I am calling out all of the well-funded legal firms that are busily sculpting their ongoing and future class-action barrages on everyone’s favorite villain, the pharmaceutical industry.

Here’s my dilemma: I am heavily reliant on social media platforms, and your incredibly-well-financed advertising budget has not only allowed you access to my feed, it insures that I have no lasting measure to block your posts.

Well played.

The ads I would particularly like to block are those specifically targeting the makers of anti-viral cocktails and trumpeting their massively detrimental effects.

Putting it into the correct social media vernacular of today: Could you please just STFU about the severe repercussions of their usage??

Your claims might be absolutely correct. No doubt, you have some legal victories supporting your costly endeavors. I gather that there are some unfortunates that have encountered massive setbacks from the use of these drugs, and I hope that the

pennies-on-the-dollar settlements you won for them allow for their recovery.

On the other hand, maybe you’re just another part of the background noise the HIV community has accustomed itself to hearing. There has been a deluge of conspiratorial assertions that became inflated to the point it influenced some to forgo the very treatments that might have helped them.

Your arguments are not without merit, and yet I still keep coming back to the fact that these drugs are saving lives. One specific drug in your line of fire is Triumeq, the current generation in the line of drugs that has successfully stopped the progression of HIV. There is a strong degree of bias here, since I am personally am drinking the Kool-Aid. Wait: Make that endorsing the Kool-Aid. Actually, I have struggled to get us to the place where there IS a Kool-Aid.

So yeah, my experience convinces me that these drugs are saving lives.

All of us fighting the battle against this epidemic — both HIV+ and HIV- — have lost far more than we have gained. So many good people have died. So much of who we once were lays on that field. Our dignity, our compassion, our guilt for being sexually active, our remorse and our grief took severe blows in this ongoing struggle.

Those next to me that ingested the most toxic chemicals that were presented as cures but instead only hastened their demise would have done anything — ANYTHING — to have had these drugs we have today.

I keep coming back to the fact these drugs are saving lives.

Where was your advocacy in those years when the only treatments available really were poison? You would have been laughed out of court if you had presented a case. You did not, of course. You didn’t care then; the only reason for your concern now is that there is big money in challenging their efficacy.

Because of these drugs, our viral loads are undetectable. The reality that we will no longer be at risk of infecting another human being is cathartic.

I keep coming back to the fact that these drugs are saving lives in all sorts of ways.

International relief organizations, American AIDS foundations and private efforts alike utilize this class of drugs in their successful eradication efforts.

Still, I keep coming back to the fact that these drugs are saving lives.

Today is World AIDS Day. And today, I really do not care about the distractions involved. Today, I celebrate the game-changing and life-saving effects of anti-virals.

I have wept. I have fought. I have lived to see treatment that I believe is effective.

Maybe I am wrong. I have been wrong so many times in this nearly four-decade-long struggle.

But still, I keep coming back to the fact that these drugs really are saving lives.

So for one day, can you please STFU???