This health crisis shows just how quickly the private sector and government can act if the will – and money – is there.īill Clinton first called for an HIV vaccine back in 1997 and said it should be in place 10 years later. Last year the FDA approved a coronavirus vaccine faster than ever before – in a matter of months. ACT UP protesters close the Federal Drug Administration building to demand the release of experimental medication for those living with HIV/AIDS. Its ‘drugs into bodies’ campaign sounds a lot like the clamour to get ‘vaccines into arms’ now. In 1988 the iconic AIDS activist group ACT UP protested the Food and Drug Administration because it was so slow to approve new drugs. To date the number is so far into the tens of millions it’s hard to be sure. 800,000 people died from HIV/AIDS in 2018 – 35 years later. The HIV virus was isolated and identified in 1983. More than two million people have died of coronavirus so far – it’s an awful toll.īut we’re on the brink of having the tools to control the disease. The necessary billions of dollars didn’t flow for years – it was left to small groups, individuals and charities, fighting against indifference, intentional neglect and worse. And many in society, and government, thought that was no bad thing.
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They were usually young gay men or trans or people of colour. Or if it did it was in an embarrassed or disgusted tone.Īny coverage was dehumanising and cruel. I’m no epidemiologist and they’re very different diseases, but when HIV emerged it wasn’t old people it killed, it was gay people. The global response has been unprecedented and after just a year we’re administering a vaccine that could typically take years or even decades to develop. The World Health Organisation says speed is the best defence against a new virus – acting fast to erect defences to protect society and individuals. ACT UP targets US president Bush at the White House. Minute by minute, breathless blanket media coverage.
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Billions of pounds spent on treatment, information campaigns, medical research and hundreds of billions more to support the economy. Lockdowns, travel bans, quarantine, mass testing. In the months since COVID-19 was discovered, we’ve put the world on a war footing, our way of life on hold and thrown the resources of the most powerful nations on Earth at the disposal of science to fight it. The fantastic news we have an effective and safe vaccine against the virus that causes coronavirus made me think of the starkly different approach taken to the early years of HIV. Those that survived – or were still to – were traumatised and brutalised by the effects. A whole generation of young men was wiped out. The family story is a microcosm of what happened to the gay community in those years and later. But the world didn’t respond as it has to COVID-19.Īs I came to understand that I was gay too, I realised the sheer weight of the stigma – I’m sure it’s one of the reasons I didn’t come out until I was much older. In 1995 more than 8,000 people died in one year alone in New York City and 40,000 across the US. Members of AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). By 1994 it the biggest killer of young men in the United States. The photos reminded me of, well, me.īy 1991, AIDS was the biggest killer of young men in New York.
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I recently unearthed some new photos of him, travelling to far-flung places, surrounded by friends, always with a drink in hand. He was dashingly handsome and, from everything I’ve learned, incredibly popular and fun to be with. He was by any measure an extraordinary young man – the first in our family to go to university, the youngest director of a merchant bank in London who went to work in Hong Kong in the financial boom of the 80s.