![]() Reagan’s negligence meant that the epidemic was considerably worse than it might have been if he’d actually done his damn job. ![]() People and organisations trying to cure AIDS and treating people with AIDS were intentionally left critically underfunded. The reason Reagan gets so much hate and blame for the AIDS crisis is because he basically ignored it.He didn’t publicly address the topic of AIDS until 1986. Heard it in my dreams those nights in the summer of '82. When a skull cracks the sound is something beautiful. Head straining at the seams, brain inflamed screaming bloody murder. REAGAN: Some of the really unlucky ones came down with encephalitis. Speakes and the less call it politically correct members of the press pool the claim was made that we'd supported it the whole time, that in that cabinet meeting all those months ago I'd declared it our number one research priority. 644 dead and two months later in the press conference in-between wisecracks from Press Sec. Let it pass in the end, but they had to claw out every dollar. Could cry and scream about it, talk about it to the press, give it attention. REAGAN: Couldn't shoot it down it outright, would work to their advantage. ![]() People want to believe that nothing bad is ever going to happen to them, and they do- until it does. Push the thought away and keep on going in blissful ignorance, write off the sick as people who deserved it or the unfortunate victims thereof, and that way it's not something that you have to seriously consider as something that might happen to you, because you're not one of them. If you tell them that only drug users and gay men get it, they can ignore it. A new disease that threatens everyone? People don’t want to have to think about that. People want to keep going without major upheavals to their lives (unless they’re positive ones). Terry Pratchett once said in Feet of Clay that all people really want is to know that tomorrow is going to be mostly the same as today. I imagine that quite a few of them didn’t want to understand, either. People- including Reagan- didn’t understand what AIDS was or how it worked. It was the 80’s- homophobia was everywhere Reagan intensified the War on Drugs in 1982. Because it’s not just that AIDS was considered a disease that only gay men and drug users got, it’s that AIDS was considered a disease where the people who got it were expendable. Between 43% and 44% of Americans in 19 believed that AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behavior.īut I’m digressing. In two separate polls in 1987, roughly half of Americans agreed that it was people's own fault if they got AIDS (51%) and that most people with AIDS had only themselves to blame (46%). Even if they didn’t die, they were treated like lepers- remember, it was a false but incredibly common belief that you could contract HIV just by touching someone who was infected. Getting HIV/AIDS was enough to ruin someone’s reputation permanently. ![]() Naturally, this led to more discrimination, because people with HIV/AIDS got stereotyped as either being filthy drug addicts and gay people, or the blameless innocent victims of the aforementioned- but being a 'blameless innocent victim' didn't stop people from discriminating against them- keep in mind, at this point all kinds of rumours and misinformation were flying around. For a very long time, it was an established fact in the public consciousness that if you had AIDS, then you were either gay or a drug user- though a third group later emerged in this stereotype: the ‘victims’, people who contracted HIV either through improperly-cleaned medical tools, blood transfusions from HIV patient, or sexual assault. Because that’s what AIDS was stereotyped as: a disease that gay men got, although the stereotype later expanded to include drug users. Other, less incendiary terms like ACIDS ('Acquired Community Immunodeficiency Syndrome') and CAID ('Community-Acquired Immunodeficiency') were also used, but GRID won out. ![]() That was AIDS’ original name, GRID: Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. Homosexuals have declared war on nature and now nature is exacting its awful retribution, read the columns - beautiful stuff, couldn't have put it any better. Then suddenly they're banging the table and hollering and yelling about twelve million, twelve million in funding for GRID or ACIDS or what was it that they called it now, and you know that was the line. Wasn't worth the effort to single it out specifically, who cares, let them have their pet projects. Million for the NIH here, five-hundred thou for the CDC there. REAGAN: Handful of appropriations in some small half-measure bills. Next item, move it along, we've got a lot more on the agenda. REAGAN: First caught wind of it in a daily briefing, somewhere in the spring of '82. Hi, everyone, here's part two of the SCP-7918 declass. ![]()
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