"...and we read it twice, slowly, because the phrasing is quite dry," a US budget officer told me on Saturday. He had just finished reading the phase-out notice aloud to a small glass dish. The dish contained the virus. The dish did nothing.
We then did it properly. The United States is ending about $45 million a year in support for Namibia's HIV response, so the first question is simple. Does a virus stop when the funding does. We set up six dishes. We read the notice to three of them. The other three heard nothing at all. That is called a control group. It means we left half the dishes alone to see whether the reading changed anything.
It did not. All six dishes carried on as before. The odds of that being a fluke are under one in twenty. That is the cut-off scientists use to mean we are fairly sure.
Next we tried a longer document. We left the full budget spreadsheet beside the dishes overnight. By morning the spreadsheet had not changed and neither had the virus. We should be careful here. The virus may simply have struggled with the formatting.
