> Yikes. That's a flag.

You flagged my comment because I expressed an opinion that you disagree with about social distancing? I didn't say it doesn't work to reduce infection (although I absolutely put no stock in associative studies), I said it was a bad thing. I don't believe in constraining human relationships via coercion in order to prevent the spread of a highly infectious respiratory virus that is and was always going to be endemic. What an evil thing to do to use the flag button like that.

Doubly ironic because you linked to an article about a study rather than the actual study, and the study itself is incredibly weak because it's a crappy associative study, which is the only type of study you can really perform for social distancing (which is why it will always be a largely unfalsifiable intervention but I digress)

> Announcement of condom innovation funding: https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-condom-campaign...

That doesn't change the fact that they're spending money on this intervention. Moreover there are obvious ethical concerns with billing genital modification as a medical intervention. We don't take that ethical stance towards FGM, which we rightly decry here in the West as evil. (And before you say that FGM is totally different from male circumcision, you should read up in detail about both, including the multiple different forms of FGM, many of which are analogous to male circumcision; the correct answer is both types of genital mutilation are evil, not just the one we do to girls).

> It's not really healthy to harbor this amount of unfounded hatred for someone you've (presumably) never met, and I'd advise bringing fact-checked sources next time.

You clearly aren't familiar with fact checkers and how they work otherwise you wouldn't use that phrase with a straight face.

And sorry, it is absolutely healthy to harbor a strong distaste for someone that does things you think are evil. I've never met Xi Jinping but I don't like him either.

> On the compound impact of a 1% difference: https://www.politifact.com/article/2016/apr/18/hiv-africa-6-...

First of all politifact is not a neutral source, can we stop collectively pretending that these fact-checker types have any credibility?

Anyway I don't want to get into the whole AIDS-in-Africa debate but maybe you should read up on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangui_definition and the fact that we regularly diagnose AIDS for things that could very plausibly not be AIDS.

---

I avoided giving sources because I don't want to have to argue the age-old "is it okay to perform a medicalized pseudo-surgery that started out intentionally with the intention of curtailing pleasure and the function of the male sexual organ" debate. But you might be interested in https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1016/S0968-8080%2807... that goes into some interesting history.

On the WHO-Bill-Gates-circumcision-for-HIV thing specifically, there's a great response letter to the original study that points out the glaring flaws (the most shocking that they halted the study halfway through because the results were supposedly so good it was unethical not to circumcise everyone right away...which poor data analysis aside has the obvious confound that you can't have sex for weeks after getting circumcised thus you need a long study period). However I'm having trouble finding it.

Tangentially, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/africans-speak-out-... makes some good points though. Yes it's not a research paper, I'm not trying to say it is.