i’m gonna need some of y’all to educate yourselves on the difference between a vaccine and a cure

I just saw someone saying we should live life as normal bc maybe there will never be a vaccine for Covid, the way there’s never been a cure for AIDs. Although AIDs is sexually transmitted and PrEP exists and prevents people from getting HIV.

We’re not trying to find a cure for Covid, we’re trying to find a vaccine. So you can’t look at AIDs as a failure in that way because modern medicine has learned how to help prevent it. And of course Covid can be transmitted just by breathing near someone, AIDs can’t.

Furthermore, people with HIV and AIDs absolutely take precautions to not infect other people, things like informing partners and using condoms. Just like how people should prevent the spread of Covid by wearing a mask and social distancing.

If anything, we shouldn’t look at AIDs as a reason NOT to take precautions against Covid while we wait for a vaccine, but a great argument FOR it. AIDs decimated a generation of people who were particularly vulnerable, like gay men and hemophiliacs.

There was little research early on because most people not in those communities did not care that people were dying and they considered themselves less vulnerable, despite the fact that plenty of people in other communities died as well.

If this country had cared about the people dying, we could have learned a lot more about AIDs a lot earlier on and educated people on the importance of condoms as a stopgap measure until PrEP & better treatments were developed. We would have saved so many lives.

So don’t use AIDs as an excuse for going in large crowds or not wearing a mask, it’s uneducated and insulting. AIDs is a very different disease but we should be using the lessons we learned from it. To do otherwise is an added insult to the people who have died from it.