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Comment by billfruit | Hacker News Reader

This and another article today on the Atlantic seems to be implying that this type of epidemics are better dealt with in democratic countries. To me, that isn't that much clear, to see how the AIDS was handled in the United States during the 80's.

Even democratic governemnts are succesptible to staging coverups to save face.

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> To me, that isn't that much clear, to see how the AIDS was handled in the United States during the 80's.

Do you know of an undemocratic country that handled AIDS better?

The early AIDS epidemic response was absolutely terrible, but at least when the government would not respond, civil society did as best it could.

Was that really a coverup or willful neglect due to a cultural atmosphere that was massively homophobic? From what I understand the Reagan administration was reluctant to put resources into something that was considered a "gay mans disease", really wouldn't have played well with the majority of the electorate at the time.

>From what I understand the Reagan administration was reluctant to put resources into something that was considered a "gay mans disease"

indeed, let us not forget that "AIDS" was originally called "GRID", "Gay-related immune deficiency" and was also called things like "gay cancer" and "gay plague". It was unfortunate events like Ryan White's infection [1] that started to raise awareness for HIV/AIDS.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_White#Ryan_White_and_publ...

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