AIDS AND GOVERNMENT

AIDS AND

GOVERNMENT

12 YEARS OF NEGLECT

The first U.S. cases of AIDS were reported to the Centers for Disease Control in 1981 (see card 92), soon after President Ronald Reagan took office. By the time Reagan first spoke of the epidemic,

six years later, more than 36,000 Americans had contracted AIDS, and almost 21,000 had died. The worldwide scope of the crisis was evident, but the U.S. remained the only Western industrialized nation without a government-sponsored AIDS education program until 1988, when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop offended both his Commander in Chief and his conservative Christian supporters by distributing an AIDS information brochure (see card 96).

President George Bush was inaugurated in 1989, as the AIDS crisis deepened. While he paid lip service to the concept of fighting AIDS for four years, he opposed the full funding of the $275 million Ryan White bill for AIDS treatment, refused to allow those with HIV to visit the U.S., confined HIV-positive refugees in military camps (see card 91), and refused to follow the simple guidelines set forth by his own Presidential Commission on AIDS. The 1992 Republican Party platform was especially condemnatory of those whose "lifestyles" were supposedly implicated in their AIDS diagnosis.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton vowed that if elected he would lift the travel ban on HIV-positive people, appoint a federal AIDS policy coördinator, dedicate more money for AIDS research, and fully fund the Ryan White bill. Hope was kindled among AIDS activists when, in the first sentence of his victory speech, Clinton called AIDS a national priority. In February 1993, he tried to lift the travel ban but the Senate voted his proposal down. Next Card 90: AIDS AND RELIGION: Dogma versus Conscience