Reagan and AIDS

Andrew Sullivan, who is HIV+, defends Ronald Reagan from the charge that he was "responsible" for the AIDS epidemic during his Presidency:

Reagan should indeed be faulted for not doing more to warn people of the dangers of infection early enough (Thatcher was far better). But the truth is that it was pretty obvious very early on that something dangerous was afoot as AIDS first surfaced. Just read Larry Kramer at the time. Many people most at risk were aware - mostly too late, alas - that unprotected sex had become fatal in the late 1970s and still was. You can read Randy Shilts' bracing "And The Band Played On," to see how some of the resistance to those warnings came from within the gay movement itself. In the polarized atmosphere of the beleaguered gay ghettoes of the 1980s, one also wonders what an instruction from Ronald Reagan to wear condoms would have accomplished. As for research, we didn't even know what HIV was until 1983. Nevertheless, the Reagan presidency spent some $5.7 billion on HIV in its two terms - not peanuts.

Saying Reagan, and Reagan alone, was responsible for the death of 500,000 Americans and 10 million AIDS sufferers around the world (as one gay rights activist was quoted as saying in the Washington Times) means, at the very least, that people who knew the risk but continued to have unsafe sex or use unclean needles bear no responsibility at all for their actions. Or that Reagan could have just waved a magic wand and ended AIDS before it got started.

I ain't buying it.

Posted by damian at June 9, 2004 06:47 AM