Dr. Anthony S. Fauci saw early on how the virus was killing people whose ability to fight disease had weakened disastrously. “I said, ‘Whoa, we really have an issue here,’ ” he said. “It seems to be spreading and spreading.”
Dr. Deborah L. Birx, his colleague in the current struggle to tame the novel coronavirus, recalled moments “when you not only couldn’t make a diagnosis, you didn’t know what the problem was, and you didn’t know how to treat it.”
“It was,” she said, “devastating.”
Neither of them had the coronavirus pandemic in mind when they made those comments. Instead, they were reflecting on a much earlier time in their public health careers — the 1980s and ’90s — when another plague raised discomfiting questions about how vigorously the United States dealt with ruinous infection. For both doctors, the enemy then was H.I.V., the human immunodeficiency virus, which at its direst led to the life-threatening acquired immune deficiency syndrome, best known as AIDS.
As shown in this latest offering from Retro Report, which uses video to cast a spotlight on past events and help illuminate the present, the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s resembled the coronavirus pandemic in a notable respect: It caught this country napping.
“The flags were going up, and the warning bells were rung,” said Allan M. Brandt, a historian of medicine in a remote interview with Retro Report. But “the United States was extremely poorly prepared to deal with H.I.V.,” Mr. Brandt said. “We didn’t have a recent history of massive infectious epidemic diseases. We didn’t have a preparedness apparatus.”
“One of the things about epidemics is that the clock is always moving, and that was really true with H.I.V.,” he continued. “Many people died because of the very slow and resistant and inadequate and inconsistent responses.”
Sounds familiar in the age of Covid-19, some would say.
AIDS has yet to be conquered, but medications have greatly subdued it in this country, to such an extent that Americans routinely forget the panic and pain of three decades ago as the virus’s spread reached crisis dimensions. In those years, the toll fell most heavily on gay men and on drug addicts using dirty needles. That made it easy for many people to shrug off AIDS as not their concern, just a disease confined to those living on society’s margins.
Government officials showed scant sense of urgency, and the same might be said about many news organizations. The intense media coverage in late May when the number of United States coronavirus deaths surpassed 100,000contrasts sharply with what happened when the AIDS epidemic reached that same milestone in 1991. The New York Times, for example, took note of it with an Associated Press article at the bottom of Page A18.
Even Dr. Fauci came under withering attack back then from AIDS activists who accused him of moving too hesitantly to find a remedy. One of them, Larry Kramer, who died in May at 84, went so far as to call the doctor an “incompetent idiot” and “a murderer.” While he may not have appreciated the venom, Dr. Fauci came to agree that the federal bureaucracy had been overly cautious and needed to up its game. Over time, the two men bonded; in later years Mr. Kramer described Dr. Fauci as a “true and great hero” in the AIDS crisis.