“I literally got chills up and down my spine,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was then rising star at the NIH. “I said, I don’t know what’s going on here, but this is a new disease.”
HIV and COVID have a number of parallels, including a disproportionate impact on minorities and those who have substandard healthcare. But COVID-19 quickly mobilized a national effort to battle it, resulting in highly effective and safe vaccines in record time and treatments that have helped ease the death toll, all in a matter of months rather than decades.
It was not until 1983 that the virus causing the illnesses and deaths was identified, and 1985 that a test for HIV became widely available. The tides began to turn in 1987 when the first treatment, azidothymidine garnered approval as the first of dozens of antiretroviral treatments now available. “It was a disease primarily killing a disenfranchised population -- gay men,” said Phill Wilson, founder of The Black AIDS Institute. According to Wilson, scientific and political efforts were propelled by activists holding them accountable.AIDS patient Deotis McMather sleeps in bed at San Francisco General Hospital's AIDS ward 5B, circa 1983. After being diagnosed with AIDS, he returned to his apartment where all of his belongings were thrown out onto the street.
Members of the AIDS activist group ACT UP protest at the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration on Oct. 11, 1988, in Rockville, Md.There are other parallels between the COVID-19 pandemic and HIV. People who can’t access treatment still die of HIV and it is still is a leading cause of death in some countries.
“With misdeeds conducted in the past -- how syphilis was dealt with for Black communities, and mistrust with the way power has been exercised in a racist way in institutions of power, the police, the electoral process, the war on drugs -- it all contributes to medical mistrust,” Wilson said.“It wasn’t until the last 8 or 9 years that we began to analyze HIV data for transgender people,” Chung said.
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