Replies

Jeez, I just had this conversation with a leftie student today who was screeching on about how AIDS was Reagans fault, and that made him an evil person.

Student: Reagan didn't take AIDS seriously. Me: Would the opinion of one man have made the disease dissapear? Student: No, but he could have supported research to stop the disease. Me: We have spent over 15 BILLION dollars [ed: look it up yourself, NIH numbers) of taxpayer money on AIDS research and prevention programs since 1985, and even with all of our new technologies like electron microsocopes and gene sequencers, we still can't stop it and are still debating exactly how it works. What difference would a few million in extra funding have made when 15 billion couldn't do it? Student: He could have put the money into prevention programs to keep it from spreading. Me: AIDS was primarily a homosexual disease in 1983, but very few homosexuals really believed that AIDS was transmitted by sex. Even those that believed AIDS was caused by sex refused to change their ways or wear condoms, because they were sure that a cure would be found quickly. Student: The government could have educated them about it. Me: I was only a kid at the time, but even I remember all of the press discussions about homosexual sex causing AIDS, a homosexual would have had to live in a cave to not know. But most refused to change their behavior. Student: The government should have told them that a cure would take a while. Me: The actual virus wasn't even identified until '88 or '89, so nobody knew what they were fighting. How were they supposed to know how long it would take to cure it? The doctors at the time were pretty optomistic and thought they'd have a cure in a year or two. NOBODY suspected back then that we'd still have this disease 20 years later. How exactly was Reagan supposed to predict that? Student: Maybe they couldn't have predicted it, but they could have stopped it. Me: How, by shutting down the gaybars? By forcibly testing "at risk" people and interning infected people? Would you have supported that? Student: Of course not, that's fascist! Me: So if you were Reagan, what would you have done differently? Student: <blank stare for about 30 seconds> Student: You right wingers are all alike. You have to worship your God Ronnie and think he walked on water. He was evil and killed a lot of innocent people because he didn't care about AIDS!

And with that, she stormed out of my programming class. She never did answer my question either :-)

I'm firmly convinced that lefties exist only because people don't think. Like many subjects, this libbie had no clue how to react when her communist mantra fount itself in the cold glare of the light of truth.

"You could have poured half the national budget into AIDS in 1983, and it would have gone down a rat hole," says Michael Fumento, author of BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World. "There were no anti-virals back then. The first anti-viral was AZT which came along in 1987, and that was for AIDS." As an example of how blindly scientists and policymakers flew as the virus took wing, Fumento recalls that "in 1984, Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler predicted that there would be an AIDS vaccine by 1986. There is no AIDS vaccine to date."

..Pass her this note next time you see her. Source posted above.

Arthalion: The actual virus wasn't even identified until '88 or '89, so nobody knew what they were fighting.

The virus was identified in April of 1984, three years after the disease was identified (June of 1981). The cause was not clear in 1981-82, but the epidemiology was clear -- it was sexually transmitted.

Arthalion: We have spent over 15 BILLION dollars

The funding for AIDS was relatively small before 1985, several million per year. Public health people were well aware that the situation was ominous -- the case load was small (a few thousand) before 1985, but growing exponentially. There were scientists urgently calling for more funding but for several years they were not heeded.

Reagan apparently wasn't clued in on this issue early on. I heard the historian Haynes Johnson claim on NPR that Reagan didn't know about AIDS until his friend Rock Hudson died of it -- he had to ask his personal physician what AIDS was.

NOBODY suspected back then that we'd still have this disease 20 years later

Ahem, I'm sure I wasn't the only doctor that suspected it was a virus, and knew there was no "antibiotic" for viral diseases, and that we didn't even have the basic scientific knowledge to figure out how to kill viruses without killing the host, as viruses are about as close to naked DNA as a "living" thing can get.

Also, many of us even knew that viruses and prions may not really fit the criteria for "life," that they may just be organic chemicals that can replicate and cause infection.

I specifically remember warning people that we would need a once in a century type genius to make the mental breakthrough to even begin to fight the disease. I was very much in favor of controlling it by making it a reportable disease and having the public health department confidentially track down all exposed people, like they have discretely done for decades with TB, venereal diseases, and other communicable diseases.

But the gay community made that illegal, and the millions of deaths and disability extra will always be on the heads of the gay activists would put their politics ahead of the lives and well-being of millions.