Forgive me for ranting, but I wrote an article the other day about a new variant of HIV that has some scientists concerned and it might have public health practice implications. It's nothing to panic about, but it's something to be aware of.

Anyway, I promoted the article on Twitter like I do most of my articles, and somebody responded, "Nice scare mongering."

I was puzzled, because the article isn't scary at all. It's just a heads up about being aware of what's going on, and about taking sensible precautions to avoid infection ... like always.

I asked what she thought was "scare mongering" about the piece and got a huge lecture about Anthony Fauci, who helped accelerate the development of anti-retroviral drugs that literally enabled a Lazarus effect for close friends of mine with AIDS, who got up out of their deathbeds in the late 90s and lived again. Some of them are still alive and healthy today on HIV treatment.

This woman, who isn't old enough to have a first-hand memory of the AIDS crisis, lectured me about how these drugs actually killed people instead of saving them. She told me I needed to educate myself and learn about the "true" history of the AIDS crisis, about what an evil actor Anthony Fauci was then like he is today with respect to covid-19.

I went to her profile and learned she's a big time covid-19 denialist and anti-vaxer.

These people are nuts. They're just crazy.

Part of me wishes she got HIV and then decided not to seek treatment. She would die. It's really that simple.

But she won't. Instead, she's going to continue to run around devoting enormous amounts of energy to trash-talking medical science and medical experts. I can't even pretend to understand what motivates people like this.