Condoms are the key to keeping you as an individual HIV negative for the rest of your life. Your sexual health is your responsibility, you cannot rely on anyone else to protect you from HIV or other STIs. Using condoms is a sign of a highly educated knowledgeable responsible gay man who cares about his sexual health and that of other gay man.
Lets be honest. The gay ill unprofessionals are wrong when they say that condoms only work 7 out of 10 times (now they say 9 out of 10). There are not thousands of bewildered gay men walking around infected with HIV saying to themselves “How on earth did I get HIV I used a condom every time!”. They contracted HIV because they didn’t use a condom with their sexual partners. They had unprotected sex.
Condoms will always work at preventing you being infected with HIV as its a barrier that the virus cannot get through. PrEP however is a medication. It does not “protect” you from being infected with HIV. If you are infected through unprotected sex without a condom PrEP is the “treatment” for that HIV infection. You have to hope it works.
There are various strains of HIV and many HIV positive people have resistant strains to medication. Some of those strains are resistant to the medication in PrEP. 25% of HIV positive people have a resistant strain 11% have multidrug resistance. What is frightening is that 1% have a resistant strain to the medication in PrEP. It would only take 7 days for one of those persons to not take their medication, have unprotected sex and potential cause an outbreak of drug resistant HIV strain. Especially if there is a bareback culture that the gay ill health sector is encouraging. PrEP will fail eventually. It is inevitable. Just as other STIs become resistant to medication so will HIV to PrEP.
Humans are fallible. If a gay man can’t get it together to wear a condom will he manage to take PrEP regularly if negative or his medication if positive to keep him undetectable? Trusting someone who says they are undetectable or on PrEP and wants unprotected sex is never a good prevention strategy for you the individual. Them telling you they are undetectable is irrelevant. You simply don’t know. That’s the “knowledge” you need to know.
If you proudly state you wear a condom every time you will avoid the bareback cesspool of disease, despair, desperation and worry. You will avoid the overcrowded clinics full of gay men who falsely believed the gay ill health unprofessional’s marketing hype that PrEP would liberate them from the evil condom. Ultimately the choice is yours but 30 years of consistent condom use proves they work and that they keep you HIV negative. Will we be saying the same about PrEP in 30 years? We doubt it.
Watch this video and others in the series, where we got these stats. The marketing that “PrEP works” isn’t that simple.