Eight Billion COVID Infections a Year: What the “Airborne AIDS” Debate Reveals About Long COVID Advocacy

Based on : AJPM Focus study “COVID-19 is ‘Airborne AIDS’: provocative oversimplification, emerging science, or something in between?”

A strange thing is happening in pandemic politics. Some of the people who fought hardest for health justice have started drawing new lines around what we’re allowed to say. Especially when it comes to what this virus is doing to the immune system.

A recent study in AJPM Focus dared to say what many researchers have been circling for years. COVID-19 can cause immune dysfunction that, in some ways, resembles HIV. Not because it’s the same virus. Not because it follows the same path. But because it leaves behind some of the same wreckage.

That comparison triggered immediate backlash. The kind that shuts doors and silences people. The kind that says: how dare you even suggest that.

When the Biology Gets Inconvenient

Here’s what the study actually said :

• SARS-CoV-2 can deplete T cells, including CD4 and CD8 subsets.

• It can cause immune exhaustion and chronic inflammation.

• It can damage mitochondria and impair immune memory.

• It increases vulnerability to other infections.

• It can persist in tissue reservoirs long after the initial infection, keeping the immune system under chronic stress.

• It keeps doing this through repeated exposures, more than once a year for most people.

None of this erases HIV. It highlights a pattern we’re still refusing to face. This virus isn’t just a short-term illness. It’s altering immune systems around the world, again and again, in ways we barely understand.

The comparison doesn’t minimize AIDS. It says : we’ve seen this kind of damage before. We know what unchecked immune dysfunction looks like. Let’s not pretend it’s new.

Eight Billion COVID Infections a Year

Every year, all eight billion of us are infected with SARS-CoV-2, many of us more than once. That makes this the most widespread immune-altering event in modern history.

And here’s what’s worse. The places still hardest hit by HIV, Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Asia, the Caribbean, are also among the least protected against COVID. They have the fewest vaccines, the weakest ventilation, the least access to antivirals.

This isn’t an abstract debate. It’s about real people dealing with layered crises. HIV and COVID are colliding in bodies, in clinics, in entire healthcare systems. Acting like those two pandemics are unrelated doesn’t protect anyone. It just keeps the walls up.

When Silence Helps the Wrong People

The backlash to these comparisons hasn’t just quieted researchers. It’s given cover to the people who want COVID to disappear from public life altogether.

When advocates say it’s offensive to compare COVID to AIDS, guess who cheers. The same politicians who cut public health budgets. The same lobbyists who fight air filtration in schools. The same pundits who call long COVID “hysteria.”

They use that outrage to say : see, even disability advocates think you’re overreacting.

Now the scientists get attacked from both sides. Right-wing media calls them fearmongers. Left-leaning activists call them insensitive. And meanwhile, the virus keeps doing damage, quietly, steadily, globally.

What Real Solidarity Looks Like

If you believe in public health justice, then you don’t shut down hard conversations. You don’t tell sick people their experience is too messy to talk about. You follow the evidence, even when it points somewhere uncomfortable.

The HIV movement changed the world because it refused silence. It exposed power, demanded access, and forced medicine to evolve. We need that energy again, but this time aimed at a virus infecting billions.

Solidarity doesn’t mean drawing a line around one kind of suffering. It means fighting for everyone exposed to risk and neglect.

The lesson from HIV was never “don’t compare.” It was “don’t look away.”

Where the Pushback Comes From

This response isn’t coming from bad actors. It’s coming from some of the very communities who’ve fought hardest for dignity in illness, AIDS activists, disability advocates, long-time fighters for equity.

They worry, rightfully, that comparing COVID to HIV might erase the history of a brutal epidemic, or trivialize the trauma that came with it. They worry about stigma, about co-opting language, about repeating the old harms in new ways.

But somewhere along the way, that caution turned into control. Into silence. Into a new kind of gatekeeping, one that says certain scientific ideas are off-limits, even if they’re true.

We Lose Time Every Week Day

Every day we spend arguing about metaphors is a day someone loses lung function. A day someone collapses with a reactivated virus. A day a kid develops dysautonomia and no one connects the dots.

COVID is not a vibe. It’s not an opinion. It’s a biological threat that keeps evolving and spreading. It deserves the same kind of attention we once fought to give HIV.

It doesn’t matter if it makes people uncomfortable. What matters is that it’s true.