I always have to laugh when Reagan gets criticized for AIDS. HIV is not as big of a threat to public health as cancer, obesity, heart disease, odd strains of enfluenza, etc. Hell, I still have to read literature on WNV when I donate blood, and that pretty much blew over 7 years ago. Carter was president when HIV first surfaced in 1979, and I'm not going to criticize him for failing to suddenly create a multi-trillion dollar task force to hit the problem with head-on.
Dude, it was because we finally saw it as a grave threat to public health and took action that we were able to limit the scope of AIDS impact in this nation. Had we not done that we damned well could of had the same situation here as has devastated sub-Saharan Africa where millions have died from AIDS or maybe that little fact has escaped your attention?
First, let's get your facts straight. HIV/AIDS was first diagnosed in this nation in 1981 when Reagan was President. Not Carter. When AIDS was first diagnosed in 1981 it didn't even have a name. It had been observed that groups of young Gay men in New York and California were suffering from a group of opportunistic infections and cancers (karposi's sarcoma) that resisted treatment. A frightening number of these young men died and the public became very concerned. Ronald Reagan said nothing.
In 1982 researchers in France and the USA identified a certain retro-virus now called Human Immuno Virus (HIV) that was the cause of this illness and it was given a name "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" (AIDS). Public concern was growing as more people had been diagnosed and the incidence of the disease was growing in numbers, spreading to new locations and was noticed in other populations then gay men, such as, Haitians, Hemophiliacs and IV drug abusers. Ronald Reagan said nothing.
In 1983 over 1,000 people had been diagnosed with AIDS, over 300 of them died in the United States. Ronald Reagan said nothing.
By 1984 CDC in Atlanta had reported that over 4,000 cases of AIDS had been diagnosed. 1800 of those people died. The city of San Francisco alone reported over 500 cases. To bring attention to this disease a march was held in San Francisco from the Castro district to the Moscone center, over 100,000 people participated. Again, Ronald Reagan said nothing.
By 1985 CDC had reported that over 6,000 people in the US had died from AIDS. A close personal friend of Ron and Nancy Reagan, Actor Rock Hudson, was diagnosed with AIDS. With AIDS out of the Presidential closet national AIDS activist Paul Boneberg begged President Reagan to say something to America that he new someone with AIDS to raise awareness about the disease. California congressman Henry Waxman publicly criticized Reagan for being silent about the disease. Reagan's friend Rock Hudson died of AIDS. Still, Reagan said nothing.
Finally, in 1987 towards the end of his second term, Reagan addressed the issue of AIDS at the Third International Conference on AIDS in Washington DC.
When he finally spoke, over 36,000 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and over 20,000 of them had died. The disease had spread to 113 countries with over 50,000 cases diagnosed. That soon spread to millions of cases.
Now in Africa alone well over a million people have died of AIDS.
The lesson of Reagan's silence is that a localized disease that began in 1981 with only a hand full of people spread to epidemic proportions affecting tens of thousands of lives before anything was said by President Reagan and the mighty resources of the Federal government were finally brought to bear on fighting the spread of this disease. However, subsequently the disease had went from localized outbreak to an epidemic within the USA to a pandemic affecting millions of lives around the world.
One can only speculate, how many more lives would have been saved had Reagan recognized AIDS in 1983 when he was first made aware of it and had done something about it?
This is the legacy of Ronald Reagan's silence about AIDS.
