You can wait for every human to change their behavior to fit your preferences (and disparage them until they do). In the meantime we can produce drugs that save lives until then. We can do both at the same time, so what's the problem?
> You can wait for every human to change their behavior to fit your preferences
No one has said or claimed that... and it isn't about "my" preference or yours; it's about the scientific approach to resolving an issue by addressing its root cause, or at least adhering to the 80/20 rule.
The issue here is exploitation. All I see is a greedy company trying to profit from a demographic instead of resolving the root cause, offering a "subscription-based" medicine. It's strange how all these new "breakthrough" medicines are supposed to be taken for life, like Ozempic. Meanwhile, the best prevention is to get tested in advance. It takes a few minutes and it's reliable, safe, and obviously cheaper than paying for pills/shots for life for the chance of getting that disease/virus.
If that medicine were a "treatment," on the other hand, then it would definitely be a breakthrough, especially if it's taken once, like some treatments for other STDs. Obviously, it isn't, and there's an entire business model built around that.
You seem to think the root cause is either "people have too much sex" and/or "people should have the foresight to always get tested at the appropriate time".
Both of those things are not root causes. The first is your value judgment (which others do not share, and there's nothing wrong with that; your moralizing around this is unwelcome), and the second is just a fundamental understanding about the availability of healthcare and people's ability to access it when they need to.
If there is any kind of "root cause" here, it's the existence of HIV itself. We should do our best to eradicate it, and taking every measure possible to help prevent people from contracting it in the first place is a good way to do that. Sure, some of that will be through education, teaching people to avoid risky behaviors, and get tested regularly if they're in a high-risk group. But creating vaccines and other prophylactics is also a good way of doing that, arguably even better, because it doesn't require that you educate everyone and change everyone's behavior. That never works all that well.
there is a lot of spontaneity in the act of sex that you're taking for granted; it's not that easy to throw that away and get the same thing out of the event.
rigor and standards are often the enemies of passion, so it's a hard sell. Your base logic is right, prevention is the best cure, but humans just don't work that way.
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