COVID-19 & HIV: Follow Me Down the Rabbit Hole
Before you toss me out as a nutjob or crackpot who is spreading fake news- I ask you to follow me on a journey.
I’m a Behavioral Economist, and I’ve been working on a project called Rapid Economic Innovation COVID-19. This isn’t a plug for my work, it’s just the context of why I was reading so much research (beyond the personal obsession for wanting to know what the fuck is going on).
If you want to build an economic theory, you need to start at the beginning, make recommendations for the middle and then look forward to the eventual end and how you want the economy to look at this point. (hence, lots of research)
From the behavioral side of things, I was getting kind of disturbed by the number of people who don’t seem to be taking COVID-19 seriously and trying to reverse engineer the reasoning behind that- it’s not so complicated.
What happened is an example of something called “anchoring”.
When people have an initial exposure to a thought/idea/product it becomes an anchor used as a reference point for the future. The world got “anchored” to compare COVID-19 with the flu.
What if coronavirus had been anchored to the word HIV? The comparisons have been made by scientists and doctors since January (I know, right? You’re probably wondering why you didn’t hear about that… but we’ll get back to that later).
There would be a wildly different reaction if COVID-19 was framed as an incredibly contagious novel form of AIDS.
Nobody has ever been nonchalant about being HIV+
As a young woman, I moved to Israel and lived on a Kibbutz with young people from all over the world. It was the late 90s and they were scared of outsiders bringing AIDS into their community. They tested all of us for HIV when we arrived and it took almost a month to get the results.
My roommate’s name was Oxana, she was from the Ukraine and we were a lot alike. We didn’t have a shared language but I thought she was lovely. She was 19 and I was 21, both starting our lives in a new country. I was working in the daycare and a friend came to tell me that Oxana was gone. She had tested HIV+ and the Kibbutz made her pack and leave immediately, I didn’t see her before she left. I was told that they gave her money and drove her to a nearby city. The next morning we heard from the police that she took her life.
Part of me is sharing this because her death was tragic and senseless and her story should be known. It’s also to demonstrate the terror of the times when testing positive for HIV+ felt like a death sentence. These terms carry immense power.
Let’s bring it back to today- coronavirus started as a mysterious illness but it did manifest like a bad chest infection with a fever, so the “flu” in context made sense. But now we are stuck anchored to that term.
Now researchers are pointing out similarities to HIV, but people are having a hard time accepting it. Those two illnesses are too far apart to make the mental leap.
Because we’ve fallen into another trap, called cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance happens when you hold one or more beliefs that contradict each other. The contradiction causes stress and then people tend to double down on the idea they believe in the most and seek justifications to deny anything that contradicts their belief.
Remember now, we anchored COVID-19 to the flu and we developed our mental and emotional coping mechanisms around that idea.
We were told we could flatten the curve and we were staying inside so the medical system won’t get overwhelmed, we believe that the young are fine because it is mostly the old who are dying, and we believe there can be herd immunity. While a global pandemic is scary, these ideas help us make sense of it all. The problem is- this isn’t totally accurate and might not even be true.
It’s too early to know what COVID-19 really does to our bodies, how it works, or the best solution to combat it.
About a week ago a friend sent me an article “Coronavirus could attack immune system like HIV by targeting protective cells, warn scientists” and I thought “What fresh hell is this????”
I’m working on an economic plan to prevent the global economy from going into a depression for fuck's sake. If this article was true, then nothing made sense anymore. I mean, Sweden…OMG.
I’m not going to lie, this is the point when I got into bed for a few days. Eventually, I forced myself to confront this potential reality.
I was following a trail of breadcrumbs, I tried to stick to primary research- so as not to get sucked into a media narrative. I also zoomed out to look at the meta picture.
Creepy Coincidence #1
People look completely healthy but are “superspreaders”. The same way people who were HIV+ could be gorgeous and seem healthy. All the while, they were transmitting the disease to others.
Creepy coincidence #2
COVID-19 can basically be anything. It was a cough and fever, then it included conjunctivitis, loss of smell and taste, headaches, gastrointestinal problems, sore muscles, kidney, and heart failure. The longer this goes on, the wider the range of potential symptoms. But in the context of AIDS, this makes sense. Nobody died of AIDS, they died of a wide array of illnesses they contracted because their immune system was weak.
Creepy coincidence #3
Mass confusion and hysteria. COVID-19 is terrifying and mysterious, it is also highly politicized and polarizing. This feels like AIDS on steroids- the same thing but happening faster and even more out of control.
I was still on the fence until Professor Luc Montagnier, a French virologist who literally got the Nobel Prize for the discovery of HIV gave an interview where he concluded that “COVID-19 virus is partially lab-grown and his research showed that it contains small sequences from HIV, the AIDS virus.”
And now we circle back to the beginning, because at this point- I hope that I have made my point. Are you down the rabbit hole with me?
The world needs to stop and figure this out, we need to make room for scientific discoveries that are both uncomfortable and challenge what we accepted as true.
Below is the research that I’ve been reading. Take a look and then answer this: What if COVID-19 is our generation's HIV?
