For these patients, the virus had decoded the action of the drug, and it became necessary to switch to another combination of anti-retrovirals. The awful truth of HIV is as a virus its path of destruction through the body is not universally predictable. No two people have an HIV infection in exactly the same way. The CD4 cells that are destroyed in each person are hapless victims, chosen at random. The memory cells, which store instructions to fight common ailments, are destroyed randomly, too.
Opportunistic infections arise.
Such unpredictability and individuality are strong reasons to suspect not enough is known about HIV to support a drug holiday for all who want one. I'm a working stiff myself. The resulting superinfection transferred the drug resistance and this unrecognized virus was able to replicate wildly. It was never true, but the fantasy was, for some people, more than enough. For a generation normalized to equate safer sex only with stopping the transference of HIV, the presence of HIV in both partners seemed to signal the sensibility of forgoing protection.