“ Instead of major research efforts to develop a test and medications, there were inane suggestions for forced quarantine
of gay men and an actual forced quarantine of Haitians. Especially in wealthy countries, substantial research funding and public action have converted
AIDS from a devastating epidemic to a manageable chronic disease.
Centers for Disease Control warned that
they were spots where the risk of transmission was high because people met there for sex.
When public health officials must take actions
that are invasive and forceful, like quarantine or travel restrictions, they need to be based in real science and implemented transparently, without recycling prejudices against "risk groups." Otherwise,
quite rationally, people assume public health is biased and unscientific, and
resist. That fatal inaction flowed from the wrong-headed assumption that
only some people got AIDS, and that those people didn't really matter.
As a historian of 20th-century queer and trans politics,
I know that's nothing compared to the toll that HIV, the
virus that causes AIDS, took on our city. It took health experts decades just to notice HIV.
It took four years to develop a blood test for HIV. ”