biold0 wrote...

I personally think that since the HIV virus originated in Africa, that
we should be charging them instead of throwing money at them like we
do right now.

And here's something you should think about.  The new antiviral drugs
are very effective when used properly but also very expensive, way too
expensive for any African country to afford for its high number of
AIDS cases.  Western pharmaceutical companies are under pressure to
lower the price of the drugs, so what they do is "donate" the drugs for
free or greatly-reduced cost to the blighted African countries, then
they raise the price of the drugs in Western countries (especially the
USA) by several hundred percent to cover the revenues lost when they
generously donated the drugs to Africa.  The USA bears the brunt of
the price increase because it has no national price controls and also
has a law mandating that all AIDS patients receive the drugs at
government expense.  So while Abbot raised the price of Norvir by 4x
after "donating" the drug to Africa, it could easily have raised the
price to a million dollars per dose and I suppose the U.S. government
would pay for it.