Ever hear of the gay plague? A disease that according to a moral majority including many governments - like the US government is God’s retribution on the sinful? .
This is the story of HIV and AIDS in the US. I’m Spartacus Olsson, this is a TimeGhost-Short, about the US response to the HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. HIV – a virus that attacks the immune system causing a range of conditions known as AIDS – originates in the Belgian Congo in the 1920s, when Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) jumps via bushmeat from other primates to humans in neighboring Cameroon.
It arrives in the US in 1969- right in the middle of the sexual revolution. Blood-borne and sexually transmitted, it spreads at first silently among drug addicts sharing needles, and in sexually liberal homosexual communities. Symptoms are vague and chaotic and incubation time is very long, It starts with something like a flu, then slowly progresses into bouts of multiple diseases like pneumonia and opportunistic cancer.
Once the HIV virus has progressed to AIDS it is sooner or later invariably lethal. The first public report by the Center for Disease Control comes on June 5, 1981, citing five previously healthy gay men being treated for a type of pneumonia associated only with severe immunodeficiency. By the time of publication, two are dead.
By August, 108 similar cases are reported. They call it GRID, Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease. Newspaper headlines refer to “Gay plague” and “Gay cancer” but the CDC soon finds cases among heterosexuals and GRID becomes AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
But the stigma of association to homosexuality sticks. In the early 80s environment of neo-conservative puritanism, AIDS is seen as moral judgement upon the homosexual, black, and Latino communities where it is hitting the hardest. US President Ronald Reagan leaves statements to his Communications Director, Pat Buchanan, who writes in the New York Post in May 1983: “The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children… The poor homosexuals — they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution,” Then in 1985 things start to change - media stories about non-gay people, and celebrities afflicted with AIDS start emerging.
One case captures the US media especially. It is 13 year old Ryan White, who has acquired HIV via a blood transfusion. In an environment of fear, in an information vacuum about the disease, Ryan is barred from school, and on the streets of his hometown people yell gay slurs after him.
His eventually successful struggle to be readmitted to school gains national interest. Later that year Reagan finally mentions AIDS, allocating a modest sum to research. By this point, over 12,000 Americans have died.
When he leaves office 91,000 Americans are dead and 700,000 infected with HIV. The measured response continues under George Bush’s administration. Frustration among the afflicted culminates in October 1992 when ACT-UP scatter the ashes of AIDS victims on the White House Lawn in protest.
It is medical science, not public health initiatives that finally mitigate the suffering starting in 1995. A ‘cocktail’ of drugs is found to reduce viral load, restore the immune system, and inhibit HIV transmission. Deaths fall from a peak of 42,000 in 1995 to 17,000 by 1997.
But by then 409,000 have died including Ryan White, until 2021 another 370,000 Americans will succumb to the disease in the US. The story of HIV/AIDs is similar across the western world. While the disease is in 2021 considered to be survivable, in the third world, especially sub-saharan Africa the global AIDS pandemic rages on.
Once again fueled by superstition, lack of public health initiatives, and the economic disparity barring most people from the expensive therapies. In the past decade, every year, an average of one million people have died of complications from AIDS worldwide. By 2021 it is over 40 million people killed by what is now a preventable disease.
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Never forget.
