Well, kudos to Nightline which evidently said AIDS and Reagan in the same sentence.
The Washington Post has had some wonderful back of the section stories that were written in an understated tone. Somebody even quoted Daniel Ortega. No mention of AIDS and Reagan in the same sentence by a journalist in that paper that I can find, but I'll keep looking.
Several posters have questioned whether some have overstated the indictment of Ronald Reagan for failing to exercise leadership at the advent of what would be called AIDS. I give you C. Everett Koop, former Surgeon General:
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/health_cast/uploaded_files/morningtrns2.pdf
starting page 23:
"AIDS entered the consciousness of the public health service very quietly, very gradually, and with no fanfare at all. And it was 20 years ago today that the Center for Disease Control published its report on five previously healthy homosexuals who had a rare type of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. It wasn't until the next day, tomorrow, that the public health service staff discussed this issue.
And it wasn't long after that, just about a month, when in July of `81, we heard another report at a staff meeting from CDC, that 26 previously healthy young homosexual men had turned up with having Kaposi sarcoma, which they described as an uncommonly reported cancerous condition found usually in elderly men, if at all.
Now the public service--health service had never come upon anything like this in its history and it was given a somewhat awkward title of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. For a short while before that, we were calling it GRID, which stood for Gay Related Immune Deficiency. But then when more cases came in that were not homosexual, we called it A.I.D.S. and eventually just AIDS and it has remained that ever since.
By August of that same year, we learned from CDC that there had been 108 cases reported of HIV and 43 of those had already died. I was not yet
the Surgeon General and all through that summer of `81, I was preoccupied by my long struggle for confirmation. But I certainly did realize if ever there was a challenge for a Surgeon General, it was a disease we called AIDS/HIV.
But for some reason, due to intradepartmental politics that I still cannot truly understand or explain to you, I was cut off from AIDS discussions and statements over the next five years.
But I did have a very definite impression about what was going on on Pennsylvania Avenue. Domestic policy folks in the White House
isolated Ronald Reagan from the whole subject of AIDS. And because transmission of AIDS was understood primarily in the homosexual
population and in those who abused intravenous drugs, the advisors to the President, took the stand, they are only getting what they justly deserve. And the domestic policy people, as well as the majority of the President's cabinet, did not see any need to come to grips with AIDS, or indeed to have a governmental policy towards this disease. And these combined attitudes did nothing to dampen.
Indeed, they merry--very well may have aided and embedded the hatred of homosexuals in this country, the discrimination against innocent school children like Ryan White, and the acts of arson on the homes of hapless children with hemophilia, such as the Ray Children.
There were two reasons why public health authorities took a while to get a handle on AIDS in the beginning.
One was that there were relatively few people trained as clinicians and researchers familiar with the rare diseases we were discussing. And the second reason was that the first patients, those with--found in homosexual men, usually patronized physicians and clinics that were more understanding of their gay lifestyle. And in making that choice these men effectively placed themselves outside the mainstream of clinical medicine and, therefore, they were more difficult to know, more difficult to reach and, therefore, more difficult to help.**
As a result, the first public health priority and that is to stop further transmission of the virus, became needlessly mired in homosexual politics of the early 1980's. In 1985, there was the death of Rock Hudson, a movie star, the first national figure to die of AIDS. And this at least got the attention of the White House. Also in 1985, we had a test for the first
time to identify the presence of antibodies to the HIV and we couldn't see the virus, but we first at last saw its footprint.
Now, in spite of many charges that have been leveled against the public health service for foot dragging, I would like to remind you that we learned as much about the virus of AIDS in six years as we had learned about the polio virus in the previous 40 years."
**I dispute to some extent this point.
My father served his country for thirty years: three in the Air Force, the balance in federal civil service. He never turned his back on anyone. The Reagan Administration turned his back on him.
Ronald Reagan does not deserve the amount of respect this nation gives him. Pity and compassion for his suffering, yes.
Ronald Reagan, Jr. may think his father crapped bigger than our current president, but my father's heart encompassed all people, even when I had to pick up his crap with rubber gloves.