People might be interested in why this useful. Much like with Covid today, scientists are interested in understanding when the disease first appeared. Because that gives us clues about where it came from and how quickly it is changing now. You can estimate this based on changes in the sequence of the genome. Changes (mutations) will appear in the genome at a predictable rate ("mutation rate"), and is measured as mutations per generation.
For HIV, there are plenty of estimates for the mutation rate based off a mixture of statistical bioinformatics and knowledge of genetics. But they are all inferences because we don't have many sequences from before 1988. This relatively ancient genome allows scientists to see how good their estimates are by looking at a genome that will have -20 years worth of mutations. Turns out the estimates are really good. I would then draw the link back to Covid where the mutation rate is estimated in the same way. So it's a good bet that the date estimated for Covid's emergence is pretty close to the mark.
You can see the paper here[0]. I think the actual paper would make a better link on HN, but I guess the press release is useful for those without a molecular biology background.
It's also relevant to demonstrate now that this virus too hasn't been made in the lab. The "lab origin" is a claim that some like to spread on every outbreak, even in spite of the fact that virologists know that nature produces the viruses very easily and there are no facts supporting anything else this time too.
From the abstract:
"Our phylogenetic analyses date the origin of the pandemic lineage of HIV-1 to a time period around the turn of the 20th century (1881 to 1918)."
At that time humanity didn't even know what the virus really is -- they just knew that something in some liquid transmits some illness. The most advanced lab at that time could only get that liquid using the filters.
Interesting you mention this, in the WP series Operation Infektion, one of the disinformation campaigns by the Soviet Union is placing an article in a small newspaper in India, wherein the claim is made HIV was made in a lab in the US.
"Based on the theories of Dr William Campbell Douglass, many believe that that HIV was genetically engineered"
"William Campbell Douglass, M.D. Education: BS, University of Rochester, New York; MD, University of Miami School of Medicine; Graduate, U.S. Navy School of Aviation and Space Medicine" (1)
"Survey data from the United States (US) and South Africa (the only countries for which quantitative data exists) suggest that a significant minority of people endorse such beliefs and that this matters for public health." (2)
And "we know who" now spreads the disinformation about the COVID-19 virus (I won't intentionally mention him, he has too much fans here).
(Additionally, the biggest stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons were always in the U.S., apparently more of 10% of the chemical weapons are still not destructed.)
Something being impossible unfortunately in no way makes it less likely to be part of a conspiracy theory. I have the feeling that it's actually the opposite.
It's pointless to try to prove anything to conspiracionists, they'll just tweak their stories and continue as if nothing happened. Anything that goes against their narrative is ignored and quickly forgotten, anything that appears to remotely vaguely confirm their beliefs is amplified and repeated ad nauseam.
Don't waste your time with them. You cannot reason people out of something they were not reasoned into.
Every conspiracionist beyond hope was once not quite beyond hope if you go back enough in time, and new ones are getting minted all the time and can still be saved. It's a worthy fight, even though it cannot be thoroughly won.
It has been argued that one saves people from going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories not by giving them the right facts, but by ensuring that they do not feel alone and isolated in society. Speaking with Flat Earthers can reveal that they accepted Flat Earthism simply because it gave them some feeling of community with other people on the internet, and the belief in a flat Earth itself isn’t actually the point.
The question is not really "was this particular one man made?", but "is it possible?" It is pretty obvious 1970ties technology was not advanced enough to pull this stunt. But times change.
the "gain-of-function" experiments - ie. increasing the deadliness and transmissibility of a virus - doesn't seem to require any meaningful technology, at least not the way it was done in the Wuhan labs to the coronavirus[1]. Such "improved" virus wouldn't look like a "lab made". In theory similar gain-of-function experiments could have resulted in the human transmissible HIV back then.
Those gain-of-function experiments were done at the University of North Carolina.
But we know for certain that SARS-CoV-2 was not created through gain-of-function experiments. It doesn't use any of the standard viral backbones used in such experiments, it has a receptor binding domain that computational chemistry algorithms would not have predicted to work (meaning that nature "invented" it, not scientists), and the virus contains seemingly random differences throughout its genome from all known viruses - that would not be the case for a lab-created virus.
The boring answer is the correct one: this virus evolved in nature, and then spilled over into the human population late last year.
Your statement contradicted itself in several places: a "gain of function" virus would contain random differences, and would look indistinguishable from something "created by nature." Effectively that's how nature makes more virulent viruses; the more virulent examples reproduce more effectively. Just like that's how nature/bakeries makes yeast that works better on flour. No genetic engineering involved.
I don't think there is any evidence of this, despite the usual suspects (neocon types on our side, and militarists on the Chinese side) ginning up the case for an "escape from lab" casus belli, but let's get the facts straight.
> a "gain of function" virus would contain random differences, and would look indistinguishable from something "created by nature."
No, a chimeric virus created in a gain-of-function experiment would look extremely similar to known viruses, because these chimeras are created by combining elements of known viruses. It would not be 4% different from the closest known natural virus. Accumulating thousands of mutations throughout the entire genome takes decades of evolution. In the wild, that means thousands of generations of hosts.
A virus created in a gain-of-function experiment would also use a well-known backbone. It would not be based on some virus that nobody had ever heard of.
I don't know what your purpose is in regurgitating verifiable but admittedly realistic-sounding bullshit on hacker news, but virtually every statement you have made here is obvious bullshit.
I don't even particularly believe the "possibly released from a lab" meme, and am generally against the shadowy dipshits that push it. But you're not helping here.
does gain of function require directly engineering the sequence? i saw one gain of function expeeiment where a cat virus was exposed to mouse material, and underwent zoonosis on its own
additionally the sequence can just be manually copied over
that paper for some reason ignores plausible alternative approaches to creating viruses in the lab
The problem with that theory is that the virus contains thousands of mutations throughout its genome, which would take decades of evolution to accumulate. In the wild, this virus jumps to a new host every few days, meaning that decades of evolution amount to thousands of generations of virus. No lab has the time to pass virus through so many animals.
i dont understand why it would have to jump through a bunch of animals first. cant it go from bat to human?
fauci was conducting coronavirus gain of function experiments in wuhan in 2019 trying to go from bat to human, so at least some scientists didn't consider the evolutionary distance to be so great
That is the answer you get from the experiments, if it jumps then it can, if it doesn't jump, keep trying different strains and generations selectively bred in mice/ferrets/etc. (in addition to using human cells in vitro to filter the candidates at various stages, an interesting modern possibility is to use mice seeded with human cells with the receptors of target type like ACE2 in this case and/or with human cells from respiratory surfaces). In general it is like you'd selectively breed new type of apple or grain, condensing the decades of chaotic natural selection into managed selection over few years or even months when it comes to fast iterating objects like for example viruses and bacteria.
So far it looks like the experiments did succeed. China is a country where prison inmates voluntarily donate organs while still alive, and in general it sounds like their prisons are very harsh, comparable or even worse than for example in Russia. Compare to that getting infected with a flu and spending few weeks in a nice lab hospital being well fed and relieved from the hard labor and abuse by the guards and other prisoners - i suspect there would be a line to sign up for those experiments.
So I'm still not following. You say it is infeasible for a lab to generate sars2, yet it seems Fauci thinks it is feasible enough to fund an attempt.
If I understand your argument, you claim sars2 is too genetically different from the closest public sequences to have been lab engineered. But, what precludes a lab from discovering a virus in the wild that is close to making the jump, and then pushing it the rest of the way? I am not understanding the argument that we have to limit the range of possibility to only the publicly disclosed virus sequences.
For example, if you line up the ace2 site between sars2 and sars, they have a lot of similarity. This author claims the section is essentially copied over, although I don't know if it is statistically significant enough to not just be an accident.
https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/blog/scientific-evidence-and...
So, a "lab origin" theorist could say they isolated a virus in the wild, and copied over the ace2 section from sars, and then ran it through human tissue until it gain enough function to spread effectively in the human population. Is that less or more likely than a coronavirus in the wild mutating enough to make such a lethal jump to humans? Is there any way to put a probability on the two theories?
> You say it is infeasible for a lab to generate sars2, yet it seems Fauci thinks it is feasible enough to fund an attempt.
Saying they were trying to generate SARS-CoV-2 in a lab is a very polemical way of saying that they were studying viral transmission in cell culture. They didn't create SARS-CoV-2. They created viruses that are extremely different from SARS-CoV-2.
> But, what precludes a lab from discovering a virus in the wild that is close to making the jump, and then pushing it the rest of the way?
The Wuhan Institute of Virology publishes identifying genetic sequences of the viruses it samples from the wild. SARS-CoV-2 is not among those viruses. The closest virus (RaTG13) that the WIV found before the pandemic was 4% different from SARS-CoV-2. If SARS-CoV-2 were engineered from RaTG13, then the two viruses would be virtually identical throughout most of their genome. The only differences would be those introduced by the researchers. Yet the two viruses have seemingly random differences throughout their genomes - the types of differences you would not get in gain-of-function experiments. A 4% difference corresponds to many years of divergent evolution. The two viruses might have split as far back as the late 1800s.
So it's certain that SARS-CoV-2 is not engineered on the basis of RaTG13. If you want to claim that the WIV secretly found a different virus, then for unknown reasons didn't publish about that virus, and then started doing gain-of-function experiments on it without telling anyone (including their American scientific collaborators), you're just so far out in the realm of evidence-free conspiracy land that it's not worth responding to.
> copied over the ace2 section from sars
The receptor binding domains of SARS-CoV and SARS-COV-2 are very different from one another. The blog you're looking to is nonsense.
Listen to actual experts, like the virologists at This Week in Virology, not bloggers making wild claims.
regarding the binding sites, clearly they are quite different. but, the similarities seem greater than possible by chance, and i am not sure how that could happen. maybe a variant of sars mutated into sars2?
the sites are at least similar enough that researchers are trying to use sars vaccines to engineer sars2 vaccine
What do you mean that they're more similar than is possible by chance?
Instead of reading conspiracy blogs, go read scientific papers. If you don't understand them, then there is really good introductory course material on virology available from several universities.
Looking at the ACE2 alignment from the article, it looks like there are 55 spots where the sequences have different proteins. Of those 55 spots, 7 of them are identical between the bat and sars2. On the other hand, I count 20 matches between sars and sars2.
Using a uniform distribution over the 20 proteins, and saying the probability of two proteins matching is 1/20, then the binomial probability of getting 7 or more matches out of 55 is 0.02, whereas the probability of getting 20 or more matches is less than 0.000001.
I can see 0.02 being achieved by chance, but 0.000001 seems pretty unlikely to happen by accident. So, there is some sort of non accidental relationship between sars and sars2. Maybe 1) sars2 is descended from sars, or maybe 2) it is lab engineered.
If the bat coronavirus is likely the more proximate ancestor to sars2 than sars, then #1 seems unlikely, which makes #2 the more plausible hypothesis.
Also, to return to your argument about restricting our 'lab origin' hypothesis to known viruses, it seems that if WIV found a very effective bat coronavirus, and intend to create a bioweapon from it, this is exactly the situation when they would not share the sequence. I do not understand why you think people creating a bioweapon would want to share their materials with the world.
> So, there is some sort of non accidental relationship between sars and sars2.
Yeah, they're both betacoronaviruses. You've just discovered something called "common descent." Charles Darwin published about it in 1859.
I'm sorry, but this is getting comical. You really have to step back and learn some basics about biology before you go on this dive into conspiracy theories.
Hmm, still not following. Why would the fact both are betacoronaviruses entail ace2 is conserved? Is human binding ace2 a common feature of betacoronaviruses? Are you arguing that sars is the more recent ancestor than ratg13?
I blasted sars2 against sars and against ratg13. 88% coverage for the first and 99% for the second, so ratg13 seems to be a much more recent ancestor.
Why would ace2 be much better preserved between sars2 and sars than between sars2 and ratg13?
Apologies for being dense :) As you notice, I'm pretty new to bioinformatics. Just trying to understand what your argument is.
UPDATE:
Sorry, I see a mistake I've been making that is confusing. I should be referring to Bat_CoV_ZC45 and Bat_CoV_ZXC21, not ratg13. ratg13 is the one that also has a close match to ace2, but the author claims is a forgery. The bat coronaviruses also seem to be more evolutionarily close to sars2 than sars, and they don't have the ace2 binding sites.
> Why would the fact both are betacoronaviruses entail ace2 is conserved? Is human binding ace2 a common feature of betacoronaviruses? Are you arguing that sars is the more recent ancestor than ratg13?
I'm saying that it's complete nonsense to say that there's a (1/20)^7 chance of 7 amino acids matching. We're talking about viruses that are descended from a common ancestor, not random, independently distributed coin flips.
> ratg13 seems to be a much more recent ancestor.
RaTG13 is not an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2. The two viruses share a common ancestor.
> Why would ace2 be much better preserved between sars2 and sars than between sars2 and ratg13?
ACE2 is a human protein. Neither SARS-CoV-2 nor SARS-CoV have ACE2. If you're talking about the RBD of the S protein, then note that the RBDs of SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV are only 73% homologous, which is a pretty massive difference.
Stepping back for a second, you're diving down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole with very little prior knowledge of the subject. That's just going to make you easy prey to a lot of nonsense. Really, instead of reading blogs that claim to have found the secret truth about SARS-CoV-2, listen to what respected virologists have to say about it. Do some basic background reading on virology and coronaviruses. Read some review articles from scientific journals.
I've done a bit of reading from the experts. I read the main debunking article about this lab theory, and personally did not really understand why the authors were so confident their evidence eliminated the lab theory.
1) ace2 binding is much better than humans can engineer with computer simulations
2) virus does not come from any known backbones
Regarding #1, I've found another article where the author was able to induce zoonosis from a feline coronavirus to a mouse by exposing the virus to mouse genetic material. So, the fact humans cannot directly engineer zoonosis very well does not preclude lab induced zoonosis.
Regarding #2, as I mentioned before, it seems this line of reasoning is a non sequitur. A virus backbone used to create a bioweapon is exactly the sort of sequence you are not going to upload to NCBI.
The fact the reasoning does not seem very solid in what is considered the official and definitive debunking of the conspiracy theory is itself odd.
So, it is my reading of some respected virologists that in part motivates me down this rabbit hole.
Anyways, I greatly appreciate your feedback. I'll keep learning more about virology, and hopefully get some clarity on the whole matter.
The WIV is not a bioweapons laboratory. It's an academic research institution. Any gain-of-function experiments they would do would be aimed at understanding viruses, not creating weapons. They would use known backbones, not a virus nobody has ever heard of, that they've never even uploaded to a database.
I'm going to suggest to you that the reason you don't find the reasoning in the debunking to be solid is that you don't understand the field very well. I don't know what your specialty is, but imagine someone who has no experience in it. They might have a lot of weird conceptions about your specialty, they might have no idea how things work in your field, they might find a lot of things surprising. Things that you find obvious might seem dubious to a novice. The arguments made in the debunking are considered very strong by experts in the field. That's what matters.
> Those fragments were also from different subtypes of HIV, Gryseels said, which shows that the virus had been circulating for some time in humans before the 1950s.
That was already pretty much a certainty from the already known fragmentary genomes (also mostly from the DRC), as well as the phylogenetic analysis of known strains, groups and subtypes.
Looks so. The virus seems to have "brewed" in the Congo basin for a few decades, possibly amplified by the vaccination campaigns of the early 20th century (as they'd be using the same glass syringes and steel needles for dozens of patients).
If it got out before the second half of the 20th century it apparently didn't manage to gain enough of a foothold to go pandemic[0]. Though the long incubation rate and somewhat mixed symptoms also make it somewhat uncertain.
[0] as may have been the case for Robert Rayford who looks to have been something of a terminal case rather than vector or victim of a more widespread infection
I’m skepticism that vaccinations would have increased it much tbh. A needle stick from a patient with HIV has a 1/300 chance of transmitting HIV, so it would probably have had a very limited impact. Needle sharing amongst IVDUs is higher risk due to the repeated exposure to the small risk.
TLDR: The "news" is not the age of the samples, there are older ones, but that the virus genome is still intact and allows for a more accurate estimation of mutation rates and origins of HIV.
"There are older fragments of HIV out there, one from 1959 and one from 1960, also from DRC. But those pieces aren't as complete, and thus can't offer as much information about the virus' mutations. "
If you have time I would recommend two movies that touches deeply upon this topic. They are 'Philadelphia'[1] which garnered a 'Best Actor' Oscar for Tom Hanks and 'And the band played on'[2] starring Mathew Modine.
'Philadelphia' a fictional movie that touches on the social stigma associated with HIV and 'And the band played on' captures the politics of why it was ignored by Reagan and his supporters for so long and the sad politics and scientific infighting in the chase for a cure.
Both are really incredible movies, and I'd also highly recommend them. "How To Survive A Plague" is pretty great too (it even features everyone's favorite NIH official, Anthony Fauci!).
One thing worth being aware of with "And The Band Played On": it's quite old, and science advanced a lot after the book it's based on was written, so it's sometimes factually inaccurate (Gaetan Dugas didn't personally cause the pandemic, and the incubation period is longer than they thought then). It's not a work of history or a documentary, but it makes for fascinating viewing precisely because it was made so close to the events that the story it tells is not neat and polished with the benefit of decades of hindsight and narrative shaping. It's chaotic and emotional and raw and authentic and, inevitably, sometimes wrong about stuff that wasn't known then.
The Gaetan Dugas thing seems to dominate every discussion about And The Band Plays on which is too bad because the book is like 600 pages long, tracks dozens of real life individuals, has tons of incredible primary source material, and gives a very touching, grounded, contemporary look at AIDS in the early 80s.
And out of the small portion of the book that talks about Dugas, I never got the impression that Schilts was trying the blame him for causing the pandemic, but rather that he was using him as a real life example of the type of man that existed in that era, who flew around the country having sex with thousands (yes thousands) of other men, whose behavior doubtlessly and unknowingly sped the spread of AIDS.
Most people have only seen the film, I think (I only read half the book). Gaetan Dugas is much more prominently featured in the film, which pretty strongly implies he was a key factor in the wide spread of HIV.
A much more interesting Aids movie is Cold Case Hammerskjöld, which could explain the discrepancy of existence of the virus in these early samples. Highly controversial though.
I didn't understand the AIDS epidemic until I listened to a podcast [1] where they interviewed a gay survivor. I can't imagine my friends dying off one by one around me from an unknown specter. The government pretending you didn't exist and ignoring you because it was a "gay problem". Society demonizing you.
He said that even after it was understood that AIDS was not transmissible by touch, morgues would refuse to accept the bodies of gay men. When people knew they were at the end of the rope, they would ask their friends to throw their ashes over the fence into the white house lawn. That way as their final act, they could tell the government that their active silence was literally killing people and that even if they considered them others, they wouldn't be ignored.
It's heartbreaking, but I'd recommend anyone to listen to the interview if you don't know much about that period in history.
In 2002, I was back in my hometown after some years away. By then they estimated that HIV infection was running at 1/3 of the population. I had a job that took me most days to the local cemetery, and was harrowed by the next round of graves freshly dug, most three foot long. I imagine you can guess why they were so short. And if that sounds angry, it is anger - still - but not directed at you, OP. I went to the hospital on one occasion to see the child of a friend, a little boy called AK, draw his last breath. His name was a reference to the machine gun; a child of a revolution I didn’t understand.
I’m not sure why I write this. I never really spoke of it before. I think I found your comment deeply moving.
Sorry... Trying to understand. Are you saying that all these little kids died of aids? How did they contract it? Most kids are 3 feet tall by age three or four. Also, why so many deaths in 2002? Very effective drugs had been widely available for a long time.
> Most kids are 3 feet tall by age three or four. Also, why so many deaths in 2002? Very effective drugs had been widely available for a long time.
Effective HIV suppression is not cheap, and usually out of reach of developing countries or poor communities such as… pretty much all of sub-saharan africa, where the AIDS pandemic remains essentially unchecked.
Given mother-to-child transmission is somewhere between 15 and 45% without mitigation measures (which are unlikely to be in place in a country where a quarter of the population is infected), we're talking 5~10% of children born infected.
The Australian government's 1987 "Grim Reaper" ad gives some impression of the mood at the time. Of course, it didn't do any favours to the gay community.
Italy’s 1990 “AIDS: If you know it, you avoid it” public service advertisement is indelibly seared into the consciousness of my whole generation. Drawing purple outlines around things is still an instant reminder of that. The soundtrack is often heard overlaid over threatening scenarios much as the Benny Hill soundtrack is overload over situations to indicate they are ‘funny’.
It's one of my all-time favourite songs, since I was a kid. Italian partner looked at me oddly first time I played it at home, as her memory of it was all bundled up in grim negativity.
It's not a song that gets played much at home, when she's about :(
My mother worked in a funeral home from about 1986 to 1997. I recall when they got their first AIDS victim in 1987. They took the body and I don’t recall my Mother freaking out about it. They realized that sooner or later they were going to get remains of someone who had died of AIDS. There were few protocols at the time regarding how to prepare bodies for viewing and I think they simply used common sense. I recall my Mother describing double gloves, smocks, and face shields when dealing with the blood. Despite the times, I think the folks who work in the funeral industry at that time (mostly family run) were truly compassionate about caring for someone’s remains regardless of who they were and didn’t judge. While they had concerns about dealing with this first case, it became routine (sadly) very quickly thereafter. I’d imagine they received referrals from their handling of that first case. And very quickly they started handling all remains are handled as if they were HIV positive.
The only other thing I do recall was some concern on this first case about folks showing up to disrupt the Funeral in part because most of the mourners were from the gay community. So I think they hired the an officer from the local PD to provide security but nothing happened.
I'm sure it varied quite a bit depending on where you were.
In the podcast, the interviewee talks about how in some major cities there was only one funeral home which would serve that population. Those places have now become the only place some gay men want to handle their body when they pass as a sign of appreciation for their compassion during the AIDS epidemic.
The Randy Shilts book it is based upon is a very engaging and detailed record of the AIDS epidemic in the US. He himself sadly died of it, shortly after finishing the book.
Looking closer I found this [1] which is the guy the interviewee was speaking about. It looks like it was his ashes, not literally his corpse. I think it was referred to as his body in the podcast which is where I got it from, but I'm assuming that was in the sense of "what remains of his body". I'll update my post.
It looks like the white house lawn is home to the remains of at least 18 gay men that died from AIDS.
I followed the AIDS crisis in the newspaper from Day One, starting with one-inch long columns about "mysterious purple lesions called Kaposi's sarcoma" to shrines with hundreds of photos occupying whole sections.
The similarity with corona in 2020 is that so little was known, but for years, not months. The difference was that AIDS was 100% fatal until drugs were developed, and AIDS killed a generation of young adults rather than older people.
(There were interviews with a handful of men who were immune to the AIDS virus, but had to endure all of their friends and partners dying, and had to deal with inheriting a lot of possessions that reminded them of dead people.)
Almost all hemophiliacs in North America used pooled blood products from thousands of donors, so just about all of them died. (There's a Canadian film on Youtube that covers this.)
I had no idea that he died of AIDS and that was in the 90s. It's terrifying how recent it was that he would have received public backlash for contracting a disease during a surgery.
I feel like you're leaving homophobia out of the equation. Asimov was ashamed, and there would have been a backlash, because society associated AIDS with gay men. If people had really believed that he'd got it through surgery, there wouldn't have been a bad reaction.
At the time, some pediatricians used to give moms after birth a pint of blood to "pinken them up" (make their cheeks rosy.)
Of course, that gratuitous pint gave some of them AIDS or liver disease for no useful purpose.
More and more you realize hospitals are the most dangerous place to be, emphasized by corona, but the CDC maintains a list of about 18 infectious diseases rampant in hospitals today.
Yeah- I remember being in high school biology class and we had a poster of AIDS symptoms from HIV infection (KS, along with others). Would have been mid-to-late 1980s. Fast forward to grad school- 1995-2001 and I'm working with protein structures like HIV protease and reverse transcriptase to find drugs that interfere with them. Only around 2001 did drugs start to be approved that were really effective.
I still remember that poster with KS and other symptoms on it, some 35 years later. Folks outside of biology have no idea how slow the time frames of some disease treatments can be.
>There's a Canadian film on Youtube that covers this.
Yeah it was a major scandal here in Canada. The Red Cross lost the right to handle blood a new organization called Canadian Blood Services was created.
Many people with hemophilia died but I think people at the tail end of it were around when the new drug cocktails slowed the disease.
As a teen in the 80s AIDS was pretty scary even for a straight kid with no girlfriend. It seemed like everyone was talking about it, getting it, scared of people with it, or denying it existed.
Anthony Fauci had a hard time getting Pres. Reagan to even take it seriously (sound familiar!?). Many conservatives saw it as the "gay disease" and dismissed it as irrelevant.
You know how public restrooms in the USA always have paper toilet seat covers? This dates to that era (the product existed already but was extremely uncommon).
Because of that whenever I see those I think of the bigoted attitude that lead to their deployment and won't use them.
There are more pathogens on your hands than on your butt, as you touch the whole world with your hands and keep your butt most of the time in your pants.
This reminds me of an art history class in college; amidst a lecture covering works in the '80s and '90s, the professor just broke down in tears as a lot of the artists he knew personally, and had passed from AIDS at the time...
They did absolutely nothing. Reagan didn't even say the name of the disease for FIVE years.
He did, however, relish that it affected gay men. See e.g. his comment from 1981, "maybe the Lord brought down the plague because illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments."
He finally, in 1986, allocated funds - so ridiculously low that congress allocated the five-fold amount. He tried to cut it down before passing that. In 1987, he did cut down the money allocated for research. (Which has sod all to do with drug use or sex - we didn't even know what AIDS really was)
The gay community lost an entire generation of men. Because America had a Republican administration that, during an epidemic, chose to gleefully[1] let people die instead of acting. Meanwhile, they chose to privately help their friends - Reagan helped his buddy Roy Cohn to get experimental drug trial.
The whole "they just wanted to suppress recreational drug use and unprotected sex" is BLATANT retconning. Nobody was aware how it spread, people assumed you could get it through touch, saliva, etc.
Trying to spin this blatant murder of gay people by an administration into a public health concern is frankly disgusting.
I think its possible Trumps is actually striking the tune with fellow Republicans to get their likes learning anout Reagan slow approach to AIDS - I was shocked when during last SOTU, Trump announced that within one decade we will finally find a cure for AIDS/HIV. What gives??
They did not see the problem as a black and white problem with two active solutions. They took a third option: they did nothing until public opinion had shifted and Rock Hudson, Reagan's personal friend, died of the disease.
> The first was to spend billions of dollars hoping to find a cure while certain behaviors continued to spread the virus.
And yet here we are, with governments spending billions of dollars to find a cure when we can stop the spread of COVID-19 by reducing certain behaviors.
The difference in government response to the (ongoing, btw) AIDS crisis and COVID-19 has a hell of a lot to do with the fact that COVID-19 is not seen as a “gay” disease, and is not “othered.”
Having sex is all it takes to get HIV. Once. I won’t sit here and listen to you claim it’s “selfish and destructive behavior” to have sex. Once.
Take your thinly veiled homophobia and moralizing elsewhere please. It’s not a good look, and I don’t want to hear it in my professional community.
Funnily enough, in Italy (where I grew up) there was next to no association in the public mind between HIV/AIDS and homosexuality. It was linked to drug use and sexual promiscuity, but it was drilled into us that any kind of unprotected sex (and for most people, that was automatically construed as heterosexual sex) was a risky behaviour.
I was honestly very surprised when, towards the end of the nineties and early 2000s, it gradually dawned upon me that elsewhere there was a connotation of HIV/AIDS as having been somehow associated with homosexuality ‘abroad’.
For us, in Italy, it was very much perceived as an activity-related risk, not an identity-related one. (As I dare say it should be, methinks.)
My point is that the governmental message was deliberately tailored to address promiscuity and unprotected sex, rather than single out any specific demographic or minority.
My definition of 'normal' includes men fucking each other in the butt. I hope yours does too.
Everyone who's at all serious about tackling AIDS in Africa (rather than making some kind of veiled political or moral point) is focused on reducing unprotected sex.
Transmission rates vary widely by sex act. 2/3 of transmissions in the US are between homosexual men. It's not homophobia to observe that some populations are at more risk from HIV.
You’re right. But the homophobia isn’t in the statistics (which the commenter didn’t provide, anyways). The homophobia was in the comments about “destructive lifestyles” and stating that it was because of rampant sexual partners.
As I stated, you only have to have sex once (and I don’t believe that statement is controversial) to contract HIV.
Please examine your own biases, because if your takeaway from the comment that I was addressing was “what, it’s true that gay guys are more likely to get it” then it would seem that you take the comment to readily describe “gays” writ large, which is also pretty homophobic.
It's not an act. It's not fake. An entire generation of people like me were wiped out and the attitudes displayed in the comments I'm replying to are the reasons why - homophobia.
And it is 100% homophobic to imply that gay men are reckless and risking their life, and that they're having sex orgies, or sleeping around constantly. <- All things in the comments I've replied to (not yours, of course).
And as I've said in other threads - no one is questioning that gay men are the majority of cases in the US. But that's not what I'm arguing about. It's everything else that gets said alongside that statistic - as though the one true statistic gives the rest a pass.
So it's not an act, and I don't really feel like stopping. I don't want to let harmful, homophobic statements go unchallenged here.
> Everything said in the previous comments was reported in the press of the day
As a parting note, consider that the press reporting homophobic garbage had an impact on public opinion, and ultimately contributed to the crisis. Just because it was reported does not mean it was true, nor helpful, nor good.
>But you never hear the same rhetoric about irresponsible promiscuous heteros.
We did. Sort of. Heterosexuals weren't singled out for caution about promiscuous sex, because most of the public messaging assumed heterosexual relations anyway. But the emphasis was always on promiscuity.
No, you did not see rhetoric accusing heterosexuals as a class of being prone to promiscuous behavior. Unfortunately, even in 2020, it seems to be necessary to spend paragraphs and paragraphs explaining what homophobia is until people get it. Here is an article from 1987 that does some of the work:
I am talking about sexual transmission, not transmission in general. The study you link to does not suggest that gay sex is responsible for the majority of instances of sexual HIV transmission in Africa.
>It would be inappropriate for anyone outside Africa to say how people in Africa should behave or live.
Here's a thought: it also might not be appropriate for straight people to tell gay people how to live.
Understood. But Covid is of course a different disease, and different in many ways. No consent is required to obtain it from another person. No time spent in private naked. Just be near someone in line at the bus stop and a sneeze. So there's that.
Of course it is. And really, one of the things that gets me fired up is that comparing HIV to the current pandemic is that it’s just so lazy, and inaccurate!
And yet, here we are. It’s a tempting comparison for a lot of people because it’s the worst thing in recent memory.
And that leads to the other thing that gets me fired up - people trivializing HIV as “not as bad” or even sometimes as an example of a “good” public health response. It’s just so different in almost every respect that it’s inevitably insulting.
(Of course this is not directed at you, I’m vehemently agreeing with you I believe. :)
> Of course it is. And really, one of the things that gets me fired up is that comparing HIV to the current pandemic is that it’s just so lazy, and inaccurate!
God, please tell this to my coworker. He's a biology teacher at a high school for God's sake, and he's going around saying that we should go back to school because we don't shut down for HIV, and that the novel Corona virus isn't any different. The kicker is he, of course, still wants his soccer team to practice and be able to play their games and such. And he's, sadly, likely going to get his wish. But, seriously, the man is a biology teacher arguing this. It's so damn frustrating, especially as the school won't do anything about it.
I wouldn’t expect every biology teacher to be an expert on disease, of course... but wow. I would indeed expect a biology teacher to grasp the fundamentals of disease transmission.
I wasn't paying much attention when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. Probably I was reading Tom Clancy novels about Jack Ryan. White privilege, etc.
> I have to say, you are really good at calling people names when you don’t agree with their views. You’ve made a terrific straw man out of the poster above. Obviously, they were referring to reckless, unprotected sex with many, many partners. Yet you chose to interpret it as a single sex act.
You misread my comment. I'm well aware that the poster was referring to reckless, unprotected sex with many, many partners. What I'm yelling about is the assumption that all gay men do that, which was a statement they explicitly made. No reading into necessary.
> Yet you chose to interpret it as a single sex act
A strawman involves setting up an argument that wasn't made, and then knocking it down. Ironically, that's exactly what your statement does. I didn't interpret their statement as referring to a single sex act, I reminded them that HIV transmission is not only through rampant, unprotected sex.
> You’ve gone all through this thread calling people out for having views that are different than yours. Maybe try practicing the tolerance you preach?
I don't know if it's cliche to quote the paradox of tolerance yet, but I can't stand by while people make ugly comments about my community under the guise of rationality.
> and like the lockdown protestors today, the AIDS protestors of the 1980's were upset by the need to social distance, although the gay jokes probably contributed
You have to be trolling. You can’t honestly believe that people protesting the lack of government action around HIV in the 80s were upset only that they had to “social distance?”
They protested because they had next to no information about the disease, testing was inadequate (and slow), stigma was rampant, and at the end of the day the government was content to let them die rather than search for a cure.
This is an incredibly reductive and insulting take. Don’t make rational arguments at the expense of normalizing what was an extremely cruel response by the Reagan admin.
The stigma from the police was horrific. I attended many an ACT-UP protest in NYC in the 80s. And I was assaulted by people during peaceful protests while cops stood by and did nothing.
>"It's been one of the top priorities with us, and over the last 4 years, and including what we have in the budget for '86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS in addition to what I'm sure other medical groups are doing." He also remarked, "Yes, there's no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer." Annual AIDS related funding was $44 million in 1983, 2 years after he took office, and was $1.6 billion in 1988, an increase of over 3,600 percent.
You cherry-picked the end of the statement, but you left off the beginning. It says a lot:
> Although AIDS was first identified in 1981, Reagan did not mention it publicly for several more years, notably during a press conference in 1985 and several speeches in 1987. During the press conference in 1985, Reagan expressed skepticism in allowing children with AIDS to continue in school
Reagan waited years, and a generation of gay men died. Better late than never, I suppose, but he didn’t do nearly enough and his response to the crisis is not worthy of honor or respect.
>, and unprotected sex with large numbers of sexual partners, which is particularly widespread among homosexual males.
The continuing pathologization of homosexuals reduced their access to medical services, which prevented them from being educated about responsible sexual behavior. See e.g.:
I live in DC. We have voted overwhelmingly to fund needle exchanges and have one of the highest rates of HIV in the country. The republican congress intervened into our local budget to prohibit us from allocating any of our local tax dollars to needle exchanges.
Particularly relevant given that he's the VP - but Pence notably slow-walked allowing a temporary needle exchange in southern Indiana in 2015 (state law forbade one at the time), and then immediately signed a bill into law that increased criminal penalties for carrying needles without a prescription: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/02/how-mike-p...
Taken together, I'd argue that counts.
That article also talks a little about background, and links off to other relevant articles that might serve your reading interests.
Declining to include Federal funding in his budget is not "banning".
Funding bills originate in the House. The House was Democrat controlled for Reagan's entire tenure. The Speaker or Ways and Means could have added that funding at any time. There was never a line-item veto mechanism.
I wish I had the option to downvote, because thinly veiled homophobia is really a disgusting thing to see on a supposedly enlightened site.
As if straight people don’t sleep around and have drug-fueled sex parties. And my god, swingers were and are a thing - as if gay men have a monopoly on getting laid.
The behavior is not rampant in the gay community; “they” do not have drug-fueled sex parties and fuck for days; they do not promote hyper sexuality at the expense of their health and “they” most certainly did not “just get their freedom”. If you think LGBT rights are all fought and won in the US, then you haven’t looked much into anti-discrimination laws.
You are not tolerant; and I take issue with you claiming to be tolerant. This is thinly veiled, disgusting homophobia, straight out of the moral majority’s playbook (seriously, it’s straight outta the 70s).
There is no rational conversation to be had here because what you said is wrong and disgusting and I hate seeing it on this site.
I am shocked reading some of the replies in this thread.
The average commentator here definitely tries to hide their socially regressive views behind some ideal of being "rational", but even then I truly thought that commentators here were above this.
If you grew up in the church I did, you could have the pleasure of hearing those comments as recently as ... checks calendar at least 2006! (I left after so who knows if they kept that line of rhetoric going).
It’s surprisingly common to hear this stuff today, still.
I wonder if this language and demonization was prevalent in, say, 1934. I can imagine it by the 60s, and certainly heard it in the 70s and 80s, but unsure if this was a trope much earlier (certainly there would have been other anti-gay tropes).
Dude, i dont have those views of gayness. How about you go to a spa with your kids and unawares you see a gay orgy. I didnt say a thing because of my kids and because i didnt want to to be the gay hater you’re talking about. But yeah, use that bigot label carelessly and it will mean nothing
> So, some of that stuborness in behaviour is something rampant in the gay community. They have for example, drug fueled parties and have continuous sex for days. The gay scene is doing itself a disservice by turning a blind eye on this and promoting hypersexuality at the expense of its health. I understand it’s found its freedom recently but they gotta get their shit together
That is the problem with your comment and the subject of all the replies. I don't think anyone here takes issue with you being upset that you stumbled onto an orgy, my friend.
I extend the same tolerance to you even though one time I saw a homeless man having sex with a homeless woman on a public riverbank. I try very hard every day to not assume everyone is homeless. Kind of my way of keeping a chipper attitude for the sake of the kids.
Please don't break the site guidelines regardless of how bad another comment is. That only makes this place even worse.
Also, please don't feed egregious comments by replying—a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls. That's also in the guidelines.
Instead, flag the comment by clicking on its timestamp to go to its page, then clicking 'flag'. Other users did that and the comment was killed. If you had done that instead, then the comment would have been killed sooner.
I remember how little was known in the beginning, when it was called GRID. For a while it was theorized in the media that semen hitting the bloodstream was causing the immune system to freak out; my friends, who had just started puberty, asked me (as the designated science nerd) what I thought of that, as they had somewhat random scenarios of nocturnal emissions striking road rash from skateboarding. I thought it unlikely, given what I knew of history.
We had very little idea of what constituted "transmissible" and what did not for a period of time, and so while our parents had "free love" and The Pill, with the biggest risk being herpes, at least a section of my generation got "sex = death" internalized on top of all of the other apocalyptic gloom.
Of course, even what would be transmissible was subject to propaganda: on one side, you had people arguing for any gay sex being a risk, but on the other side, some activists insisted that heterosexual intercourse was exactly and precisely as risky as homosexual (male) intercourse. Quite a lot of misinformation floating around.
Grew up at the tale end of that, during reagan 80's. Learned how to hide under a desk for nukes. Hide under a doorframe for quakes. But Ghostbusters was good.
I suppose I should have written "vaginal sex". ...but the majority of hetero sex is still penis-in-vagina so I think my comment is still mostly correct.
The fact that it was downvoted sort of underscores my point, that people prefer reinforcing their feelings, rather than know the truth.
Is it that much different than how everyone jokes about HSV1 today? It is still a (ridiculous and stupid) running punchline on SNL. Obviously it is a far less dire virus (as far as we know, today) but, we as a species (generally) compared to our individual potential, are absolute idiots and almost always take the easy intellectual route (humor and bullshit) when faced with uncommon information.
The video really seems like par for the course and not surprising in the slightest...
> Is it that much different than how everyone jokes about HSV1 today?
Yes, the governments refusal to act on the AIDS crisis and the substantial stigma around the disease - resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead is "much different" from jokes about oral herpes on SNL.
Note that there is a ton of other HSV-*, for example HSV-6 https://hhv-6foundation.org/what-is-hhv-6
I think there is just not enough research yet on what is caused or made worse by which herpes virus.
I was not trying to diminish the atrocity that is how the AIDS epidemic was handled, I was only trying to illuminate that people (and the super-majority of our lawmakers) are immature and uninformed when talking about all infectious diseases.
Edit: just look at our President’s response to Covid... it is bumbling and moronic.
So what, this tentative research that shows no causal link whatsoever between HSV-1 and alzheimers is the same as the 32 million killed by AIDS globally?
No. It isn't. Stop trivializing HIV. I don't know what you're getting out of it, but it comes across as incredibly tone deaf.
I truly was not trying to offend or trivialize anything: my only point, as best as I can distill it, is that people react irrationally and inappropriately to infectious diseases. And we need to work on that. This is not at all unique to HIV/AIDS, even though people suffering from AIDS have born the brunt of the actual suffering. If we can’t have open, rational discussions about HSV, how can we do the same with HIV?
I understand the point you were trying to get across. Many STIs have substantial stigma around them and it makes it harder to fight them.
I just want to caution you that making these forms of equivalences is a common tactic to derail and discount the impact of HIV or the experience of populations disproportionately harmed, in the same way that people derail discussions about the disproportionate killing of black people by police with statements like "why focus on black people? nobody should be killed by police."
I believe that you were not intending to do so, but I also hope that you understand and can be cognizant of that dynamic.
MiroF - I (could not initially) reply to your comment directly, but that was a perfect analogy to make your point. I can definitely see how my first comment could be taken that way, and that was not at all my intention. As with many things, I gotta work on my contextual phrasing and presentation!
I never understood the stigma part.
Random sex exposes you to STI. IV drug use also exposes you to HIV and Hep B.
It's fine to blame lung cancer on smoking (even though you can get lung cancer without it). It's however considered not fine to judge people for other risky choices. Go figure.
Semi-related: Thinking about this era I wondered how long it look for AIDS to kill 100,000 Americans. The answer is about 5 years. CoViD did it in 5 months.
Yet we still have biology teachers the school I work at asking why we shut down for Corona/Covid and not HIV/Aids. He's a fucking biology teacher, and he refuses to see the difference because he wants his precious soccer team to play this year. It's so damn frustrating, especially knowing that nothing will happen to him because he's a coach.
But even a tiny mortality rate is catastrophic when talking about city and country sized populations. The lockdowns happened for a reason, because this disease overwhelms public health.
Indeed, mass panic is an under appreciated risk in the discourse in some countries. We may have the misfortune of discovering just what that looks like in the coming months.
Only most of recently infected have no symptoms, whereas most of infected do develop symptoms, but typically after they already transmitted the illness to other people. According to what it is currently known, from all infected around 80% do eventually develop some symptoms, up to 10% need hospital, up to 5% need intensive care and around 1% of all infected eventually die. That is when observed across all age groups, among the older it's much worse.
And as soon as the health system can't cope the percentages of dead increase rapidly to even higher values -- i.e. those that need hospital need it because half of them will need intensive care (and nobody knows before it's critical who), those that need intensive care need it because most of them will need oxygen in some form and half of these will need:
I wonder what HIV would have done if it hit before mass adoption of protective equipment for sex. I think it could have brought civilization to it's knees.
I’m not sure that prophylactics really would be the deciding factor. Condoms are older than you might think, but on the other hand usage rates are still relatively low.
And humanity keeps bouncing back from things: for example, the plague (multiple times!)
I think the relatively long incubation time is probably what would have made it especially bad if it had taken hold earlier - say, in the 1800s when our understanding would have been limited and our ability to track it worse. It might have been much, much worse then.
I read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that was bitching that the government was spending way too much money on AID's research instead of important things like heart disease.
I read that, looked at their statistics and backed out an estimate of number of years of life lost for AID and Heart disease. And yeah AID's was a really big deal unless you were a sociopathic old white male editor at the WSJ.
Reading what the Wall Street Journal thinks about SARS-COV2 shows they haven't changed a bit in 35 years.
For HIV, there are plenty of estimates for the mutation rate based off a mixture of statistical bioinformatics and knowledge of genetics. But they are all inferences because we don't have many sequences from before 1988. This relatively ancient genome allows scientists to see how good their estimates are by looking at a genome that will have -20 years worth of mutations. Turns out the estimates are really good. I would then draw the link back to Covid where the mutation rate is estimated in the same way. So it's a good bet that the date estimated for Covid's emergence is pretty close to the mark.
You can see the paper here[0]. I think the actual paper would make a better link on HN, but I guess the press release is useful for those without a molecular biology background.
0. https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/05/18/1913682117