And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

by Randy Shilts

By the time America paid attention to the disease, it was too late to do anything about it.

While planning is contrary to our national genius, I feel that it may be wise to put together a multidisciplinary task force to decide how we will investigate this disease as cases are referred here to us.”

Between the time of that announcement and the date of the NCI’s commitment to finding the cause of the disease, 1,295 Americans had contracted AIDS and 492 had died. Later, the Centers for Disease Control calculated that the numbers infected with the strange new virus behind the epidemic had grown by the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, during those twenty-two months.

“The failure to respond to this epidemic now borders on a national scandal,” said Dr. Marcus Conant, who led scientific testimony. “Congress, and indeed the American people, have been misled about the response. We have been led to believe that the response has been timely and that the response has been appropriate, and I would suggest to you that that is not correct.”

I came here today in the hope that my epitaph would not read that I died of red tape.”

“Without availability of these contingency monies and the coordinated effort the Fund would provide, HHS’s only way to react to public health emergencies is the same way it is proposing to react to the AIDS crisis—by siphoning resources out of other programs to which the same immediacy may not attach, but which are equally important to protecting the health of our Nation’s citizens,” the senators wrote. “Moreover, when these other resources cannot be found and diverted quickly, we experience dangerous delays in our efforts to stop the spread of diseases that can cause widespread suffering and death.”

My mind plays that game. Sometimes I think it is all over. Gary is dead. Back in the eighties, I had a best friend and former lover, a wonderful man whom I loved very deeply, and he suffered and he died in that terrible epidemic that hit the gay community nationally, the disease we hardly remember now. It was called AIDS.

Later, everybody agreed the baths should have been closed sooner; they agreed health education should have been more direct and more timely. And everybody also agreed blood banks should have tested blood sooner, and that a search for the AIDS virus should have been started sooner, and that scientists should have laid aside their petty intrigues. Everybody subsequently agreed that the news media should have offered better coverage of the epidemic much earlier, and that the federal government should have done much, much more. By the time everyone agreed to all this, however, it was too late.

It marked the fourth fiscal year in which Congress had constructed its own AIDS budget over the objections of the administration.

The dean who accepted Conant’s resignation assured Conant that it was what was best. Conant recalled, however, that this was the dean who also once observed, “At least with AIDS, a lot of undesirable people will be eliminated.”

The butcher’s bill was so high that long-tolerated transgressions could no longer be ignored. Reckoning was at hand.

“The Reagan administration has pretended that AIDS is only a blip on the charts, a statistic that they hope will go away,” said Waxman when he opened the hearing. “Under the best epidemic projections, by the beginning of the next presidential campaign, AIDS will have killed as many people as the war in Vietnam. We cannot stand by and let those Americans die.”

A lot of good, decent Americans had perished in this epidemic, but it was the diagnosis of one movie star, who had demonstrated no previous inclination to disclose his plight, that was going to make all the difference.