The world, unfortunately, continues to suffer through the enormous disruptions and tragedies from both the COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS pandemics. We are closing in on year two since the declaration of the coronavirus outbreak, and this past summer marked the 40th anniversary of the first official CDC report on HIV/AIDS. In many ways, these outbreaks mirrored each other in stigma and disproportionate effects of minority communities.
Of course I am hesitant to draw too many comparisons. From a purely medical science perspective, the viruses are wildly different in composition and transmission capability. Additionally, the public interest in treatment was different: the mobilization to create the COVID-19 vaccine has been one of the fastest in human history, whereas HIV/AIDS still does not have a cure, and approval for massive funding treatment research came a decade after the initial outbreak.
However, what is a clear similarity is how both pandemics, and our subsequent responses, have been cluttered with fear mongering, anti-minority propaganda, and political gamesmanship. For the HIV/AIDS epidemic, hateful propaganda initially targeted LGBTQ+ community, more specifically the sexual “lifestyles” of gay men. Now, as the AIDS crisis turns to African countries, the divide is racial. For the COVID-19 pandemic, the hate, at least in the U.S, initially targeted Asian-American communities, since the virus was first detected towards Wuhan, China, but now it seems the hate is vigorously directed towards science itself. It seems a new plague is emerging: misinformation leading to the violation of human dignity.
The two pandemics are separate, but a larger historical comparison is helpful to understand each of them better. Hopefully, we can draw lessons from each that lead us to exterminating these viruses once and for all.
Anti-Gay Propaganda of the 1980s
The HIV/AIDS epidemic, and therefore the fight against it, began during a time when homosexuality was heavily stigmatized, specificially the frequency of male on male sexual intercourse. In the early days of the disease, most Americans were either completely unaware of its existence or simply equated it with God’s punishment to homosexuals for their sinful lifestyles. It was even sometimes known as ‘the gay plague.’
The common cultural practice, at the time, was to never directly address gay men, who were the main victims of the disease, because that could be seen as endorsing ‘deviant behavior.’ Simultaneously, though, anti-gay violence rose exponentially during the 1980s, primarily linked to fear of a relatively unknown and unresearched virus, that happened to delegate gay men as the principal victims in the early years.
The Reagan administration infamously refused to even say the name AIDS in any public appearance for several years of the epidemic. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly gay men, were dying, and the medical scientific community could not pinpoint a cause for quite some time due to lack of funding available for research. As a result, millions of people and their families were left ostracized by the government and their communities. This was all because American society as a whole did not deem the vast majority of the deceased as worthy of saving.
Our understanding of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, more specifically how it stigmatized the LGBTQ+ community for many years, and our understanding of the virus as an element of science is based on social constructions placed within the context of medicine. In the 1980s, as awareness of the disease increased, so did anti-gay sentiment. Because HIV/AIDS was mostly infecting and killing gay men, many Americans falsely associated it as a gay-specific disease. Despite the scientific community showing evidence to the contrary at the time, many misconceptions of how to catch HIV/AIDS persisted. For example, people assumed one could catch it by standing in the same room as a gay person, or by touching them.
Those misconceptions lingered because the HIV/AIDS pandemic is extremely emotional: people connect their emotions to the pandemic itself. When strong emotions are associated with a public health crisis, people often let the truths slip over their heads. According to a television documentary from October 1985, used to dispel some of the misconceptions on HIV/AIDS, people feel more comfortable in their own biases about certain marginalized groups and would rather adhere to those than listen to the facts. However false a pretense that may be, it is easier than changing routine behavior. This kind of ignorance and silencing of the gay community resulted in countless lost lives and lost opportunity to find treatment to prevent futher deaths.
COVID-19 Misinformation: A Pandemic within and Pandemic
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic might be one of the most visually apparent public health crises of all time. Visually apparent is in reference to all of the very tangible ways the pandemic has disrupted our everyday lives: quarantine lockdowns, remote employment, economic downfall, public mask wearing and social distancing, many months of social isolation, and tragic loss of life. But unique to a pandemic of the 21st century, a different darker pandemic emerged: one of disinformation and political shame.
In the Internet era, everyday Americans have a platform to use their voice, and when the Internet is unregulated, the platform is unfiltered with misleading information, which has proven to be detrimental to the fight to end the COVID-19 pandemic. More than three quarters, or 78 percent, of all American adults either believe or are not sure of at least one of eight false statements made about COVID-19.
People have redefined what is classified as a trusted news source. Traditional media outlets formerly trusted widely by the American public, such as CNN, MSNBC, and NPR, have been overshadowed by far right conspiracy-driven media like OANN and Newsmax. People follow the news source that most closely conforms to their already held opinions and biases. The problem with this, especially during a major public health crisis, is the public has no consensus on what is accurate about the rapidly evolving science of the virus. Therefore, false and ambiguous information spreads quickly.
Another consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic is the political price of an elected official’s representation of the pandemic. Unfortunately, during the first several months of the pandemic, the President of the United States fanned the flames of blatantly false information. He held multiple rallies without social distancing protocols, publicly attacked all efforts to contain the spread of the virus, and added fuel to ignite the fire his most loyal supporters were ready to set against anyone, including members of his own party, who did not share the incorrect opinion that COVID-19 is a hoax. This engagement is dangerous and deadly.
When the leader of the country chooses to behave this way, at a time when the country needed to come together to prevent more loss of life, others irresponsibly follow suit. And misinformation matters: public trust in science is essential to ending this deadly pandemic. Leaders refusing to step up to the plate and tackle the challenge of ending the pandemic, because of their own refusal to acknowledge the facts, has been costly. Sadly, this trend continues even now, almost a year without Trump in office.
Merging the Two Together
While vastly different in scope, how these two pandemics connect, within the context of the social and political propaganda surrounding the viruses, is the concept of fear. People are afraid of each virus for very different reasons.
Back in the 1980s, people feared the spread could inject the gay agenda into them, or rather people falsely presumed the virus was a gay plague. In the present time, the rate of violence against Asian American communities has spiked significantly, most likely connected to the coronavirus originating in China. But more broadly, there is hysteria regarding how the media and our leaders portray the virus. In other words, there is an attack on science itself during the pandemic, and too many people refuse to take the course of actions scientists have recommended. Fear drives emotions, and emotions drive panic. In each of these devastating pandemics, there is an emotional attachment to personal biases, and people hold those so strongly above anything else.
Using the Lessons to Find Solutions
The solution is to turn our inaction into action and our fear into motivation. The disproportionate weight of death, from both viruses, falls on lives that are not valued or supported. We owe it to those survivors of trauma to battle towards the end of these pandemics. But on a deeper level, we need to make a stronger collective commitment to preserving human dignity. The roots of the problems of the socialized hysteria, surrounding both pandemics, is a failure to have compassion for another person’s humanity. Once we remove our personal biases, we can get past our differences and come together to exterminate these plagues.
