Liberals order Crown attorneys to stop prosecuting some HIV non-disclosure cases

It's almost as if they don't actually care about the well-being of these groups and just want to virtue signal.

Yeah, just assume maliciousness, eh?

Public health scientists and officials pretty much universally consider criminal prosecutions for disease transmission, aside from the scenario of a psychopath operating with the intent to infect people, to be at best useless and at worst completely counterproductive.

If someone is on good treatment, then the chances that they ever actually spread the infection is close to zero. In such cases, prosecutions are a waste of limited government resources and money when public health and public drug programs are chronically underfunded and insufficient. Spending $1 million to try, convict and lock up someone who never had any real risk of infecting someone else is $1 million not spent on HIV prevention or HIV treatment elsewhere.

There's also the concern that prosecuting non-disclosure cases will further bad attitudes toward safe sex. Ideally, people should be assuming their new sex partners are HIV+ until proven HIV-. To use the law to try and enforce it the other way around may create complacency and promote the idea that your sex partners can be assumed to be HIV-. ("They must be HIV-, they have to tell me if they're HIV+ after all.") Remember that the vast majority of new infections are caused by HIV+ people not even yet aware of their status.

It's also not hard to imagine a scenario where the duty to disclose conflicts with the public health interest of getting the HIV+ person on treatment as soon as possible. For example, a woman in an abusive relationship may not be easily able to refuse sex with her husband. If testing HIV+ has legal implications for people in such situations, they may simply opt not to get tested at all and hope for the best. From a public health perspective, the woman in that situation getting tested, knowing her status, going on treatment, while not disclosing to her husband, is a far better outcome.

But nah, the doctors don't care about trying to end the HIV epidemic, they're just virtue signalling, am I right?

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