AIDS Slanders

Both President Reagan and Pope John Paul II died in the last year and in both cases commentators said something to the effect that their legacy is tarnished by their actions regarding AIDS. This is nothing but an attempt to tarnish the reputation of two conservative heroes.

In Reagan's case, the accusations started soon after AIDS was first discovered. Groups like ACT-UP insisted that more money was needed for AIDS research. They were convinced that there was a simple cure that could be discovered quickly if the government only spent enough money on it.

Medical funding doe not work that way. First you have to isolate the disease before any research can be done on treatment. Lines of inquiry have to be proposed and evaluated before work can begin. All of this happened and by the end of Reagan's term, AIDS research was among the top three in medical funding.

It is now around 20 years later. Billions have been spent on AIDS research and no cure has been found. There are treatments that will delay HIV from developing into AIDS and other treatments that extend the life of people who have AIDS but these are not cures.

That wasn't enough so protestors also claimed that Reagan had not done enough to warn people about AIDS. In response, the government sent a postcard to every household in the country. Again, it was not considered enough. The AIDS activists wanted someone to blame.

AIDS continues to increase. I doubt that there is a sexually active person born in the US who does not know about the risk of AIDS and the need for safe sex but it still is not enough.

Further, nearly everyone who dies from AIDS during the Reagan administration contracted it before anyone knew about AIDS. There is a long period between the original HIV infection and the development of AIDS. This runs from two to seven years. Most of the early cases of AIDS were in people who contracted HIV in the 1970s.

Certainly Reagan cannot be blamed for that. But he is. A made-for-tv movie had him saying callous things about gays with AIDS.

With John Paul II, the reasoning is that he refused to push for condom use so he is responsible for the AIDS crisis in Africa. There are several problems with this reasoning. The two most obvious are that 1) most Africans are Muslim, not Catholic and are therefore unlikely to follow the advice of the Pope, and 2) if someone is ignoring the Pope's position on fidelity, why would he listen to the Pope on condom usage?

Another factor is that AIDS in Africa might not be spreading sexually at all. The heterosexual transmission rate of AIDS is very low in the US where is remains confined to gays and people who share needles. There is a very real possibility that African AIDS is being spread through improper sterilization. This has never been studied for political reasons.

It should also be pointed out that the higher the percentage of Catholics an African country has the lower the percentage of AIDS cases. Again, without further study there is no way of knowing why this is true.

Blaming the Pope for AIDS is particularly heinous because he did take an active interest in AIDS. During a visit to the US he made a point of picking up an infected child. This was during the early days of AIDS when most people were afraid to touch AIDS patients. Many of the AIDS hospices in Africa are Catholic.

While the motives of people who say these things about Reagan are clear - they don't like Reagan's conservative politics, the motives of the John Paul-bashers are more complex. They resent him for not liberalizing the church so they are trying to create a negative consequence for his actions. This in turn pressures the new Pope to be more open to liberalization.