Bush (And Reagan!) Versus AIDS Patients: The Blamethrowing

With the death of George Herbert Walker Bush, we now go back in time to the late 80s and early 90s, when AIDS activists blamed Reagan and Bush for AIDS deaths. Particularly, this HuffPo piece dropping the blame "nearly 10 years into the epidemic, 150,000 cases of people with HIV had been reported in the U.S., and 100,000 people had died due to AIDS."

This was largely the political view of American gay advocates at the time, who blamed AIDS deaths on Bush and his predecessor, never mind a considerable list of achievements under Reagan (a number of which that were booed as he delivered them at a 1987 speech). But as Elizabeth Whelan wrote in 1988 in Reason, there was precious little the government could do about those deaths:

Can anyone who knows the facts deny that AIDS, as it appears in the homosexual and drug-using population, is a self-inflicted disease? A promiscuous homosexual lifestyle carries inherent health risks, and gays knew this by the mid-1970s when rates of sexually transmitted diseases soared. Just because AIDS or any other fatal disease was not specified on the "morbidity menu" prior to 1982, how can they look to anyone but themselves for an explanation why these infections occurred? This is not to say that gays deserve AIDS, any more than cigarette smokers deserve lung cancer. It comes with the territory.

Was the government blasé about the AIDS epidemic in the years between 1981 and 1984? Yes and no. "Yes" in the sense that 20/20 hindsight now shows AIDS to be a more insidious and formidable opponent than was first thought. But "no" in that federal research dollars were forthcoming, progress was made, and Shilts seems to have forgotten that America had and continues to have other health concerns demanding our attention. While in mid-1983 there were some 1,279 cases of AIDS on record, in that year nearly 450,000 people died from the effects of cigarette-related disease (also the consequence of a chosen behavior).

Gay sexual behavior was always going to be hard to police and needle-sharing as well. In 2000, the CDC released a report on high-risk AIDS behaviors (PDF); its findings included

• 30% of IV drug users had used needles they suspected or were used by others (Table 10, p. 17)
• 49% of those surveyed at gay bars had four or more sexual partners in the prior year (Table 12, p. 19)
• 37% used condoms sometimes or never when having receptive anal intercourse (Table 13, p. 20)

The problems involved are those of addiction, and male evolved sexual preferences, which revolve around partner novelty. Both are hard to solve. Blaming that on Reagan or Bush fails to consider the choices gay men (and drug users) were still making nearly a decade after the latter was out of office.