June 5, 2021

Welcome to the history of HIV. Like most histories, it contains both tragedies and triumphs—and lessons for those willing to learn them.

Long before U.S. physicians first identified an alarming set of unusual illnesses that seemed to have targeted gay men, HIV was making its way quietly around the world. Americans were the first to notice because of our relatively advanced healthcare systems and because the first cases were clustered so tightly in New York and California.

But HIV—the wiliest virus the world has ever identified—had been doing its deadly work for decades by the time Dr. Michael Gottlieb, an immunologist at the University of California, and his colleagues, filed the first report identifying five cases of a strange new illness that seemed to be decimating the immune systems of gay men. That report was published on June 5, 1981. It would turn out to be the “shot heard round the world,” recognized only in hindsight as the epidemic raged and people died by the thousands…and then by the millions. Forty years after that report, UNAIDS estimates that approximately 35 million people have died of HIV-related illness.

The real numbers will never be known—and the costs will never be calculable. But in a world in which an unknown virus can emerge in one place, hitch a ride on an unsuspecting human host who boards a plane, and arrive literally half-way around the world within hours, it is vital that we grapple with and understand the story of HIV and AIDS.

The story demonstrates that our understanding of what “public health” is (or more accurately was) —and the practices we have used in the past to implement it—are woefully inadequate to deal with biological realities that recognize no geographic boundaries.

The story is also one of cultural hysteria and cruelty, rooted in the soil of white supremacy, patriarchy, Christianity, heterosexism, and capitalism. No surprise that those were the very elements used to ensure the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic would become the worldwide nightmare it now is.

AIDS was certainly not the first global pandemic—but it was the first to play out in the modern media age. As I watch the ongoing debacle of the response (mostly the lack thereof) to SARS-CoV-2 across the United States, I think of that first CDC report and feel uneasy shivers of “deja vu all over again.”

A Paige Baker
Creator/Editor
HistoryOfHIV.org

FYI….

The downloadable PDFs you will find at the beginning of each year contain full documentation (including links) and additional information and comments. I will continue adding more years as soon as I can get them properly sourced and formatted.

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