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| ACT UP, SILENCE=DEATH c. 1987 Then as now, silence is deadly. |
Florida:
49,050 COVID-19 infections June 21-29, 2020.
AIDS activists feel sense of déjà-vu as they watch the coronavirus catastrophe unfold.
The federal government's response to the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 feels all too familiar to AIDS activists. Thirty years ago, activists helped to force the Reagan Administration to acknowledge the existence of that disease. The first case of AIDS emerged in the U.S. in 1980, but it wasn’t until 1985 — nearly 13,000 deaths later — that President Reagan uttered its name publicly. Before, he dismissed it as the “gay plague.”
Sound familiar?
Sound familiar?
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Now, amid another global health crisis, Tom Sheridan, former national director of public policy for the powerful AIDS Action Council, said he is witnessing an eerie repeat of events: the current administration blatantly ignoring early warning signs, the president dismissing the disease as the “Chinese plague” or worse yet using the racial pejorative "Kung Flu." And new infections and death rates are soaring, especially in the South and West. Florida recorded nearly 50,000 new infections the last week of June, 2020. A number so large and astonishing that it defies belief. The government's response has been even more remarkable; to pretend like the numbers do not matter.
“What I feared the most is what I’m seeing now,” said Sheridan, who runs an advocacy strategy firm that helps to mobilize and organize not-for-profit activist groups. “We didn’t learn the lessons we should have learned.”
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Between 1988 and 1993, Sheridan’s advocacy for AIDS proved victorious. In 1990, he was a key architect of the bill that would become the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act, which helped to secure access to healthcare for low-income and uninsured AIDS patients. Then he successfully lobbied for the Americans with Disabilities Act, making it illegal to discriminate against those with HIV or AIDS. And in 1991, his coalition’s efforts effectively doubled the budget for AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health.
Now, he fears, the fight against COVID-19 will be an equally rigorous battle. But with a virus that is so much more easily transmitted, the damage will be worse.
“AIDS was a slow burn,” he said. “Coronavirus is like a wildfire.”
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History Repeats Itself
Sheridan is among a coalition of activists, frontline workers and public health professionals from the AIDS era who are disturbed to see this recent history repeat itself with COVID-19. As vestiges of AIDS and HIV mismanagement resurface in current times, those on the front lines draw chilling similarities between the neglect, denial and misinformation of the Reagan administration and President Trump’s handling of COVID-19, pointing to gaping holes in the U.S. public health system and a harrowing reckoning: Americans are still ill-equipped to weather such a crisis.
“We are now seeing the results of the past 30 years of the destruction of our public health system,” Sheridan said.
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Gleaning lessons and experiences from the AIDS era, epidemiologists and scientists — including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, who played a key role in pushing science-based research and policy reform for AIDS — now understand how to respond when a highly contagious viral pandemic hits: test, treat, trace and isolate, according to Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“In a public health crisis, it’s essential that leaders act quickly, speak plainly and honestly and be guided by science and public health,” Frieden said.
But with the lack of a centralized public health response, such protocols can’t be carried out.
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Joseph Osmundson, a microbiologist and writer who works with the Treatment Action Group, an AIDS policy and research think tank, says the scientists with whom he works have been clear on a public health plan to contain the coronavirus since it began to ravage the country. But without a cohesive public healthcare system, there is no uniform public policy to support such a plan.
“That is why everything is falling between the cracks,” Osmundson said.
And now, like in the 1980s and ’90s, advocacy groups are scrambling to fill in where public health policy falls short.
“The COVID advocacy community is really built upon what we’ve learned from HIV,” he said.
In March, the Treatment Action Group partnered with the Latino Commission on AIDS and the Black Leadership Commission on Health to launch the COVID-19 Working Group, which includes Osmundson and major players from the AIDS era.
And they, like Sheridan, are distressed.
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“Watching PTSD be triggered in those people who lived through the ’80s and ’90s in New York in real time — by some echoes of bureaucratic murder, basically — has been intensely harrowing,” Osmundson said.
In a disturbingly similar fashion to AIDS-era mismanagement 35 years ago, the federal government has been criticized for a laggard response to COVID-19, a failing that was corroborated in June 25’s Government Accountability Office report, which laid out shortcomings that included a lack of testing and of ensuring that hospitals had adequate supplies. In late January, President Trump failed to heed warnings from public health officials of a potential international health emergency. In February, he assured attendees of his rallies that the virus would vanish when the weather warmed up. And in March, he rejected the type of aggressive testing regime called for by the World Health Organization. A Yale University epidemiologist went so far as to call this pattern not simply negligent but deliberate.
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Tracking and tracing
One sign of the broken public health system is the failure to carry out widespread contact tracing, a key pillar in quelling the spread of the virus as the country reopens.
The practice involves identifying and interviewing anyone who comes into close contact with a confirmed case of COVID-19. It has been credited with reining in the virus in Germany and South Korea, but it has never been fully carried out in the United States.
But for contact tracing to work, public health officials say, a system of social services must be set up, including quarantine plans, policies to protect vulnerable communities and delivery services for essential goods. With COVID-19, as with AIDS, such services have been sorely lacking.
Originally posted by Megan Botel, Los Angeles Times. Edited and paraphrased here.
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