The Danger of Erasing AIDS from US History

As part of Trump’s anti-DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiative, employees of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) were instructed to remove all web pages related to gender identity or HIV from the CDC website by the following Friday. 

The anonymous government agency staffer who relayed this order to the CDC stated that the primary focus of the censorship was gender identity, but that “There’s just so much gender content in HIV that we have to take everything down to meet the deadline,” in a memo acquired by NBC News. 

Among the HIV-related pages that were censored were a page providing resources for healthcare providers, a page reporting the numbers of cases and deaths of HIV in the United States, and a page presenting the federal “Ending the HIV Pandemic Plan.” Another target of the order was the website for the HHS-run Ryan White HIV/Aids Program, which existed to create safety nets for low-income HIV patients. 

Shortly after these were deleted, the Trump administration ordered that all employees of the Department of Health and Human Services (which includes the CDC) cut all communication with news outlets. 

The United States has seen the power that HIV has to ravage a country before, in the infamous AIDS crisis (1981-1990s). The first report of a case of AIDS in the U.S. came on June 5th, 1981, documented by Michael Gottlieb, MD of UCLA. Just one month later, twenty-six gay men were reported to have contracted HIV and died within less than 24 months. By 1988, 82,406 Americans had contracted HIV/AIDS, including 32,399 in the year 1988 alone. Ninety-five percent of patients diagnosed with AIDS between 1981 and 1987 died. 

“I graduated from nursing school in 1985…the next year, it started to be an overwhelming number of AIDS patients,” said Jane Peeples, retired nurse, graduate of nursing school at the University of Pennsylvania, and longtime resident of the Philadelphia area.

Peeples said, “At first they would come in and they might just have a not-too-serious case of pneumonia and we’d treat them with antibiotics and they’d get better, so the mood was relatively light in the room… but later, we’d see the same person come back just gaunt, with so much weight lost and so much weakness…when they were in the really late stages their eyes would just…they were vacant. They were so weak and depressed. It was sad seeing young men decline that way.” 

Peeples also points to homophobia as part of the problem, saying, “In the beginning there was a lot of hostility towards gays: that they brought this plague upon us, the ‘gay plague.’ And the religious-right people were like; ‘It’s God punishing them for their sins.’ They were really ostracized. At the time there were a lot of gays who hadn’t come out and so they happened to get AIDS, it was like; ‘oh my god, my family is not only finding out I have AIDS but they’re finding out I’m homosexual.’ That was overwhelming to some people. Somebody in the hospital committed suicide because of that.” 

To make matters worse, the Reagan administration used homophobia to make AIDS patients a public laughingstock and thereby avoid addressing the problem. 

Featured in the Vanity Fair documentary When AIDS Was Funny, an audio recording of a press conference including former president Ronald Reagan’s press secretary Larry Speakes contains the quote, “Over a third of them have died. It’s known as ‘gay plague,’’’ followed by laughter from around the room. 

In a 1984 press conference between Speakes and journalist Lester Kinsolving, Speakes told Kinsolving twice that Reagan “had not expressed concern” about the AIDS crisis, to which Kinsolving replied, “That seems to have evoked such jocular reaction around here.” 

“The worst part of it was going to hospitals and going to people’s homes and doing what you could do, then going home and turning on the news and seeing a president who would not fucking say the word AIDS in public,” composer David Garner remembered about his experience of the AIDS epidemic in 2019. 

“We have a public health crisis and at the very top levels of our government the president of the United States refused to acknowledge it,” Garner said.

Journalist Jack King of the British Broadcasting Corporation wrote that “AIDS was perceived to be a gay-only disease long into the 1980s by an unsympathetic public, so there was little-to-no pressure on Reagan to respond, his political capital unthreatened by his silence.”

In other words, Reagan benefited from the fact that not enough Americans cared if gay people were dying. The trite idiom that “history is doomed to repeat itself” applies in a frighteningly literal sense to this situation. 

“How can we work on preventing HIV among the populations who are most at risk if we can’t talk about it?” the same unnamed government agency staffer told NBC News. 

Dating back to the early days of the 1980s AIDS crisis, the HIV prevention division of the CDC is responsible for tracking cases of HIV within the US and funding research that has led to the development of treatments and preventative measures that safeguard us from experiencing another epidemic. With this division under attack, all of those safety measures are, and so are the people who are most at risk. 

CDC graphs reporting contemporary HIV statistics from 2022, which were preserved by the independent healthcare research organization KFF, showed that HIV affected about 25,000 more Black or Hispanic Americans than it did white Americans. 

Citing a 2013 study titled “Worldwide Burden of HIV in Transgender Women: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” the Human Rights Campaign website reports that 21.6% of transgender women in America live with HIV, that transgender women worldwide are 49 times more likely to contract the virus, and that rates of infection for transgender men remain higher than those of the general population. 

According to a surviving report on HIV from the Supreme Court of Florida, gay and bisexual men accounted for 67% of all HIV cases within the U.S. That report goes on to say that one in six gay or bisexual men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime. Add in race, and that statistic increases to one in two Black gay/bisexual men and one in four Hispanic gay/bisexual men. 

San Francisco-based AIDS healthcare provider Dr. Paul Volberding said in 2016 interview with The Guardian about AIDS, “This is the most fatal infectious disease ever seen. Without treatment, 98% die. More than Ebola. More than Smallpox.”

This is all to say that HIV targets specific groups of marginalized people, and by wiping out the educational resources and cure-finding research essential to its mitigation, the Trump administration itself is targeting them too. Perhaps, like Reagan, this dangerous suppressive legislation relies on us not to care. The Trump administration is trying to forcibly bury the reality of HIV under silence, and as the HIV/AIDS awareness organization Act Up famously warned us thirty-eight years ago, silence equals death.