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Comment by betterunix2 | Hacker News Reader

...what exactly is your point? That other preventable illnesses exist and kill more people, therefore an HIV vaccine is uninteresting? That 700k dead does not justify the effort to eradicate HIV, and that we should just continue to rely on long-term treatment regiments?

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I think he was pointing that massive dollars have gone for AIDS research but it is not what should be our high priority compared to other death causes. In America and world both, AIDS is small fries for death cause.

> In America and world both, AIDS is small fries for death cause.

The critical distinction is outcomes: until relatively recently, the only outcome of an HIV infection was eventual death from AIDS. This is still the default outcome in most of the world.

Plenty of things kill more people than AIDS, but most of them have substantially less severe individual outcomes: many people survive them, or the social/political solutions are substantially more tenable (healthier eating, access to potable water). And that's even before we consider how AIDS research has advanced the field of medical virology as a whole.

That is a really difficult call to make because research into HIV/AIDS has generated a great deal of information about viruses and potential ways of treating or controlling them. This is similar to the arguments about the space program being an expensive and largely irrelevant exercise even though all sorts of critical technology for weather satellites, solar power, electronic communications and so on came more or less directly from exploration and development of space.

Does nobody read comments before replying?

My entire statement was “we don’t need an AIDS vaccine to survive as the human race”.

If AIDS was risking our survival than diarrheal diseases should as well?

I'm pretty sure the person you're responding to is very in favor of eliminating deaths from diarrhea and heart disease as well. Why would advocating for an AIDS vaccine imply otherwise?

You didn’t read my comment either!

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