25 years since the discovery of AIDS

[Guest Merlin]

Actually, Reagan spent $5.7 BILLION on AIDS during his administration, so the claim that he did nothing is a flat out lie.

[Guest JohnPela]

RE: Senator Lucky Said...

 

>Lucky said:

>And, if posts that you don't think are "needed" and "helpful"

>weren't allowed, then the whole message center would be about

>Ben Versace, wouldn't it? Have a nice evening!

 

Senator Lucky,

That above post was a cheap shot!

 

Now Lucky you are supposed to reply:

 

I knew Ben Versace, I saw him perform at the Gaiety, he is an acquaintance of mine and Senator Pela you are no true fan of Ben Versace!

 

Then Senator Pela is supposed to respond:

Gulp, clearing my throat and then saying: Oh that was such a devastating remark about Ben Versace, I cried about it all night long. Boo, hoo, hoo... and also ... intellectually, with that remark Lucky, you have totally demolished all my viewpoints about President Reagan and the relationship to the spread of the AIDS virus in the USA.

[jackhammer91406]

RE: Senator Lucky Said...

 

Hey JP,

It's been a while since we have talked. I think you are still misreading Lucky's remarks which he went on to explain. his beef is with the advisers of Reagan, some of whom were gay.

 

For myself, I think a lot of headway could have been made had we as a nation begun the fight much sooner. There is no way to tell of course because hind sight is 20/20. But if strong efforts had been made sooner, while the number of infected was still low compared to today, AND with Reagan's cache in the world, I think it could have made a profound difference. I do not blame Reagan for AIDS, but I do fault him for his lack of a swifter response to it.

 

JP, as for your congenial senatorial riff, pretty funny. but you have left yourself open for the Ben cracks.

 

Nice to see you again. wish you could have visited me during the St Augustine trip.

[Guest JohnPela]

RE: Senator Lucky Said...

 

Jackhammer:

I hope you had a good time in St Augustine. I still haven't made it to Metro in Jacksonville. Guess, who was advertised at being at Metro the first Saturday night in June?- non other than one of the favorite dancers at the Gaiety- Vito, now porn star Tony Micelli.

 

Yeh, I thought the Senator's Benson/Qualye analog was applicable. And Lucky did direct his simplistic comments towards Reagan (which at one time I had felt the same way). Also, I certainly do not have any concerns about cracks about me and any former Gaiety dancers.

[+ Lucky]

Merlin, tell us the truth about that. How many years did it take Reagan to get to that point? And after how much pressure? Try reading the facts:

"The rise of the new Right was coupled with the presidential campaign and election of Reagan in 1980. When AIDS was first reported in 1981, Reagan had just assumed office and was attempting to meet the demands of the conservative agenda by slashing social programs and cutting taxes, while at the same time embracing traditional moral principles. Consequently, Reagan never even mentioned the word "AIDS" publicly until 1987, and his administration did little in terms of supporting medical research, releasing AIDS-related drugs in a timely fashion, or promoting AIDS education. For Reagan and his advisers, AIDS was not a national problem; instead, it was a series of local problems to be dealt with by states and localities rather than by the federal government.

 

Members of Congress calling for a sustained federal response to AIDS had to operate in this political and electoral climate. The most active members of Congress in the early years of the AIDS crisis represented districts or states with large gay constituencies. For example, in the House of Representatives, three Democrats, Barbara Boxer of San Francisco, Henry Waxman of Los Angeles, and Ted Weiss of New York, were active in calling for a committed federal government response to AIDS. But they and their supporters faced an uphill battle given both the Reagan administration's general policies of fiscal austerity and its particular hostility to even acknowledging the potential seriousness of AIDS.

 

From June 1981 to June 1982, the period generally considered the first twelve months of the epidemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spent $1 million on AIDS, compared with $9 million in response to the much smaller problem of Legionnaires' disease. In late 1982, Congress allocated $2.6 million to be targeted for the CDC's AIDS research, but the Reagan administration claimed that the CDC did not need the money and opposed any congressional supplemental appropriations designed to fund federal governmental AIDS policy efforts.

 

In the absence of presidential leadership, Congress was forced to ascertain on its own how much money doctors working inside government needed to address the AIDS epidemic. The Reagan administration resisted these efforts but refused to exercise an on-the-record veto of supplementary AIDS funding efforts. In the crucial early years of the epidemic, when federal resources could have been profitably spent on basic research and prevention education, federal AIDS researchers relied on supplemental funding in the form of continuing resolutions initiated by Congress. Year after year, Congress significantly increased AIDS funding relative to the Reagan budgetary proposals.

 

Under the leadership of Weiss, who was chair of the Subcommittee on Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations, and Waxman, who was chair of the Subcommittee on Science and Technology, Congress investigated attempts by the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) to address AIDS in 1983. Both subcommittees held hearings and jointly requested a study of the Reagan administration's AIDS-related policy efforts by the Office of Technology Assessment. The Weiss subcommittee requested that the Government Accounting Office perform an audit of the AIDS-related activities of the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Weiss report highlighted AIDS funding problems in the Reagan administration and lengthy delays in research into possible AIDS-related drugs, as well as management problems in funding, coordination, and communication within the PHS. The highly public, adversarial relationship between Congress and the Reagan administration regarding governmental responses to AIDS continued throughout Reagan's two-term presidency.

 

One way that congressional Democrats attempted to force the administration to increase funding and other forms of support for people with HIV/AIDS was to publicly highlight the large numbers of people affected by the epidemic. This strategy helped to concretize AIDS for the public. Indeed, Reagan himself could no longer remain silent about AIDS in the face of increasing numbers of fatalities; he gave his first public AIDS speech in 1987 on the eve of the Third International AIDS Conference, amid growing congressional concern about the lack of a coherent federal response to AIDS. By 1987, congressional concern was so pervasive that the Senate, which had been much less active than the House in addressing AIDS, called for the Reagan administration to establish an AIDS commission. In response to the request of both Republican and Democratic senators, Reagan appointed what came to be known as the Watkins Commission, after its chair, in the summer of 1987.

 

There was, of course, considerable conservative congressional resistance to spending federal tax dollars on AIDS-related measures. For example, Republican senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina was highly critical of federal spending on AIDS education. On October 14, 1987, Helms appeared on the floor of the Senate during a debate over a federal AIDS appropriation bill to denounce a safer-sex comic book, which he thought had been federally funded, published by Gay Men's Health Crisis of New York. A subsequent investigation revealed that no federal funds were used to support the production of the comic book; nonetheless, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to pass the Helms amendment to the AIDS appropriation bill. The Helms amendment prohibited the use of federal tax dollars for AIDS education materials that "promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities." Since 1987, Helms continued to offer his amendment to each appropriation bill. With these amendments, Helms and his conservative supporters in Congress, notably former California Republican representatives Robert Dornan and William Dannemeyer, helped limit federal funding for safer-sex education targeting gays and lesbians.

 

During the last year of the Reagan presidency, Congress considered the AIDS Federal Policy Act of 1987. This was the first legislation considered by Congress that took into account the larger societal implications of the epidemic, and that went beyond mere funding of AIDS prevention, research, and treatment efforts. The legislation, passed by Congress and ultimately signed into law by President Reagan, prevented discrimination against individuals with disabilities, including those who were infected by HIV or AIDS, in certain forms of housing and employment. This legislation set the foundation for the passage of the more comprehensive Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, a law that protects all Americans with disabilities, including those who are infected by HIV or AIDS, from discrimination in public accommodations and the workplace. AIDS is not specifically mentioned in the law, but people with HIV/AIDS are included owing to a variety of subsequent judicial and regulatory decisions." Source: AIDS Agency TheBody.com