Someone Cared Less About AIDS Than Reagan

There’s actually a president more uncaring about people with HIV/AIDS than late former President Ronald Reagan. South African Thabo Mbeki refused to acknowledge the connection between HIV and AIDS, at the very least.

Mbeki’s utter dismissal of victims of HIV/AIDS nearly pushed former President Jimmy Carter to give him a beat down, according to Raw Story.

The first time I came here to Cape Town I almost got in a fight with the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, because he was refusing to let AIDS be treated.

Claiming that AZT, the best anti-retroviral drug available at the time, was toxic, Mbeki refused to allow into the country in 1999. That was in spite of, Carter said, United Nations’ offer to help. Microsoft founder Bill Gates father, Bill Gates Sr., unsuccessfully tried to lobby Mbeki to treat a pregnant woman.

Ironically, then-South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang stood in solidarity with Mbeki. The leader gained particular notoriety of denying a connection between HIV and AIDS, according to time.com.

Mbeki insisted that ?as Africans we have to deal with this uniquely African catastrophe? and that simply accepting Western conventional wisdom on AIDS would be ?absurd and illogical.

Time.com also reported, beginning the early 2000s, Mbeki’s policies kept life-saving drugs from South Africans. At the time, according to its own statistics, 1 in 10 of citizens were HIV positive.

A U.S. Centers of Disease Control weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report, released June 5, 1981, describing cases of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) in five young and healthy gay men, according to aids.gov.

Two of the men were dead by the time the report came out. The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times published stories the same day. The San Francisco Chronicle published a June 6 story. By the end of 1981, there were 270 reported cases and 121 of the victims were dead.

Reagan didn’t make his first public speech about the disease until May 31, 1987, when he established a Presidential Commission on HIV. The Federal Food and Drug Administration had approved zidovudine or AZT in March and Congress approved $30 million in emergency state funding.

That funding would become the foundation of the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, which was authorized by the Ryan White CARE Act in 1990. However, that Congress’ benevolence only went so far. It would approve the Helms Amendment, named for late U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C.

The amendment banned using federal funds for AIDS education, which ?promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities.?

Edited by SS

Jason Carson Wilson is a Chicago-based freelance writer with more than 10 years of journalism experience. Wilson previously worked as a staff writer for daily and weekly newspapers throughout downstate Illinois. He also contribute to the Windy City Times. Wilson, a gay, African-American, is a first-year Chicago Theological Seminary student. He covers stories about GLBT rights, human rights, marriage equality, politics, race, and religion.