[mike_hearn]

By definition anything that isn't the actual disease is a biomarker proxy for it. What actually matters is disease.

> People without detectable HIV don't develop AIDS.

An AIDS diagnosis requires the presence of HIV so your statement is a tautology (not your fault). If we rephrase to what you meant, that people without detectable HIV don't develop AIDS or any identical set of symptoms, then actually they do but when it happens it goes by a different name (ICL, idiopathic CD4 T lymphocytopenia).

ICL is what they call AIDS that appears in HIV negative people and is essentially ignored by the public health community, as it's not supposed to exist.

[JumpCrisscross]

> what they call AIDS that appears in HIV negative people and is essentially ignored by the public health community, as it's not supposed to exist

And people who test negative for influenza often show flu-like symptoms, must be a conspiracy.

[roywiggins]

why should anyone care whether a drug that targets HIV has any effect on medical conditions that aren't caused by HIV? you wouldn't expect it to!

[mike_hearn]

They care because they think the claim that AIDS is caused by HIV is wrong, and that AIDS/ICL are in reality the same thing with a shared root cause.

The claim of a viral cause came from Team Fauci in the 90s, who we now know are all pathological liars who happily conspire with each other for their own ends. We can read the Slack logs where they arrange their conspiracies, even. Back then there were renegade virologists and journalists who claimed there was a coverup by virologists in progress, and the inventor of the PCR test agreed with them, but they were ignored because people thought scientists were ideal people who would never do things like that. That was wrong, so the prior for there being a COVID style problem back then too should be strong.

It's reasonable to disagree with that perspective, of course. You can point to pieces of evidence, other people can debate them. It's not reasonable to be like JumpCrisscross and simply roll your eyes at claims of medical malfeasance anymore - that's a severe case of non-memo-getting at this point. A rational person should default to assuming anything involving Fauci and virologists is unreliable. When Nobel-prize winning scientists and journalists speak up and provide a great deal of detail on an alleged conspiracy, priors should then get stronger (and they did). When Pharma companies do tests that implicitly claim to cure AIDS but don't actually test that claim, they should get stronger still.

Or you can be like JumpCrisscross and continue eye-rolling at anyone who has lost trust in the institutions. Don't be like that!

[roywiggins]

More than a million Americans are on PrEP. If any of them are contracting AIDS while HIV-negative, we would have noticed by now.

[mike_hearn]

Who is "we" though? The same people that gets their money from people like Fauci?

AIDS is a syndrome, what a sufferer dies from is specific diseases they become vulnerable to. Go back to the 90s and you can find doctors claiming they were pressured not to report suspected cases of AIDS in people who were HIV- but rather to report them as individual unrelated cases of the specific diseases they contracted, or as ICL and so on. The people who aggregate the data decide who dies of what.