place to wrap this nonsense up. I’ll be back later in the week with some more technical posts. Let me know if you made it through the video.