Volberding justified this first outlay of any municipal funds anywhere in the world for the AIDS epidemic by noting that between July 1, 1981, and July 1, 1982, he had seen ten cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma. The city’s $40,000 appropriation was based on Volberding’s projection of seeing twenty more cases in the next year. The prognostication, of course, was hopelessly naive, but these summer months of 1982 were the innocent times when the names of all San Francisco’s AIDS patients fit on one blackboard.
