Check out this AP story on the USAToday’s website:
U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could “pose a dangerous public health risk.”
As a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 1992, Huckabee answered 229 questions submitted to him by The Associated Press. Besides a quarantine, Huckabee suggested that Hollywood celebrities fund AIDS research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies.
In 1992 it was already well known that AIDS is not spread through casual contact.
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I noted this in a comment in a different thread, but Hucka-bigot is further quoted in the AP article as saying:
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I was so horrified when I read this – but not surprised. What HAS surprised me, though, is the number of people – reasonable, moderate to progressive, educated people – who have said things like, “I don’t know much about him, but Huckabee seems like a good guy.” Or, “Huckabee seems like the most reasonable of the Republican candidates.” This kind of relying on personality and persona over knowledge and beliefs is what got us George W. Bush. My fear is it’s happening all over again.
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p>Also scary is that Huckabee’s comments might seem reasonable in lots of communities in this country.
Lucky Hucky sounds so bloody reasonable at times (Paul on Iraq, Huckabee on prison reform and sometimes taxes) that it’s easy to forget that at base he’s nutty as a hatter.
From a review of Jonathan Chait’s recent book on Firedoglake:
The emphasis on character by the (lazy) media is being consciously exploited by Republican operatives, in other words. That’s how character flaws get stuck to Democratic candidates like feathers to tar.
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p>…the sad fact is that if HIV/AIDS activists had not obstructed normal public health procedures in the early to mid 1980s, the pandemic might not have gotten as out of control as it did. I know the stated reason for the obstruction, but they weren’t particularly helping the rest of us.
,…I won’t cite to sources like I usually do (most of this is from memory and the sources are probably not probably available over the Internet) but in the early to mid 1980s when HIV/AIDS was identified, and was associated with homosexuals, IV drug users and Haitians immigrants(!), all three groups at the time were considered the dregs of American society.
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p>I won’t go into the IV drug users or the Haitian immigrants–whose story I do not know–since most of the HIV/AIDS activists that I was referring to were primarily gay. Remember that this was from the early 1980s, and remember that what came to be called HIV/AIDS was then referred to as GRIDS–the Gay Related Immuno Deficiency Syndrome. We first read about it in 1982, in a now long defunct publication NYNative. Nobody knew why what was going on at the time was going on, but it was obvious that something was going on.
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p>That’s the build-up. At least one reason why HIV/AIDS activists opposed use of usual public health practices to stem the HIV/AIDS pandemic is that they feared–probably correctly–that those who were identified as being infected would lose their jobs, their housing, their relatives and so forth. Remember, a positive diagnosis of HIV would likely have been the “scarlet letter” that would identify the person as being homosexual, and that was in the time when being identified as being identified as being homsexual was virtually a kiss of rejection from society.
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p>On the other hand, rejection of use of public health procedures allowed the pandemic to spread, probably more than it need to have been, which put the rest of us at risk. What is the solution? I don’t know. What I do know is that most of my friends from the late 1970s and early 1980s are dead, and the only reason that I’m alive today is that my partner (now spouse) and I read NYNative. And he, being of German descent, was very conservative. On health issues.
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p>I could go on and on about black men on the “down low” and Hispanic men in recent years, but I’ll refrain. It is seriously a tragedy what homophobia is doing to those communities..
don’t presume the down low to be the sole realm of blacks and hispanics. have you not noticed the parade of white bastards of late? haggard, craig, bob allen, richard curtis…
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p>fear of loss of everything was indeed a factor in many people not getting tested and treated early on. it still is, but to a lesser degree in some locations that now have protective laws on the books. the fear is and was real and not based on nothing. i will never forget my mother chewing out her dentist when he stated that he wouldn’t treat gay people any more. he was one of millions of health care professionals that thought they could choose who deserved health care. employers and families had similar points of view.
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p>our society’s homophobia and the reagan administration are largely to blame for the epidemic not being addressed properly from the start. i’m not sure why you pin this on the “HIV activists”. let me tell you a personal story. my mother was a county public health nurse. she saw what was happening (people not getting tested, or being abandoned after diagnosis). and the country health department where she worked had ZERO interest in getting involved in protecting the public health from this disease. so she decided to start a testing/life support network of her own. the most difficult problem she faced, besides funding, was gaining the trust of the people who needed her services. they were afraid. i don’t blame them. we lived in one of those states that now has passed a very nasty anti-gay constitutional amendment. it was a hater state then, it is a hater state now. but she plugged away, having conversations and holding info sessions. and getting gay people on the board and working for the org. and she slowly gained enough trust that the org became what it was intended to be. but you see, that path was long and it took highly dedicated people like her to work on their own time to break through the thick pall of homophobia and resultant fear that existed there in the 80s. so you have it wrong. it wasn’t the HIV activists who caused the problems. it was the HIV activists who found the solutions.
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p>and btw, they allayed the fears of people being found out by setting up an elaborate system of using only numbers to identify people. if they had demanded on knowing identities, few would have gotten tested.
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p>You may be able to persuade me otherwise (I doubt it) but “on the down low” is black slang used by blacks for black men who want to have sex with men while appearing in public as being heterosexual. Does that mean that there are not white men or Hispanic men who do precisely the same thing? Certainly not. But as far as I can tell they don’t use the same term. Whites? Closeted. Hispanics? Floritas.
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p>The problem, that you may wish to ignore but that is entirely relevant to the topic at hand, is that black men who are “on the down low” oftentimes believe that HIV/AIDS is a gay disease, and they do not identify as being gay. As a result, they do not protect themselves when having sex, either with men, or with their black female companions. Several years ago, it was reported that one of the demographics that was registering the largest increase in HIV/AIDS was black women. And that was primarily because of homophobia in the black community.
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p>NB: A couple of years ago, it was reported that the second largest demographic for new HIV/AIDS infections was Hispanics. White men seemed to have been getting the message. To late for many of them, unfortunately.
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p>Another of my little stories. A few years ago, my then partner, now spouse, was in Germany rehabilitating our little hovel. I would go out to some gay dance clubs for my weekly dance fix (no sex; kept the weight down). I found it interesting that they were giving out condoms for free.
and this guy in a pink bunny suit with a bunch of guys walked up to me, said something I couldn’t understand and then gave me a condom.
Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On is still the best book on the early years of the AIDS epidemic. There’s plenty of blame to go around – the indifference of the Reagan administration, slow action by blood banks, resistance from elements of the gay community to changing the bath house culture, resistance from social conservatives to providing effective educational materials, condoms and clean needles. What happened is depressing enough, but it could have been so much worse in this country if not for the HIV/AIDS activist community raising awareness every way they could from ActUp to the Names Project to AIDS ribbons, pushing education and testing through community health centers, hotlines, bars and anywhere vulnerable populations could be reached, and demanding research and appropriate funding.
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p>…the stigma issue, and I understood it at the time. I did not need Randy Shilts’s book to tell me.
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p>But, riddle me this. Who do the HIV/AIDS activists believe they were protecting by making sure that public health officials would be unable to use standard public health procedures to at least try to stem the pandemic? Those of us who were infected were infected. But those of us who were not infected might not have become infected if standard public health procedures been brought to bear.
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p>Those who were already infected should have been given palliative care, which, in the early days, was not available. But the activists did not do us any favor by increasing the likelihood that more of us would become infected.
At what point was the method of transmission widely known–not just by the scientists, but by the population then considered to be most at risk?
at one point in the early 1980s it was believed that HIV/AIDS was caused by (ta da!) butyl or amyle nitrate (otherwise known as poppers). It was idiotic, of course, but that is one reason that sale of popppers was banned in MA.
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p>By 1983-84 or so, it was known that HIV/AIDS was caused by a virus–remember the controversy over whether Anthony Fauci of the US’s CDC or a French scientist (don’t recall his name) had first identified the virus, but it was shortly thereafter determined that the method of transmission was identified–transfer of bodily fluid. And it wasn’t long thereafter that an HIV test was developed. But all of that was well before 1992, when Huckabee made his idiotic comment.
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p>I don’t do biology, but from what I have read it is my understanding that the research on HIV and how it does what it does has markedly advanced knowledge of how viruses work. There have been a number of articles in Scientific American over the last 20 years on the topic. But, it’s a shame that it required a pandemic to spur such research.
but by the population then considered to be most at risk
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p>…and, I hate to have to tell you, I can’t truthfully respond to it. Let’s understand, there are multiple populations who are at risk. White guys who identify (note the term) as being gay have apparently absorbed the information. White guys who do not identify as being gay (the Larry Craigs and Ted Haggards, for example, guys who have homosex in parks or in the Boston Public Library) may not have.
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p>Black guys who identify as being gay probably have absorbed the information–on the old NYTimes gay rights board, there was one young commenter who definitely did. But you’ve seen the discussion here about black guys on the “down low” who do not identify as being “gay” but like to have sex with men “on the side”–and I’ve known more than a few. There were reports several years ago that they believed that HIV/AIDS is a gay disease, and, since they are not (self-identified as being) gay, they are not susceptible to it. I believe that there was an entire series on that in the Globe several years ago, which may still be on-line. The gist of the series was that homophobia in the black community was killing black people, and that some predominantly black churches were becoming concerned.
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p>I have sufficiently little information about HIV/AIDS information among Hispanics that I really do not want to comment about that demographic.
HIV/AIDS activists weren’t a monolith. You’d also know that they were hardly capable of “making sure” of anything. In the early years, most worked with ridiculously little funding and institutional support. I don’t buy that their efforts to educate on safer sex practices and to encourage testing increased the likelihood of more people being infected. I remember that there was a sharp drop in the new infection rate among gay men as information about HIV/AIDS and education efforts took hold. It’s also a leap on your part to think that ‘standard public health practices’ would have done better. Contact tracing wasn’t going to help with men who had multiple anonymous encounters or with those determined to protect closeted partners. The entire community – not just activists – rejected the idea of quarantine.
…no, contact tracing would not have been 100% perfect. But it might have been better than doing nothing.
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p>…no, HIV testing would not have been 100% perfect. But it might have been better than doing nothing.
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p>..no, closing the bath-houses (I went to a few in NYC in my younger years) might not have been 100% perfect, but it may have been a little better than nothing. (I know the arguments for their not having done so, so there is no need to rehash them here)
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p>What you are incorrect is in your assertion that
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p>It’s also a leap on your part to think that ‘standard public health practices’ would have done better.
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p>Actually, it is a leap on your part to presume that standard public health practices would not have done better than doing nothing. Standard public health practices have helped stem more than a few pandemics in the past, since they were first instituted in the early 20th century. Do some research on Typhoid Mary and contact tracing, and then get back to me.
HIV/AIDS activists were the source of the great deal that was done to fight the epidemic in the early years – including pushing for research dollars, building service organizations, educating about the disease and how it spreads, providing anonymous testing programs, advocating for closing the bathhouses (eventually successfully) and discouraging unsafe sexual practices. Their efforts were reflected in a sharp decline in new infections in the gay community. Your claim that “nothing” was done and that HIV/AIDS activists were to blame is just bizarre. There were disagreements in approach and emphasis, but overall their efforts were indisputably helpful. The only standard public health practices that were not followed were mandatory contact tracing (voluntary tracing did take place – remember “Patient Zero”? – although with questionable results) and quarantining, and the rejection of these measures stems from the reasons I gave above – perceived low effectiveness and broad-based opposition- not some sort of culpable inaction on the part of HIV/AIDS activists.
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p>I’ll also decline your invitation to revisit the history of science and medicine. I spent seven years in that field at the University of Chicago and Harvard University. I could be much more of a bore here than you, I suspect, about the likes of Snow, Koch, Pasteur, Park, Baker and Reed. You seem like a bright person. It’s a shame that you apparently feel the need to talk down to people.
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p>…at least in part because, I believe, we are addressing two different periods in time and two different issues.
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p>It is indeed true that HIV/AIDS activists were instrumental in pushing for increased funding for research, but that was largely after ACT-UP was founded. And that was in 1987. It is also true that Larry Kramer, who helped found ACT-UP had earlier founded an HIV/AIDS organization, Gay Mens Health Crisis, but that was largely limited to NYC, and he left it in 1985 or so because he believed it to have been politically impotent.
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p>I was writing about public health measures that could have been undertaken in the 1982-85 time frame, earlier than ACT-UP, that in more than a few ways were resisted by gay, not HIV/AIDS, activists (there was a difference), particuclarly in San Francisco.
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p>You may be correct that new infections among white gay men appear to be decreasing, percentage wise, as a result of education. But they are not the only people who are at risk, as I’ve described above.
You prove that you have taken your signature to heart.
Because this was a disease that had a stigma, policymakers and experts steered clearer of this than usual. Some gay activist groups — ACT UP particularly — put on a full-court press for “a cure for AIDS”. Of course, no virus has ever been “cured” in Western medicine…at best you can treat the symptoms or innoculate against it ahead of time.
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p>Millions of dollars and thousands of hours of research were spent in a direction that didn’t hold out much hope. Now that we treat the effects of the disease, lifespan is much longer; there are many recorded cases of people living more than 20 years after first testing HIV-positive.