Forty Years of Pandemic: Our Lives with AIDS

The corona pandemic claimed more than 3.5 million deaths, so far, only taking Sars-CoV-2 infections into account.

However, we are also plagued by numerous other ailments, AIDS for example, and there are certainly parallels to these.

This ranges from strange respiratory infections to vaccine research to the fact that both cases are a zoonosis, the origin of which is known for certain in only one.

There are therapies that keep HIV in check, but where is a vaccine that protects people?

Something like that is missing, while the World Health Organization can report thirteen vaccines that will soon be used against Covid-19, and around two billion vaccine doses have now been administered. The world is currently afraid of a coronavirus, but HIV has not been defeated either: around 38 million people are infected with it and will not get rid of the AIDS pathogen for their entire life. This virus has killed at least 35 million people so far, destroyed dozens of families, pushed them into poverty and orphaned children - since we knew about it.

On June 5, 1981,

the CDC's

the first time about five cases of strange pneumonia in LA; It affected young homosexual men, two of whom were already dead. Similar reports followed from New York and San Francisco; In 1982 the new epidemic officially reached Germany. These three dead in Frankfurt am Main are part of the story told here, which began a long time ago in a rainforest and continues to have no end globally to this day.