Posted on 07/04/2021 11:13:23 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In 1981, doctors in New York and Los Angeles saw healthy young men sicken and die within months, their immune systems apparently destroyed.
The deaths set off a frantic search for the culprit. By 1983 virologists had identified a novel pathogen they would call Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
Over the next decade, scientists learned much more about HIV, which early on had a fatality rate close to 100 percent, worse even than Ebola or smallpox. Ultimately they tamed it - perhaps the greatest success for scientific and medical research in the late 20th century.
But the political story of AIDS is much trickier. Scientists realized quickly that gay men and intravenous drug users were at far higher risk of contracting HIV than the general public. But they feared people might not support funding for AIDS research - and stigmatize those groups further - if they explained that reality openly.
So they didn’t.
As Smithsonian Magazine reported in 2013:
“Federally-funded campaigns sought to address a large number of people from all backgrounds--male, female, homosexual or heterosexual. The America Responds to AIDS campaign, created by the CDC, ran from 1987 to 1996 and became a central part of the "everyone is at risk" message…”
The deception probably increased the public’s willingness to fund research. But it came with serious side effects. Smithsonian went on to explain:
“Some AIDS organizations, especially those providing service to communities at the highest risk for contracting HIV, saw the campaign as diverting money and attention away from the communities that needed it the most.”
It also caused needless fear in people at vanishingly low risk, especially heterosexual women.
Perhaps most important, it was fundamentally untrue.
That fact should matter to anyone who believes truth - even unpleasant truth - ought to drive public policy decisions.
Which brings us to COVID.
SARS-COV-2 isn’t even in the same time zone as HIV as a killer. But it is like HIV in one crucial way. It plays favorites.
After a year, most of us know that the elderly are at much higher risk from coronavirus (though even well-informed people may not be aware HOW much higher the risk is).
But what public health authorities have gone out of their way to obscure is how much obesity - especially severe obesity - drives the risk of the coronavirus in younger people.
In April, British researchers published a definitive paper on the subject in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, a peer-reviewed journal. The researchers examined the medical records of almost 7 million people in England to look at the link between obesity and severe outcomes from Covid, including hospitalization and death.
The topline findings show only a moderate link between extra weight and Covid risk. But when the researchers looked more closely, they found that’s because in older people, being overweight does NOT drive excess risk.
So the researchers divided the patients into four age ranges: 20-39, 40-59, 60-79, and over 80. They found that in the two younger groups - including adults up to age 60 - being obese was associated with nearly ALL the risk that Covid would lead to intensive care or death. The findings held even after they adjusted for many different potential confounding factors, like smoking, non-weight-related illnesses, and wealth.
The excess risk was extremely high even for people who weren’t morbidly obese - defined as a body-mass index of 40 or more. A person between 40 and 60 with a BMI of 35 - someone who is 230 pounds and 5’8” - had about five times the risk of dying of Covid of a person of normal weight. For younger adults, the excess risk was even higher, and for morbidly obese people even higher still.
In contrast, people of normal weight under 40 are at essentially no risk of death from Covid. The researchers found their rate to be under 1 in 10,000 per year. Even in the 40 to 59 age range, normal-weight adults had an annual risk well under 1 in 1,000.
The researchers did not include those stunning findings in the main body of the paper, only its appendix. Still, they were clear in their discussion about the overall results:
“Our findings from this large population-based cohort emphasise that excess weight is associated with substantially increased risks of severe COVID-19 outcomes, and one of the most important modifiable risk factors identified to date.”
In fact, the findings suggest that for people under 60, weight loss would be the single best way to reduce the risk of Covid - probably even more than a vaccine (and with no side effects).
But of course you haven’t heard about this paper.
No one has. The public health establishment has decided that an honest discussion of who is really at risk from Covid might smack of victim-blaming - just as it did a generation ago with HIV.
This time, though, we haven’t just frightened a bunch of people at essentially no risk. Our viral lockdown theater has been far more destructive, for kids who have lost a year of school and everyone else. In one final irony, lockdown-related weight gain may have actually worsened the risks last year.
It’s long past time to tell the truth.
Wasn’t Fauxi involved with HIV/AIDS research too? CDC playing with lives.
I believe that entirely. But keep in mind obesity is a huge problem in US of America. One reason is food is a smaller percentage expense of income, here, than most countries.
The risk factor of dying or having a more severe case of COVID from being obese was well established early on. Which is one very big reason that closing gyms and restricting or banning outdoor activities made no sense.
They could have responded with quarantines of the sick to at least try to prevent further spread, but they wanted money for research so hide the already obvious facts.
I recall at least some of the effort to convince people it wasn’t just a disease to those at risk, and boy did they hop on the bandwagon touting that kid who got it through a blood transfusion to try to demonstrate it wasn’t a gay disease!
But even to this day it hasn’t spread much out from beyond those they knew near the beginning were vulnerable because of voluntary actions they chose to perform.
AIDS was contained to a known vector — the anus fetish community.
Rather than isolate the vector, as would have been good medical practice, the decision was made to release (by default0 the disease into the general public.
Only Fauci and his cronies know the reason for that decision.
Politicized exaggerated and lied about diseases. Both campaigns orchestrated by deep state Fauci.
Amazing how similar the two campaigns are.
In both cases they posed a limited danger to specific groups of people yet the danger was trumpeted as universal to instill fear which was used for emotional and political manipulation.
BenLurkin wrote: AIDS was contained to a known vector — the anus fetish community.”
Actually, there was a second known vector, intravenous drug usage. But, that would have been ‘blaming the victim” too.
“Rather than isolate the vector, as would have been good medical practice, the decision was made to release (by default0 the disease into the general public. Only Fauci and his cronies know the reason for that decision.”
When in doubt, always follow the money. Fauci/CDC wanted more funding for research and they knew they could get far more money if AIDS threatened everyone, not just the homosexual and intravenous drug using community. For similar reasons, Fauci is pumping COVID as a threat to everyone.
An enforced quarantine of all active homosexuals back in 1980-81 would have resulted in AIDS being a footnote in a few medical journals.
Concerning AIDS, the CDC didn’t want you to think in terms of life style choices just like they don’t want you to think about their gain of function projects.
Fauci was patient zero in both epidemics.
The only thing ‘great’ about the response to AIDS was how they turned it into a multi billion dollar annual slush fund.
YES. GEICO WAS the single highest-ranking mis-leader of federal HIV/AIDS funds, research, and their (deliberately-refusal of isolation and treatment programs.
The other truth is both Mutate constantly which is why the idea of a vaccine for either is almost impossible to produce and with AIDS no vaccine ever reached a clinical trial that I am aware of. Fauci was in charge of that also and he did a horrible job, where is that Vaccine he promised over 35 years ago?
Common Denominator: Fauci and his vaccine$,
Just a guess.
I was living in Berserkeley during that period, and the eminently sensible suggestion was made to close gay bathhouses, and judging from the resultant howls from the perv community one would have thought it was actually a plan to send them to death camps. The irony was, of course, that the bathhouses were true superspreaders of HIV, which at that time was virtually 100% fatal.
... and remember the gays screaming they were being turned away from places ?
National uproar.
The thing the two have in common is the incompetence of Anthony Fauci
"Would you rather have bathhouse sex and die, or not have bathhouse gay sex and live?"
"We'll take the sex and death, please."
Of course the real cause of gay mortality from HIV was that Ronald Reagan did not talk enough about the disease. Gay America was ready and willing to forego unprotected anal sex if only Reagan had asked them to do. Yep.
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