World AIDS Day, Now With a Side of Censorship

Today is World AIDS Day, and ACT UP member and co-founder of PrEP4All, Jason Rosenberg, has a piece all about it in Vogue magazine:

With Threats on The Horizon, World AIDS Day Is Still a Call to Action

If you don’t remember who Mr. Rosenberg is, he was one of the organizers of the protest that was held outside Simon & Schuster ahead of the publication of my book, The Real AIDS Epidemic. We became aware of him in January 2023, with the article AIDS Denialism Is Still Deadly in 2023, published in The Body, and which explicitly called for the censorship of my book. Anyway, Mr. Rosenberg is back with this piece about World AIDS Day. Spoiler: It’s propaganda for PrEP, and angst about Trump and Kennedy, with some calls for censorship sprinkled in. He opens with an ominous warning about RFK Jr—although he doesn’t mention him by name, it is extremely obvious to whom Rosenberg is referring (emphasis mine throughout):

World AIDS Day arrives every year on December 1 and yet it remains one of the more confusing—and I’ll add, often dreaded—markers in the AIDS community. Advocates are often forced to choose between mourning the loss of loved ones or using the globally recognized day to highlight the persisting struggles holding us back from seeing an AIDS-free generation. As we face an incoming administration that campaigned on promises to “reshape” our healthcare with guidance from one of the loudest leaders in the anti-science and denialist movement, our impulse to resist has never been more clear or urgent.

“One of the loudest leaders in the anti-science and denialist movement?” That’s quite the label to slap on someone. Rosenberg spends a couple of paragraphs describing how he got involved in AIDS activism, which, unsurprisingly, happened around the time that PrEP—pre-exposure prophylaxis, the practice of giving “anti-HIV” drugs to “HIV”-negative individuals as a kind of vaccine—was being rolled out.

When I joined ACT UP NY, we were a few years into the FDA’s approval of oral PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis). Although we had a drug on the market that, when taken daily, can effectively prevent people from acquiring HIV, its pharmaceutical manufacturer, Gilead Sciences, was marking up the price by 66%, potentially having users pay up to $24,000 out-of-pocket for an annual supply. This news of price gouging only became more disturbing when we discovered that the funding for the trials were sourced from US taxpayer dollars.

I love the vagueness of this language. PrEP “can effectively prevent people from acquiring HIV”—how effectively? Notice they’ve backed way, way off the “99% effective” estimate that was being thrown around a few years ago. Certainly this figure is not supported by clinical trial data.

Also, there is a tiny theme in this article of being critical of Gilead for their exorbitant prices for their “anti-HIV” drugs; however, Rosenberg stops short of admitting that Gilead has literally been not only robbing their patients financially, but actively harming them by continuing to promote an incredibly toxic drug. I’m sure he’d have preferred not to criticize Gilead in any way, but the company is in such hot water legally that it would have been very suspicious had he not mentioned it at all.

He discusses the promise of lenacapavir, which we have discussed already. However, there is also the issue of price (it should also be noted that lenacapavir is not yet approved for PrEP, but only as an ARV for now):

This is especially important as we reflect on the recent (and exciting) results from the PURPOSE 1 and 2 trials for lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injectable PrEP that proved highly effective among cisgender women (PURPOSE 1) and gay men, trans, and nonbinary people (PURPOSE 2) in preventing HIV (it's currently approved as a treatment for the disease, not a preventative measure equal to the daily oral pill). While the price is uncertain, we know that the cost of lenacapapir as treatment is currently a whopping $42,250 for the first year—when it could be incredibly profitable at the price of just $40 annually. We also know that lenacapavir’s manufacturer, once again Gilead Sciences (seeing a trend here?), announced they would license generic forms of the drug in 120 countries—excluding Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru—all countries that helped make the trial a success by participating.

We have discussed this generic licensing here previously. I’d like to draw your attention to something else that preceded this paragraph:

Almost a decade later, there are now several generic forms of oral PrEP on the market—but equality still isn’t here. According to the US CDC and referenced in PrEP in Black America’s For Us By US report, 91% of Black Americans who could benefit from PrEP have never received a prescription.

There it is—the not-so-subtly bullying and condescension from the AIDS activists to the Black community, that has been going on for decades at this point and gosh darn it, just doesn’t seem to work because, in my estimation, the Black community knows what’s up with PrEP and is, for the most part, wisely choosing to steer clear.

Now, we get into the real meat of the article, and it is—surprise, surprise!—that we need to stop misinformation and disinformation. That’s code for censorship. Check this out:

Despite cost creating major barriers to access to HIV prevention, stigma and misinformation are equal pressing challenges in reaching communities—and this is where Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. come in.

Back in early 2023, I was part of an effort urging the publishing house Simon & Schuster to end the distribution of an AIDS denialism book, which thankfully later got removed from their site. A lot of this advocacy was inspired by the anti-PrEP ads that flurried across social media platforms in 2020, sharing damaging talking points about the prevention drug. As AIDS advocates, we knew alarmist language that was stewed with misinformation could harm efforts connecting people to PrEP and deter people from trusting the science behind it.

Here Rosenberg is bragging about his almost-successful cancellation attempt of my book, The Real AIDS Epidemic, which you can read about in detail in my piece, How to Kill a Book About AIDS. I notice that, this time, he is smart enough not to mention my name and get me even more publicity. He even brags about his The Body article from 2023 warning about the dangers of my book, before it had been released and before he could have known what was in it (has he even read it? Doubtful):

During our Simon & Schuster campaign, I penned a piece for HIV-AIDS site TheBody named AIDS Denialism Is Still Deadly in 2023. The piece ended with this: “It’s easy to say that fringe opinions can’t attract an audience after we’ve made such immense progress and have taken revolutionary steps to preventing, treating, and curing HIV/AIDS. But who would have thought AIDS deniers would be given platforms as large as these?”

Referring back to the statement that his advocacy stemmed in part from “anti-PrEP ads.” Rosenberg is referring, of course, to the advertisements by law firms that had been retained to obtain compensation for patients that had been harmed by Truvada and related medications—recall the mostly successful attempts on the part of said activists to have almost all the advertisements removed from social media, effectively hiding from patients the possibility that they had been harmed by Gilead’s medication and that they might be entitled to compensation. The activists are proud of this?

The article limps to a close, after another somewhat half-hearted attempt to smear Kennedy:

I have often revisited these two lines since election night. People like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is Trump’s top pick for the Secretary of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), seemed so distant from any material decision-making power until now. This is someone who has pushed the falsehood that HIV does not cause AIDS and even suggested that “lifestyle choices” and recreational drug use are what cause the virus. This type of AIDS denialism, accompanied by a range of health-related falsehoods and misinformation, is what’s keeping many AIDS advocates up at night.

Well, the gloves are certainly off now in the media regarding the fact that Kennedy has expressed skepticism of the official HIV AIDS story. After ignoring this for months in the hopes that it would disappear, it appears clear at this point that this strategy has been revisited. How much will it affect Kennedy’s potential appointment? Probably not very much, in my estimation—the general public is much more concerned with Kennedy’s focus on toxins in our food and environment than in his stance on AIDS, from what I can tell.

Regardless, I do derive a small amount of satisfaction knowing that the AIDS activists are being “kept up at night” by the possibility of their favorite paradigm imploding before their very eyes. They know that their story has been decidedly falsified on every front and that all they have left is the illusion that their “anti-HIV” drugs are “highly specific” to “HIV” and are “safe and effective.” Of course, we know that they are neither safe—revisit AIDS activist Sean Strub’s documentation of how ARVs were responsible for his profound osteoporosis—nor specific to “HIV.” If at any point in his tenure (assuming he is confirmed), Kennedy decides to take a hard look into the reality of “anti-HIV” drugs, the AIDS activists have every reason in the world to be “kept up at night.” Let’s hope that this happens, and that the censorship games the AIDS establishment likes to play no longer work. Maybe future World AIDS Days will look a lot different, in that case. Forty years on, I’m reminded of the (paraphrased) words of the late Liam Scheff: “AIDS is real, “HIV” is not… they [old-school AIDS researchers] know it and they need to move their fat asses over on the research bench so we can get some real answers.”