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Notes -
Reuters:
Trump orders sweeping freeze for federal grants and loans
Trump order set to halt supply of HIV, malaria drugs to poor countries, sources say
Apparently based on this memo (pdf).
This seems very... crude. The question is if it's purposefully crude, if there's some structural reason it can't be better implemented, or if the person in charge is incompetent.
Also, impoundment? We'll see?
There is no reason why my tax dollars should be spent on anything in Africa. Not medicine, not food, not anything.
Cut them off. This is not crude, it's deliberate. Cut everything off, the useful stuff will bubble back up eventually.
Disease eradication is good for everyone. It is bad for global health to have a giant reservoir of AIDS, Malaria, Ebola, and god knows what else just waiting to make the jump to the developed world.
AIDS and Malaria cannot “just make a jump”. AIDS only is a thing in western world thanks to gays and drug addicts. Without them, we’d, uhm, flatten the curve by now (in fact, it would probably never become a thing in the first place, it only became a thing thanks to gay Canadian flight attendant who really liked to fuck random guys in places he flew into).
Malaria is not a disease that spreads from person to person, and we cannot have malaria become a thing in US, because we already stopped it being a thing. We used to have malaria in US, and we destroyed the conditions that allowed malaria to exist. We can’t have malaria now without recreating this condition, which, given the land use patterns, is highly unlikely.
Realistically speaking, people will continue to have promiscuous dangerous sex and to use intravenous drugs. The reason is simple: those things feel good. In order to make a major dent in the rates of either of those two things, you would need massive social change that, realistically speaking, could only come from some kind of massive shift in consciousness that, let's be real, is not going to happen - or it would require massive government intervention that would bring its own host of problems. For the latter, you'd basically need the entire US to become like Singapore, and let's face it, probably all but the most ardent social conservatives would hate that once they saw the downsides of having such a massively interventionist government.
Even if one somehow got rid of those things, the fact would remain that the deadliest diseases in human history were not caused by either promiscuous sex or drug use, so it would not even do much to address the overall issue of disease.
Yes, but, the likelihood of contracting HIV from no-condom vaginal sex is a fraction of a percent. It's pretty hard get HIV from straight sex. In a counterfactual world in which everyone is straight, HIV would be nearly extinct.
Yes, but that is not a realistic world. Gay men have existed for, probably, as long as humans have existed, and they will continue to exist.
Hopefully there's a cure some day. Perhaps they could spend some of the Africa AIDS money to search for a cure.
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