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Comment by etrabroline | Hacker News Reader

The Regan administration had two options. The first was to spend billions of dollars hoping to find a cure while certain behaviors continued to spread the virus. (what these activists wanted) The second option was to reduce the occurrence of those behaviors, namely intravenous recreational drug use, and unprotected sex with large numbers of sexual partners, which is particularly widespread among homosexual males.

The war on drugs had some horrible consequences, but in this case it was a positive. Even the very liberal New York City government shut down gay bathhouses to reduce the amount of unprotected sex and had some success in reducing infection rates.

Telling people to stop a selfish and destructive behavior is not demonizing them or ignoring their problems.

EDIT: This was meant to be a reply to djaque.

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They did absolutely nothing. Reagan didn't even say the name of the disease for FIVE years.

He did, however, relish that it affected gay men. See e.g. his comment from 1981, "maybe the Lord brought down the plague because illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments."

He finally, in 1986, allocated funds - so ridiculously low that congress allocated the five-fold amount. He tried to cut it down before passing that. In 1987, he did cut down the money allocated for research. (Which has sod all to do with drug use or sex - we didn't even know what AIDS really was)

The gay community lost an entire generation of men. Because America had a Republican administration that, during an epidemic, chose to gleefully[1] let people die instead of acting. Meanwhile, they chose to privately help their friends - Reagan helped his buddy Roy Cohn to get experimental drug trial.

The whole "they just wanted to suppress recreational drug use and unprotected sex" is BLATANT retconning. Nobody was aware how it spread, people assumed you could get it through touch, saliva, etc.

Trying to spin this blatant murder of gay people by an administration into a public health concern is frankly disgusting.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids

I think its possible Trumps is actually striking the tune with fellow Republicans to get their likes learning anout Reagan slow approach to AIDS - I was shocked when during last SOTU, Trump announced that within one decade we will finally find a cure for AIDS/HIV. What gives??

They did not see the problem as a black and white problem with two active solutions. They took a third option: they did nothing until public opinion had shifted and Rock Hudson, Reagan's personal friend, died of the disease.

They. did. nothing.

It was worse than that. They laughed and made jokes while they did nothing [1].

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids

And remember how they immediately jumped on "Legionaries' Disease" even though it only affected a room full of geriatric legionaries.

> The first was to spend billions of dollars hoping to find a cure while certain behaviors continued to spread the virus.

And yet here we are, with governments spending billions of dollars to find a cure when we can stop the spread of COVID-19 by reducing certain behaviors.

The difference in government response to the (ongoing, btw) AIDS crisis and COVID-19 has a hell of a lot to do with the fact that COVID-19 is not seen as a “gay” disease, and is not “othered.”

Having sex is all it takes to get HIV. Once. I won’t sit here and listen to you claim it’s “selfish and destructive behavior” to have sex. Once.

Take your thinly veiled homophobia and moralizing elsewhere please. It’s not a good look, and I don’t want to hear it in my professional community.

Funnily enough, in Italy (where I grew up) there was next to no association in the public mind between HIV/AIDS and homosexuality. It was linked to drug use and sexual promiscuity, but it was drilled into us that any kind of unprotected sex (and for most people, that was automatically construed as heterosexual sex) was a risky behaviour.

I was honestly very surprised when, towards the end of the nineties and early 2000s, it gradually dawned upon me that elsewhere there was a connotation of HIV/AIDS as having been somehow associated with homosexuality ‘abroad’.

For us, in Italy, it was very much perceived as an activity-related risk, not an identity-related one. (As I dare say it should be, methinks.)

Same (growing up in Israel). Didn’t realize it’s “gay” until much later.

Here’s from 1992: https://youtu.be/rQTbSFojYRE

Sure, but getting AIDS from "regular" sex is pretty rare and difficult. The chance of infection is very low.

My point is that the governmental message was deliberately tailored to address promiscuity and unprotected sex, rather than single out any specific demographic or minority.

It can't be that difficult. Look at Africa, for example.

Google 'dry sex and AIDS' first. You might have to broaden your definition of normal.

My definition of 'normal' includes men fucking each other in the butt. I hope yours does too.

Everyone who's at all serious about tackling AIDS in Africa (rather than making some kind of veiled political or moral point) is focused on reducing unprotected sex.

Absolutely - I'm the poster child for tolerance.Why would you jump to such an ungenerous assumption?

Would you say, on reflection, that you followed the site guidelines by taking the most positive interpretation of my post possible?

Transmission rates vary widely by sex act. 2/3 of transmissions in the US are between homosexual men. It's not homophobia to observe that some populations are at more risk from HIV.

You’re right. But the homophobia isn’t in the statistics (which the commenter didn’t provide, anyways). The homophobia was in the comments about “destructive lifestyles” and stating that it was because of rampant sexual partners.

As I stated, you only have to have sex once (and I don’t believe that statement is controversial) to contract HIV.

Please examine your own biases, because if your takeaway from the comment that I was addressing was “what, it’s true that gay guys are more likely to get it” then it would seem that you take the comment to readily describe “gays” writ large, which is also pretty homophobic.

And in Africa most transmissions are between heterosexuals. But you never hear the same rhetoric about irresponsible promiscuous heteros.

>But you never hear the same rhetoric about irresponsible promiscuous heteros.

We did. Sort of. Heterosexuals weren't singled out for caution about promiscuous sex, because most of the public messaging assumed heterosexual relations anyway. But the emphasis was always on promiscuity.

No, you did not see rhetoric accusing heterosexuals as a class of being prone to promiscuous behavior. Unfortunately, even in 2020, it seems to be necessary to spend paragraphs and paragraphs explaining what homophobia is until people get it. Here is an article from 1987 that does some of the work:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-07-20-me-2954-s...

It would be inappropriate for anyone outside Africa to say how people in Africa should behave or live.

Your facts may need complementing, as only 30% of transmission in Africa is sexual "between heterosexuals". See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12665438/

I am talking about sexual transmission, not transmission in general. The study you link to does not suggest that gay sex is responsible for the majority of instances of sexual HIV transmission in Africa.

>It would be inappropriate for anyone outside Africa to say how people in Africa should behave or live.

Here's a thought: it also might not be appropriate for straight people to tell gay people how to live.

Understood. But Covid is of course a different disease, and different in many ways. No consent is required to obtain it from another person. No time spent in private naked. Just be near someone in line at the bus stop and a sneeze. So there's that.

Of course it is. And really, one of the things that gets me fired up is that comparing HIV to the current pandemic is that it’s just so lazy, and inaccurate!

And yet, here we are. It’s a tempting comparison for a lot of people because it’s the worst thing in recent memory.

And that leads to the other thing that gets me fired up - people trivializing HIV as “not as bad” or even sometimes as an example of a “good” public health response. It’s just so different in almost every respect that it’s inevitably insulting.

(Of course this is not directed at you, I’m vehemently agreeing with you I believe. :)

> Of course it is. And really, one of the things that gets me fired up is that comparing HIV to the current pandemic is that it’s just so lazy, and inaccurate!

God, please tell this to my coworker. He's a biology teacher at a high school for God's sake, and he's going around saying that we should go back to school because we don't shut down for HIV, and that the novel Corona virus isn't any different. The kicker is he, of course, still wants his soccer team to practice and be able to play their games and such. And he's, sadly, likely going to get his wish. But, seriously, the man is a biology teacher arguing this. It's so damn frustrating, especially as the school won't do anything about it.

I wouldn’t expect every biology teacher to be an expert on disease, of course... but wow. I would indeed expect a biology teacher to grasp the fundamentals of disease transmission.

He is not worong, the coronavirus is not as scary as being reported. The death rate are very low.

I did not know that getting HIV required consent, or being naked.

But you get the idea. You could opt out. People did. And it didn't take totally isolating yourself in a clean room.

Unless you mean rape or something. But that's a violent crime, and a tiny, tiny fraction of the public health issue that is an infectious disease.

I wasn't paying much attention when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. Probably I was reading Tom Clancy novels about Jack Ryan. White privilege, etc.

Exactly. One of the biggest risk factors for COVID-19 is obesity. (See https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid... )

Is our government demanding that people whose lifetyle makes them obese or overweight pay for the cost of the coronavirus epidemic?

> The Regan administration had two options.

Por que no los dos?

He did do both. From wikipedia:

>"It's been one of the top priorities with us, and over the last 4 years, and including what we have in the budget for '86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS in addition to what I'm sure other medical groups are doing." He also remarked, "Yes, there's no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer." Annual AIDS related funding was $44 million in 1983, 2 years after he took office, and was $1.6 billion in 1988, an increase of over 3,600 percent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_policy_of_the_Ronald_...

You cherry-picked the end of the statement, but you left off the beginning. It says a lot:

> Although AIDS was first identified in 1981, Reagan did not mention it publicly for several more years, notably during a press conference in 1985 and several speeches in 1987. During the press conference in 1985, Reagan expressed skepticism in allowing children with AIDS to continue in school

Reagan waited years, and a generation of gay men died. Better late than never, I suppose, but he didn’t do nearly enough and his response to the crisis is not worthy of honor or respect.

>The second option was to reduce the occurrence of those behaviors, namely intravenous recreational drug use

The Reagan administration banned needle exchanges:

https://www.csis.org/blogs/smart-global-health/history-ban-f...

>, and unprotected sex with large numbers of sexual partners, which is particularly widespread among homosexual males.

The continuing pathologization of homosexuals reduced their access to medical services, which prevented them from being educated about responsible sexual behavior. See e.g.:

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.82.9....

Overall the Reagan administration's response cannot be called prophylactic.

Conservatives continue to ban needle exchanges in some of the areas with the highest rates of HIV in the US.

Source? I tried to find out this but couldn’t. Would help me make a compelling argument to a conservative friend.

I live in DC. We have voted overwhelmingly to fund needle exchanges and have one of the highest rates of HIV in the country. The republican congress intervened into our local budget to prohibit us from allocating any of our local tax dollars to needle exchanges.

Apparently they ended this funding ban at some point, but I'm having trouble finding articles on when exactly this was - it seems like it is repeatedly lifted and then reinstituted https://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/154047-holmes-n...

e: oh come on! why am i being downvoted?

Particularly relevant given that he's the VP - but Pence notably slow-walked allowing a temporary needle exchange in southern Indiana in 2015 (state law forbade one at the time), and then immediately signed a bill into law that increased criminal penalties for carrying needles without a prescription: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/02/how-mike-p...

Taken together, I'd argue that counts.

That article also talks a little about background, and links off to other relevant articles that might serve your reading interests.

  The Reagan administration banned needle exchanges

Declining to include Federal funding in his budget is not "banning".

Funding bills originate in the House. The House was Democrat controlled for Reagan's entire tenure. The Speaker or Ways and Means could have added that funding at any time. There was never a line-item veto mechanism.

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