No Time for an AIDS Backlash

Abstract

No Time for an Backlash Writing in Time, Charles Krauthammer described May 1990 protests by activists at National Institutes of Health as a most misdirected demonstration: idea that American government or American society has been inattentive or unresponsive to is quite simply absurd. On contrary, AIDS has become most privileged disease in America, this since Congress continues to allocate an enormous amount of money for research and for treatment of people with HIV-related conditions. [1] Except cancer research, HIV-related disease now receives more research funding than any other illness in United States, a priority Krauthammer maintains is all out of proportion to its significance since kills fewer people each year than many other The privilege of even extends to access to certain experimental drugs--access others do not share. Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko has also challenged view that there is government indifference regarding That might have been true at one time. But it no longer is. Vast sums are being spent on research. Far more per victim than on cancer, heart disease and other diseases that kill far more people. [2] In his view, some education posters have far more to do with promotion of homosexuality than with prevention of disease. Views of this kind reflect a movement that would assign a lesser standing in social and medical priorities of nation. This view is not new in epidemic; sentiment that homosexuals with were being treated as a privileged class had surfaced as early as 1983. [3] What is new, though, is increasing prominence of this view in public discourse and extent to which view is defended. In The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, Michael Fumento mounts a full-scale defense of proposition that epidemic has achieved national and medical priority all out of proportion to its dangers, especially since disease will make few inroads against white, middle-class heterosexuals. [4] Fumento writes in self-conscious sound-bites: Other than fairly spectacular rare occurrences, such as shark attacks and maulings by wild animals, it is difficult to name any broad category of death that will take fewer lives than heterosexually transmitted AIDS. He also says that mass mailing of Surgeon General's report on to every household makes every bit as much sense as sending a booklet warning against dangers of frostbite to every home in nation, from Key West, Florida, to San Diego, California. Because there is no looming heterosexual epidemic and because nation has neglected other medical priorities by siphoning off talent and money for research, Fumento concludes that the ratio of research and development spending to federal patient costs is vastly out of proportion to other deadly diseases. Fumento also believes that priority assigned to will endanger lives of other people: blunt fact is that people will die of these other diseases because of overemphasis on We will never know their names, and those names will never be sewn into a giant quilt. We will never know their exact numbers. But they will die nonetheless. Not only priority of on national agenda but also tactics used to put it there and keep it there have found their critics. Krauthammer concedes that gains made by activists are a tribute to their passion and commitment, but he believes that such gains have been won by ingenuous strategy. He charges that homosexual community, to advance its own interests, first claimed that was everyone's problem because everyone was at risk and its solution required universal social urgency. As it became clear that people would not fall at random to disease, he says activists changed their tactics and began to prey on social guilt: how dare a society let its gay men, needle-users, their partners and their children get sick and die? …