Given nobody has proven HIV causes AIDS, I don't see how poisoning kids with DNA chain terminators provides any benefit.
I think it stinks of an old therapy they used to use against syphilis: arsenic. The syphilis was surely going to kill you, the arsenic might kill you, but maybe it would kill the syphilis first and you would live to fraternize again. The use of poisonous chemotherapeutics in cancer follows the same line. The cancer is surely going to kill you. The chemotherapeutic surely will also, but maybe it will kill the cancer cells before it kills you. It's a gamble. We will give you almost enough to kill you and hope it's sufficient to kill the cancer. I wouldn't go for it myself. I don't need to take drugs that make my hair fall out. But what the hell, if somebody wants to take this kind of gamble, it does have a sort of logic to it. Nothing fun. Nothing you would do for a headache. But it's a chance somebody might want to take when the alternative is to die too young to watch their kids grow up. And some people do recover from cancer even after they have taken chemotherapeutics.
In the case of AIDS, the same strategy took a diabolic trurn. AIDS might kill you, A.Z.T. might also. It will surely make you sick. It will prevent the proliferation of any rapidly growing cells in your body, including the CD-4 immune cells that your doctor thinks you need now more that anything. It may kill the H.I.V. It kills it in petri dishes. But that may not cure you. The damage to you may have already been done, whatever it is. The complete absence of all H.I.V. from your body, even if it is accomplished, may not cure you of AIDS. No one has ever recovered from AIDS, even though they have recovered from H.I.V. And we are not going to give it to you in a limited dose as we do in the case of cancer chemotherapy, where we are gambling that although we are hurting you, we are hurting the cancer more and maybe you will survive longer. Here we are not gambling. No one has ever recovered from AIDS. We cannot expect that you might recover. We are going to ask you to swallow this poison until you die.
About half a million people went for it. No one has been cured. Most of them are dead. The ones who are not are also taking another drug now, a protease inhibitor. Who knows what it will do? The manufacturers didn't know when they started selling it. The FD.A. didn't require them to show that it would cure AIDS and not kill the patient, any more than they required them to show that about A.Z.T. They only required that a surrogate goal be met. A surrogate goal means that something that we think may be related to the disease in question may be improved by the drug, like the level of CD-4 cells, whatever the *** they are. It's a way to get around the notion that a drug ought to be effective in curing the disease that it is sold for before it can be sold. The surrogate-goal bullshit is an indication that our F.D.A. no longer serves our needs. Or at least it does not serve our needs unless we own stock in the pharmaceutical industry and don't give a *** about health care.
Whether that's true or not (and I still think that HIV and AIDS are related), it was the prevailing knowledge at the time, and was the best possible known path to effectuate treatment.
Medical science goes up a lot of blind alleys before finding the way out, and I don't blame anyone for trying something that didn't work. A bunch of shysters shouldn't make out like bandits just because someone might have cut a minor corner on trying to fix these kids' problems.