I pretty much agree with all 5 of James’s points above.

Lifeofthemind: the history of AIDS/HIV is very complicated, and personally I would be less dogmatic about it. HIV, which wasn’t called that until the late 80s, had been known for many years before that — it was long ago identified as a sexually-transmitted virus with no known effect, therefore considered harmless. It was only Gallo who claimed a connection between HIV and AIDS. His timing was certainly good. The world was waiting for just such a pretext, to justify a massive transfer of wealth from the productive rich to the unproductive greedy. It became almost immediately un-PC to doubt that there was a connection between the two. It also served the need to keep the flow of money going after AIDS largely disappeared in the Western world. You could just claim that HIV prevention (a virtual impossibility) is just as important as AIDS prevention. You can also claim that a multitude of idiopathic tropical diseases are AIDS, and you can back it up by pointing out that the victims of these diseases mostly have HIV in their blood.

There are a couple of inconvenient facts, though. 1) Before HIV was declared the same as AIDS, victims of AIDS invariably died, but carriers of HIV do not invariably die — indeed, the vast majority of them go on living normal lives (as far as I know, Magic Johnson is still around). 2) It was supposed to be impossible to die from AIDS if you didn’t have HIV, so when a few cases of this showed up, the victims were simply declared not to have AIDS — which mainly meant that they were denied the benefit of medical care and went on to die early.