The Polygamist is dumb, but not in the way you think.
Part of the plotline’s climax is that Jonasi Gomora’s first wife hires a HIV+ woman that she met a few years earlier to infect her serial cheater husband by sleeping with him.
Jonasi subsequently dies because he doesn’t take his HIV meds. The story here is that the woman tasked with passing on the infection still appears healthy between the time she’s infected and when she infects him, which presupposes that she’s on ARVs, yet she’s simultaneously highly infectious enough to infect someone after one encounter.
This storyline is completely detached from scientific reality, perpetuating outdated HIV stigmas and ignores how transmission and treatment actually work.
The reality is that the fundamental principle of HIV is Undetectable = Untransmittable. So if the HIV lady is healthy because she is consistently taking her ARVs, as her health status implies, then her viral load would be undetectable.
In the real world, U=U has proven that a person with an undetectable viral load has ZERO risk of transmitting the virus sexually. By making her healthy yet somehow highly infectious, the show ignores the primary mechanism of how HIV treatment works.
Then there’s just the inefficiency of sexual transmission of HIV.
The chances of a female infecting a male in penile-vaginal intercourse is just 4 out of 10 000 exposures, or a 0.04% chance per act, and that’s assuming the female partner is untreated and has a detectable viral load, which, going by how the show’s plotline treats Jonasi’s progression with the infection, she herself should have been sick and dying by the time she’s approached.
The idea that Jonasi subsequently dies simply because he didn’t take HIV meds implies a rapid progression to AIDS and death, as his twins are barely 3 or 4 years old when he dies, when they must have 2 or so when he got infected. No strain of HIV is this potent.
In the end, the writers sacrificed medical accuracy for dramatic flair, falling back on an old, misogynist trope of the “infectious femme fatale” while completely ignoring the realities of ARVs and transmission statistics.
If the writers wanted to keep the plot point of a highly effective assassination via HIV, shifting to a parenteral route like an infected blood transfusion or an injection would have made the scheme a lot more plausible.
A blood transfusion has an estimated per-act probability of 9250 out of 10 000 exposures.
That is a staggering 92.5% transmission rate from a single event. Compared to the microscopic 0.04% chance of insertive penile-vaginal intercourse.
A contaminated transfusion or heavy blood injection turns the plot from statistically impossible into a near-certainty.
Also, since the show already established that the wife has a corrupt doctor on her payroll, a medical frame-up is a perfect fit. Jonasi gets into a minor accident, or is drugged and admitted to the hospital, the doctor claims he needs a blood transfusion and deliberately uses a contaminated batch🤷🏾♂️
The entire thing is a missed opportunity for the writers, who chose to substitute lazy, stigmatising writing for what could have been a tightly plotted thrilling climax.
Chinhu ichi kuma late 80s chaimwiwa. Vanhu vaichiti chi fungus. Saka chaibikirwa black tea choiswa chofuma chakakura chichinzi chinorapa zvese nevaisarwara vaimwawo who remembers it and mai ichiti chii
Please never leave your air fryer plugged to the wall even tho off…woke up to a house full of fumes after it turned itself on.
Was reading online about a “ghost press”🙄