Abstinence is bad for business

Okay. Today, I wanted to talk about the proposed new policy of the Ministry of Health in Malaysia, that they want to start providing PrEP medication for men who have sex with men. For those of you who don't know, prep medication is a sort of cocktail of drugs called pre exposure prophylaxis and it's supposed to help prevent the transmission of HIV though it's not exactly certain whether it actually prevents transmission or just cloaks transmission. It's currently available in Malaysia only to, individuals who are at particular risk of contracting HIV, for example, someone who happens to be married to someone who has HIV. Now the Ministry of Health wants to make PrEP available on demand across Malaysia with a specific view to helping men who have sex with men avoid infection.

Now doctor Raffida Hanim Mukhtar wrote an excellent piece responding to this, proposed, policy by stating that abstinence should be encouraged and promoted as a better, easier, more reliable, not to say more affordable preventative measure for avoiding the HIV infection. I've seen people online, scoffing at the idea of abstinence and saying that people like doctor Rafida must live in a bubble if they think that talking about abstinence is even feasible. But I mean, what sort of bubble do you live in if you imagine that you can do whatever you want with your testicles and there should be no consequences? Or if you imagine that the government is supposed to subsidize your risky sexual lifestyle and pay for any consequences that might occur. It's not the thinking of someone who lives in a bubble to recognize that the best way to avoid getting a sexually transmitted infection is to not have sex.

That's an indisputable fact of reality. Now you may choose not to practice abstinence, but you can't deny that it is the safest route to take. I mean, you could theoretically throw yourself down the stairs and maybe not get hurt, but I think we can all agree that it makes a lot more sense to not throw yourself down the stairs. But here's the thing I wanted to mention. There's a whole industry that is banking on you throwing yourself down the stairs.

There's a whole industry for whom spreading disease is called growing their market. Obviously, I'm talking about the pharmaceutical industry. It's in their interests to promote risky and unhealthy lifestyles because that creates customers, oftentimes lifelong customers. The manufacturer of prep is called Gilead Sciences. It's an American pharmaceutical company, and they are currently offering $5,000,000 worth of grants to LGBT advocacy groups and programs.

And they've pledged another, $3,200,000 towards LGBT and transgender education. They also spend around $6,000,000 a year lobbying politicians in Washington and they are a partner organization with the World Economic Forum. Gilead obviously makes a lot of money when gay people get sick. Abstinence is bad for business. Now, PrEP in order to be effective is supposed to be taken every day.

So just think, if the number of gay people in Malaysia is roughly 1% of the population and PrEP from Gilead costs roughly $2,000 a month. That means that Gilead would be making roughly $660,000,000 per month from Malaysia or approximately $8,000,000,000 of Malaysian money going to an American corporation every year. Now if Malaysian clinics provide a generic version of PrEP, then that's gonna be roughly $20,000,000 per month or some 240,000,000 per year. Now understand that this is what happens if that proposal is implemented. The moment that proposal is implemented, regardless of how many people actually take the drugs, how many people actually come into the clinics to take the drugs.

Because obviously, if you're going to have this policy then you have to have the supply. So you have to have the supply in advance, meaning you have to have already given all of that money either to Gilead or to a generic drug producer. So we're talking about an enormous gift from the Malaysian public to the pharmaceutical industry. So you see there's a reason why massive corporations tend to discourage traditional values and religious morality. Because the business model for most companies is dependent upon the promotion of hedonism, gluttony, desire, extravagance, and unbridled indulgence of all sorts.

Now, of course, they will present this as advocating freedom and human rights, but more often than not, it is advocating self destruction and dependence upon their products. Companies like Gilead don't care about the health and safety of LGBT individuals. They're absolutely zealous to convert them into lifelong dependent customers through the spread of illness. So look, if you dismiss the irrefutable preventative remedy of abstinence for avoiding sexually transmitted infections, Whether you know it or not, you're nothing but a corporate shill for the pharmaceutical industry, not a human rights defender.