Alkibiádēs said:
The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. That's your definition of things turning out pretty well? Not to mention that he mishandled the aids epidemy. |
I was going to mention this. The Reagan Admististrations response to the AIDS epideminc was criminally negligent.
bdbdbd said:
Russia was never Soviet Union, just one part of it. When Russia declared independence from Soviet Union, was when Soviet Union fell.
This is new. Never knew US having an AIDS epidemy. I always thought it was just Africa around Sahara to have AIDS epidemy. I remember reading about it even in school back in the 80's. |
Yes. Yes, they did. A bad one. People were dying like flies. Many of them misrable in pain and alone without any help because hospitals would refuse to treat them. And the Reagan administration stood by doing nothing for large parts of it, presumably because it was predominantly gay people dying at first. They only started funding research when Rock Hudson, Reagans close personal friend died of it, years into the epidemic and even then the governmental response was slow and insufficient. They even decreased funding several times during the height of the epidemic.
Advances in AIDS reseach and treatment, during the time were largely driven by doctors and activists from within the gay community trying to understand and cure what was wasting them away. Most of the early research was privately funded. While there probably was no way of preventing HIV from getting into the national blood supply, suffcient research into the cause of GRID as AIDS was known at the time could have lead to effective tests faster and protected thousands from getting infected. It was gay activists who first outlined and promoted what we know today as 'safe sex'. They single-handedly brought the condom industry back into full swing. The governement meanwhile had no official guideline on risk-behaviours or cause of AIDS.
A single pamphlet called 'How to have sex in an epidemic' (penned by gay AIDS victims) drastically brought down infection rates of various STDs in gay men by as much as 90% within weeks. This shows how a more swift response from the government with proper research-funding and information on risk-behavious could have prevented lots of new infections and saved countless of lives. And this is not even taking any kind of research into life-prolonging measurements or even a cure into account.
So yeah, the Reagan administration did huge damage there. Just from a standpoint of desease control their response was catastrophic. But then again, there is no real guarantee that a democratic/non Reagan republican administration would have reacted much different. There was no gay friendly party really, until one of the activists got into a shouting match with Bill Clinton, making him promise that he would take the epidemic and research into a cure head-on if he got into office.
