THE AIDS VACCINE AND BLACKS

I am rather pleased that the news about there being a really good vaccine against AIDS that works with blacks only has got a lot of coverage. See here and here. What surprises me a little is that most people seem to be unable to explain the finding. It seems to me that there is an obvious evolutionary explanation: AIDS is said to originate with West African monkeys and to have been passed to man by West African blacks killing monkeys and eating them. American negroes originate from West Africa. Fill in the gaps.

In case the gap answers are not obvious, let me point out: AIDS is not fatal to everyone and the survivors of it over the millennia would therefore have tended to spread the genes that promoted survival throughout the West African population. So presumably most West Africans need only a little help to beat AIDS — and the vaccine gives them that little bit of extra help.

That�s probably an oversimplified explanation but I suspect that it starts us off in the right direction. One of many possible questions would be: Is HIV a recent mutation or something that has been around for thousands of years? Lots of people think the latter but it would actually make more sense if it were a recent mutation so that inherited immunity to its predecessors was only weakly helpful with the present mutation.

The Leftists are frantically panning the whole study, of course, with the usual comment being �the numbers are too small�. But the fact that the results among blacks were statistically significant at the medically-relevant differences between the major races are not at all new.

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