I'll sometimes see people ask, How could many of the same people who warned us against making moral judgments about HIV/AIDS now moralize covid? After some reading, I think I can now answer this question. 🧵
First, moralizing HIV/AIDS was not exclusively a rightwing phenomenon. It came in several directions. For instance, many leftwing activists claimed that the Reagan administration "allowed" people to die of HIV/AIDS, implying the government was morally culpable for every death.
Now this was partly motivated by the understandable rage and despair of gay men who saw their friends and lovers dying horrible deaths. However, the conventional wisdom that the government was slow to act and ignored the disease is a bit of an oversimplification.
two examples that contradict the conventional wisdom: (1) In 1984, Reagan's secretary of health & human services held a press conference announcing that the cause of AIDS had been found despite the fact that its etiology was still an open question in the eyes of many scientists.
(2) In 1987, the FDA approved the first AIDS treatment drug, AZT, in record time. AZT was approved based on one human trial that ended early and despite the fact that the drug was extremely toxic and carried serious risks. Thus the government was not immune to action bias.
Moreover, while the disease may have been unfairly ignored in the early days, by the mid-eighties there was an extreme overreaction in the form of a scare campaign to convince the public AIDS was about to spread beyond well-defined risk groups to the general public.
For example, in 1987 Oprah Winfrey said on her show that experts predicted 1 in 5 heterosexuals would die of AIDS in the next five years. Already at the time, any sober look at the data made it clear AIDS was not spreading to the general population via heterosexual intercourse.
Nonetheless, the scare campaign persisted. Why? For the media, it was profitable to sell the idea of imminent catastrophe. Some credentialed doctors and scientists were able to become famous by making predictions of doom when they should have known better.
For both the left and right there were political reasons to keep the fear going. The right saw AIDS as an opportunity to scare people back into traditional morality. The left saw it as a chance to democratize the disease by making it everyone's concern.
I want to address the left's motives since I used to be somewhat sympathetic. I now think this faux egalitarianism is harmful. Terrifying people who are at essentially zero risk is a really bad way to show solidarity with people who are at risk. It does not help either group.
We see this concretely in the public health push for "safe sex." Here condoms are the precise forerunner of masks 30+ years later. It became shibboleth that if you or your partner didn't wear a condom during sex you were taking your life in your hands.
The problem with this formula is it only made sense if you had zero concept of relative risk. For the non-hemophilic non-IV drug using heterosexual, the risk of AIDS was much closer to dying of shark attack than an automobile accident.
Nonetheless, public health had managed to encroach on people's intimate lives and this arguably became an end in itself. Once an HIV/AIDS industry got off the ground it became self-perpetuating.
In conclusion, I don't think it's accurate to say w/ covid public health forgot lessons it learned from AIDS. In terms of media terror campaigns, false universalism, the politicization of science/medicine, & utopian schemes to reengineer people's lives, HIV/AIDS is the blueprint.
further reading: The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS by Michael Fumento Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge by Steven Epstein Serious Adverse Events by Celia Farber
