Very good and thorough article here on how the AIDS crisis shaped the current relationship between the activist left and the pharmaceutical industry. One thing that's interesting is the interrelation between Anthony Fauci and Larry Kramer, which wasn't exactly the same in public as it was behind the scenes. Of course if they were two halves of a larger beast, they wouldn't always remain so. Kramer of course died of AIDS at a tragically young age, while Fauci would stay in Washington for decades more. And the lessons he learned maybe weren't the ones he should have learned.
Anyway, it's more than worth looking at. Nothing ever ends.
2 comments:
With the widespread adoption of antiretrovirals to gay men the physician Seamus O'Mahony was correct when he stated: “Pharma’s single greatest idea was to move its focus from the sick to the well, thus creating vast new markets of ‘patients’ requiring lifetime treatment with drugs.”
As Jer just said, 'It's like big pharma had sleeper cells waiting for the opportunity to enact their programs'.. which they've done by equating AIDS treatments with gender affirming drugs - bypassing the fact that puberty blockers are sterilizing. The fact that lots of careers have been made at the same time goes without saying
As we learned from the Mrna vaccines developed at lighting speed to treat Covid whoever develops the drugs first gets most of the money. That they have also been very harmful to many people is still being hidden from the public at large. People have been catching on though, just as they did with AZT.
Jer found an article on Spin magazine a few years ago called AIDS and the AZT Scandal Spin (1989) - Feature Sins of Omission.
You're right to say 'nothing ever ends'.
Until it does, of course.
Yeah, that's true. They did get the hot idea of marketing drugs to well people, making their pitch that your continued wellness, regardless of what you've done up until now, requires their product. It's eerily similar to mobsters' "shame if something happened to it" threats. And of course once you go down that road you start thinking of new markets. It's an ever-expanding scam.
There are going to be hundreds of thousands of adults in the future who've had their gender affirmed as children and who will be asking why no one looked out for them or asked any questions. In fact it's already started. The legal preparations these companies and doctors have made must be staggering.
It's hard to imagine how scary AIDS must have been to those in the demographic who were catching it and dying from it in the greatest number. You can understand how many would grab onto the first treatment that sounded reasonable. It's quite impressive that some started questioning the effectiveness and appropriateness of AZT. That Spin article is very thorough, as well as credible. (I didn't know they were even still in business.)
I think I stole the "nothing ever ends" line from Alan Moore's Watchmen. Means that actions always have unexpected reverberations in the future.
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