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This is such a childish and naive statement. No matter what system is put in place, the president alone can't make a radical difference in a positive direction, only shitty ones.
Yet, Clinton did. I get you're a debbie downer but many Presidents have made radical differences. Reagan and Clinton both did a good job. Bush, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden did not.
Yeah, Reagan really did a great job letting AIDS kill all those people because he hated the gays.
Oh, and kickstarting the modern homeless crisis by closing all the countries mental health facilities without another solution in the wings.
And yet, it's not 40 years later and we still have no vaccine or cure for HIV/AIDS. Blaming Reagan is tad silly. I doubt you were alive during the crisis but it was alarming. Faucci mishandled the situation just like he did with COVID.
it’s not 40 years later and we still have no vaccine or cure for HIV/AIDS.
What? We have multiple examples of massive growth in treating and stopping the spread of AIDS/HIV?
The Reagan administration literally acted like it was a joke that no one should care about because it only affected gay people. This was during a period of time where people preached that the disease was God punishing sinners. You can rewrite history all you want, but Reagan killed people by minimizing the seriousness of the disease and minimizing the gay community at the same time, essentially saying "It's okay if we let the queers die."
That opinion was given to him by Faucci. Reagan was not in charge of the disaster. Faucci was. Faucci is the one who would not sign off on the waives for the drug treatment. You are assigning blame to the President for something that isn't in his power. It is why the LGBTQ has spoken out against Faucci for years.
Fauci was not the one on the news cracking jokes about it and making fun of the gay men it was affecting. The entire administration didn't take it seriously.
Can you cite where Reagan cracked jokes about it? I don't remember that. It was officially called GRID in the beginning. It was believed to be a gay disease and that belief came from the CDC and other health organizations.
It was believed to be a gay disease and that belief came from the CDC and other health organizations.
Wow, shocker. In a period of history where queerness was regularly met with violence for being queer, straight people in positions of power were making crude assumptions about the queer community. I'm pretty sure the discrimination came first, and that's where assumptions, even from scientists who are fallible human beings like anyone else, came from. I mean hell, this was barely 30 years after Alan Turing, a fucking war hero was chemically castrated for being gay. Doctors signed off on that, too.
It doesn't mean it wasn't an issue that traveled through the entire administration. You can dump it all on Fauci's feet if you want, but it was painfully obviously much bigger than that, with the dominant straight community pretending it wasn't an issue, or an issue to be joked about since they didn't think it would affect them.
It's more complicated than that. Yes gays were persecuted in the 80's that is a fact. It was still illegal in many places until very recently (Not being gay, but gay sex).
The issue was early on it was only in the gay population. That is why they thought it was a gay disease.
As the blood supply became contaminated, it spread into the heterosexual population and that caused an even larger panic.
Yet, we still do not have a vaccine for it. we do have some good treatment options but AIDS for whatever reason has never received the funding or priority that it should have. That isn't just a Reagan thing, that is an larger issue.