One story Hodgkinson relates in his thoughtful article is how the symbol of HIV infection - and certain AIDS death - was rejected in India and a national campaign abandoned, when "in front of television cameras, a six-foot red ribbon was cut into pieces as a protest against the 'oppressive and patronising' symbol." Veena Dhari, the first woman in India to declare herself HIV-positive, said that when HIV-positive people see the ribbon “we feel like committing suicide”.

Red ribbon - (Unesco) Young Digital Creators

Quite apart from the personal tragedies of people being labeled 'HIV positive' and effectively receiving a death sentence, the unreliability of the test, which makes such labeling a cruel if not criminal act, is becoming a major issue. Hodgkinson is not the only journalist saying that the retrovirus which supposedly causes AIDS is not being detected by tests, and indeed has never been properly identified as the cause of the syndrome.

Liam Scheff has contested more than a year ago, that no gold standard exists for the AIDS test, that is, the test cannot be validated against an actual virus isolated from patients that have the disease.

And Rebecca Culshaw, a mathematical biologist and assistant professor of mathematics says she quit her AIDS related work because of the substantial impossibility to model the spread of the disease and the effectiveness of preventive and curative efforts: "The biological assumptions on which the models were based varied from author to author, and this made no sense to me."

As if a bogus test was not enough, the treatment recommended after the verdict of "positive" virtually guarantees debilitating illness and eventual death. The "side effects" of the retroviral drugs which are the treatment 'of choice' include the very symptoms we describe as AIDS.

Not that there were any serious lack of natural treatment options without the deadly side effects, but they cost much less than the chemical drugs and can't be patented...

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The circular reasoning scandal of HIV testing