This is so fucking stupid
While there was and IS a very present homophobic component to why HIV wasn’t as researched as Covid, the fact that mRNA vaccines existed for Viruses in the same family helped the process along. A SARS is not the same as a retrovirus. https://twitter.com/trans_icon_mika/status/1379884048433168392
While there was and IS a very present homophobic component to why HIV wasn’t as researched as Covid, the fact that mRNA vaccines existed for Viruses in the same family helped the process along. A SARS is not the same as a retrovirus. https://twitter.com/trans_icon_mika/status/1379884048433168392
Plus, do you know how the covid vaccines were developed and how we managed to get them so quickly? it’s because the scientists all over the world skipped a lot of linear safety protocols! hoping it’d work! Many labs worked in parallel in what before would take 1 lab like 20 years
Not to mention HIV and Covid spread differently— While investigation shows Covid could be transmitted the way HIV does, it does NOT work the other way around! You can’t get HIV from talking with an infected person. It’s just not as contagious.
HIV directly attacks the inmune system (CD4+), the one in charge to take it out. So, making a vaccine that works is kind of harder than a respiratory virus which is already giving scientists a pain because your inmune system doesn’t want to fucking remember it.
On the economic side of things, HIV just Isn’t a threat like Covid is, plain and simple. It IS very sad that it comes down to this, since entire populations and countries have been left to be ravaged by the virus, with the only help of condoms and the newly developed treatment.
while HIV HAS been stigmatized, the virus themselves aren’t comparable. Covid had the upper hand that this is not the first SARS we’ve done a vaccine for, that it had massive amounts of founding, and that we had the technology and ability to work parallel all over the world.