Dangerous Ignorance In The City Attorney's Office

 

Seattle City Attorney, Ann Davison, doesn't know the difference between HIV negative and undetectable. Normally, I'd say, "So what. Plenty of people are surprisingly ignorant when it comes to HIV terminology. But an elected official in such a seat of power who chooses to conduct investigations on innocent people over an angry and misguided tip from someone claiming (falsely) that he had been intentionally infected by a friend who he said was supposed to be negative, is a danger to any citizen of this city living with HIV. 

In case she reads this post, allow me to illustrate the difference, because the distinction matters immensely. 

A person is HIV negative if they have never been infected with the virus. This means there are no virus copies anywhere in their system, and there never has been. These people have the option of taking Truvada or other medications once daily to prevent HIV infection through sex. 

HIV attaching to a lymphocyte

When an HIV-positive person taking Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) daily is successful at suppressing the amount of virus in their bloodstream to a level so low that it becomes impossible for them to transmit the infection to others through sex, those people are considered HIV+/undetectable. 

The virus isn't gone. The few copies that remain travel into the nooks and crannies, mostly inside lymph nodes, and become dormant. They lie there in wait for an opportunity when the medicine is no longer around to suppress it, sleeping until they can wake and resume making copies of themselves using helper T-cells from our immune system as the building blocks. This is why adherence is critical and why remaining undetectable has always been my goal. 

The CDC considers an undetectable status, meaning there are fewer than 40 copies of the virus per mL of blood, to be untransmittable. This is the basis of the U=U campaign aimed at educating people like Ann Davison so they understand risk factors accurately. 

I have been HIV positive since 1993. For the vast majority of those years, I have remained durably suppressed or undetectable - same thing. Since day one, I have been upfront about my status with every partner I've had, despite the rejection and stigma that accompanies such an admission. It's in all my profiles on Grindr, Scruff, and Sniffies. I have never hidden my status. Not ever. As is the case with any long-term survivor of HIV, there are occasional "blips" where viral load spikes unexpectedly above the level of detection. It happens through no fault of the patient. This is what happened to me in the fall of 2023. 

A white blood cell infected with HIV

That year in September, I got a viral load that was "detectable" at 63 copies per milliliter of blood. This is still considered to be durably suppressed. The CDC and WHO consider any viral load below 1,000 to carry a risk of transmissibility effectively negligible.
63 < 1,000. Do the math, Ann.

If you are going to send investigators in to haunt a person's life for years, invading
their privacy day and night, holding embarrassing conversations about the subject's weight, hygiene, eating habits, and masturbation schedule, at least know which people among your constituents present a credible risk of spreading HIV. Because when you get that basic factor wrong, your whole basis for an investigation goes right out the window.

But you don't let a little thing like that stop you, do you, Ann? Even when your own investigator reads you a list of reasons to call off the investigation and leave me alone, you shut him down, reminding him he is a City Employee and as such will do whatever you tell him to do. Not very good managerial style, but hey. You do you.

I guess if it's no longer about whether your pal (my former friend turned ridiculous enemy) actually became positive through my intentional transmission, then I guess it must be a personal grudge now. I imagine it must be pretty humiliating to realize partway through an investigation that your target is medically incapable of the crime you are trying to pin on him. Add to that the bonus of the subject catching on to your game and listening to your investigators talking about him from their hiding place nearby. That's got to be salt in an already embarrassing wound. So you direct them to keep monitoring and to find probable cause sufficient to get a warrant and arrest me. Disregard the protests of the man on the ground who has seen firsthand my innocence. What does the truth matter when you've got a crusade to finish?

I suppose this is why Seattle PD's records department can't seem to fulfill my public records requests in a more timely manner. I have requested records of police reports, body worn video, dash camera footage, investigation notes and basically any artifact available in connection with me going back as far as April 2024 that still have not been fulfilled. The first bunch was held so long that some of the records met their retention deadline and were deleted despite my open request for them. Did you make a call and instruct those city employees to drag their feet as long as they could? I guess we'll see, won't we. Another batch of released files is due 12/31/25.

I can't wait until I have an opportunity to face you in court and look at your face when I show the judge my hard, unimpeachable evidence of my durable suppression since 2020 right on up through this past Tuesday. I'm envisioning your head exploding or at least plumes of cartoon steam gushing forth from your ears. Keep it up, Ann. But try to learn something along the way, ma'am. It's kind of your job to know this shit.