Transcript: The Politicization of HIV

Jul 1, 2021

In this episode of “To Health and Back,” we’ll hear from Pat Thomas — a journalist and the author of “Big Shot: Passion, Politics, and the Struggle for an AIDS Vaccine” — to evaluate the politicization of the HIV epidemic and the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has been similarly politicized.

Check out the show notes here.

0:13, Madeline Laguaite: Hello, and welcome to “To Health and Back,” a podcast about how health, medicine, and wellness decisions from the past help inform us today. I’m your host, Madeline Laguaite.

Laguaite: In this episode, I’m sitting down with journalist Patricia Thomas to talk about her experience reporting on the AIDS crisis, and how HIV and AIDS was politicized similarly to the way in which COVID was politicized.

Laguaite: Before we dive in, I wanted to explain the difference between AIDS and HIV because I’ve often seen them used interchangeably. HIV is a virus that attacks the cells in your body that help you fight off infection. That means you’re much more vulnerable to other diseases and infections. If HIV isn’t treated, it can lead to the disease AIDS. HIV is spread by contact with certain bodily fluids of an infected individual. So most commonly, that’s going to be during unprotected sex or through sharing needles. Once you have HIV, your body can’t get rid of it, and there’s not an effective cure. Once you’re infected with HIV, you have it for life.

Laguaite: Today, however, we have HIV medicine, called antiretroviral therapy, or ART that lets people living with HIV live long, healthy lives. It also prevents the spread of HIV to their partners. People can also use other effective methods like PREP — which stands for pre-exposure prophylaxis — to prevent themselves from getting HIV through drug use or sex.

Laguaite: Scientists think HIV was in the U.S. as early as 1960. But doctors first noticed something was wrong in the early ’80s when they noticed clusters of pneumocystis pneumonia and a rare cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma in gay men living in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. The resulting AIDS epidemic was very politicized for a few reasons.

Laguaite: People were very, very uncomfortable learning about how HIV is spread, and that was certainly a catalyst for the disease to be politicized. The AIDS epidemic is also fueled by inequality because the disease exposes and intensifies both economic and social injustices. In fact, even though AIDS was first identified in 1981, then-President Ronald Reagan didn’t even mention it publicly until years later in 1985. By that time, around 16,000 people had died. Here’s a clip I found from Sept. 17, 1985, when Reagan was asked if he’d support a massive government research program against AIDS, similar to the one that Nixon launched against cancer.

2:55, Ronald Reagan: I have been supporting it for more than 4 years now. It’s been one of the top priorities with us and over the last 4 years and including what we have in a budget for ’86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS, in addition to what I’m sure other medical groups are doing. And we are $100 billion or $100 million in the budget this year. It’ll be $126 million next year. So this is a top priority with us. Yes, there’s no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer.

3:33, Laguaite: Even before Reagan addressed it, AIDS wasn’t taken seriously. In 2015, Scott Calonico created a short documentary called “When AIDS Was Funny,” and it included audio of press conferences that show Reagan’s deputy press secretary, Larry Speakes, and journalists cracking jokes about the AIDS epidemic. The journalist interviewing Speakes is Lester Kinsolving. The full audio is available on Calonico’s website but I’ve included a clip of it here.

4:01, Lester Kinsolving: Does the President have any reaction to the announcement by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta that A-I-D-S is now an epidemic in over 600 cases?

Larry Speakes: A-I-D-S? I haven’t got anything on it.

4:13, Kinsolving: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.”

[Press pool laughter]

Kinsolving: No, it is. It’s a pretty serious thing. And 1 in every 3 people that get this have died, and I wonder if the President is aware of this?

4:23, Speakes: I don’t have it. Are you? Do you?

Kinsolving: You don’t have it. Well, I’m relieved to hear that, Larry.

Speakes: Do you?

Kinsolving: No, I don’t.

Speakes: You didn’t answer my question. How do you know?

Kinsolving: Does the President... in other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?

Speakes: No, I don’t know a thing about it, Lester.

Kinsolving: Does the President— does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?

Speakes: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any—

Kinsolving: Nobody knows?

Speakes: There’s been no personal experience here, Lester.

Kinsolving: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping—

4:50, Speakes: Doctor— I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he’s had no—

[Press pool laughter]

[Speakes laughing]

Speakes: —No patients suffering from A-I-D-S or whatever it is.

Kinsolving: The President doesn’t have gay plague? Is that what you’re saying? Or what?

Speakes: Nope, didn’t say that.

Kinsolving: Didn’t say that?

Speakes: I thought I heard you in the State Department over there. Why didn’t you stay over there?

[Press pool laughter]

Kinsolving: Because I love you, Larry!

Speakes: Oh, I see. Well, I don’t... let’s don't put it in those terms, Lester.

[Press pool laughter]

Kinsolving: Oh, I retract that!

Speakes: I hope so.

5:05, Laguaite: Another journalist refers to it as a “fairy tale,” referencing a derogatory term for gay people that was common in the 20th century.

Journalist: A leading environmentalist has described the President's speech on Saturday as a fairy tale. Is there any reaction to that?

5:21, Speakes: Not true. 

[Press pool laughter] 

Speakes: Fairy tales are not true and this one’s true. Lester’s ears perked up when you said fairies.

[Press pool laughter] 

Speakes: He has an abiding interest in that.

5:38, Laguaite: All that being said, I have Pat here with me now to talk more about the crisis. Hi, Pat, and welcome to the show.

Pat Thomas: Hello!

Laguaite: How are you?

Thomas: Good. How about you Madeline?

Laguaite: Pretty good, pretty good.

Thomas: My name is Patricia Thomas. Most people call me Pat. I’m a professor emerita and the former Knight Chair in Health and Medical Journalism at the University of Georgia. But before that, before the past 15 years of my life, I was a working journalist. I wrote for many publications for physicians and scientists. And I also was the editor of a large consumer health newsletter, the Harvard Health Letter, based at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, but I spent my wild youth in the San Francisco area, which is how I got interested in the AIDS epidemic in its very earliest days, because I knew people who were in the medical arena and I knew people in the gay community there. So my radar picked this up pretty early, even though I was living in Atlanta during the early ’80s. And so I have a lot of experience in this arena.

6:43, Laguaite: Although scientists believe HIV existed prior to the ’80s, Pat said she remembers the exact moment she really became aware of AIDS.

6:52, Thomas: I became aware of AIDS in San Francisco in 1981, while having dinner with a friend who I knew from Stanford. I went to graduate school at Stanford. He went to medical school there. He was a resident in hematology and oncology at San Francisco General and UC San Francisco, and he was horrified to see Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare cancer which typically is seen in elderly Jewish men and men of Mediterranean descent. But in this instance, these cancers, these horrible disfiguring blotches, which then, you know, kill you in the long run, he was seeing these cases in young men who looked just like him: white, affluent, gay, urban, San Francisco-ites, and they had this cancer.

Thomas: So when he told me about that, which was right about the same time the first publication came out in CDC’s weekly morbidity and mortality weekly report. That report was of pneumocystis pneumonia among a small coterie of gay men in L.A. So here’s my friend in San Francisco saying weird cancer among young white gay men, and meanwhile, in L.A., weird pneumonia, and guess what? They’re all dying. In 1983, I wrote my first stories about AIDS. 

8:14, Laguaite: Pat continued reporting on the crisis. Although she lived in Atlanta during the time, she wrote for several New York-based publications and described the experience.

8:25, Thomas: I wrote one story about that — about medical care in San Francisco. I wrote another story about a nonprofit organization called the Shaunti Project, which was sort of a— now, we would call it a community mutual aid society. But it was basically a community of people — gay people and church people — who realized that men dying fast of this disease had lost their jobs, were too weak to go to the grocery store, nobody’s walking their dog, and so people banded together to help them and that was the Shaunti Project.

Thomas: And so I went to a rally on Castro Street, which is the big gay shopping district in San Francisco — gay male shopping district and bars — and there was this huge street rally to celebrate the 49ers. I don’t know whether they had just won a playoff game or I don’t recall, but at any rate, some football party in the street and it was just huge and exuberant, and Castro was packed wall-to-wall with people dancing and drinking takeaway cups. And I had just interviewed an epidemiologist that day. And he said to me, that his studies — Andrew Moss was his name, he’s published many, many times — he said, “You know, in this gay male community in San Francisco, within a year, 1 in 3 of these men could be dead.” And I stood on this crowded, exuberant party street, and I thought, “Oh my god. One out of every three people could be missing from this party if the 49ers have another good year because they will be dead?” And as a medical reporter, I’ve never felt viscerally a statistic just dropped down on me like, “Whoa, look at this.” So I wrote about that, too. 

10:10, Laguaite: More than a year ago, scientists began Phase 1 trials of an experimental vaccine for COVID-19. Years before that, Pat did something similar.

Laguaite: I read that you were among the first of healthy volunteers to be injected with an experimental DNA vaccine for AIDS. Can you—

Thomas: That’s right.

Laguaite: OK, can you tell me a little bit about that? And what made you decide to do that?

10:35, Thomas: Yeah. Once I started doing the reporting for what would become my book, “Big Shot,” I had to write a book proposal. And in order to write that book proposal, I had to talk to a lot of people and do a lot of background research so I would know what book I was trying to write. And my first I don’t know, 50 interviews, or so, what really kept emerging to me is, as we would say, in chemistry, the rate-limiting step — the place where there’s a bottleneck and progress bogs down — is clinical trials.

Thomas: So scientists had a lot of ideas about how to make a preventive vaccine that would protect healthy people against AIDS and work in the laboratory and in animal models is — it’s not cheap by any means — but it’s not as expensive as mounting an ethical, scientifically-credible, clinical trial, because you have live humans, and you have to recruit them and test them and qualify them and bring them in places and do things to them. So that’s very expensive. And the government had really backed away — backed away — from spending money on clinical testing of HIV vaccines in 1994, for a variety of reasons, which were political.

Thomas: And so once I realized that clinical trials were probably the bottleneck, one of my sources said to me, “Well, if you want to help, you can do what anybody can do, which is volunteer for a clinical trial.” And I was like, “Oh, I guess I could.” So what they wanted were healthy individuals at very low risk for contracting HIV. And then we were, I was one of the first two dozen people to take what they call a DNA or naked DNA vaccine, which is synthesized in a lab contains a portion of the DNA, or the RNA for a vaccine for the HIV virus, and it induces a cellular immune response to that. So you know, it didn’t seem like much of a risk to me.

Thomas: It was an enormous pain in the butt and it taught me why affluent white people are overrepresented in NIH clinical trials, which are done in Bethesda, because for the per diem rate and the travel allowance they give you, if you didn’t have some of your own money, you could never afford to go back and forth to Bethesda to participate in these trials. Plus, you had to put a lot of trust in these people that whatever they were injecting in your arm wasn’t going to kill you and of course, people of color lack that trust. But people of color who are low income could not have afforded to go back and forth to Bethesda 17 times. I mean, I went 17 times in one year because of the study. Now, I didn’t have a lot of money. I would quit my job and was reporting a book, but I was very motivated. And I had enough money that if I lost $30 on every trip to Bethesda, it was not going to make me noticeably deeper in credit card debt than I already was. So I just went ahead and did it.

Thomas: And of course, it was a disappointment that this product — this candidate vaccine — did not prove protective. That was very disappointing. I— who wouldn’t love to be in the clinical trial that works? We’re reading stories now about people who volunteered for the clinical trials of the Pfizer, Moderna vaccines or the J&J vaccines, and they’re happy to have made a contribution, you know, to this enormous scientific step forward.

13:53, Laguaite: Like Pat mentioned, she wrote a book called “Big Shot: Passion, Politics and the Struggle for an AIDS Vaccine,” and she spoke to the process of it.

14:03, Thomas: Yes, I was the editor of the Harvard Health Letter, and one of my responsibilities was polling the 24 Harvard Medical School faculty members who were my board members to make out kind of a questionnaire, a survey, but surveying them about what they thought were the 10 most important advances in medicine, scientific advances in medicine in the past year, and then I’d write this, you know, wrap-up story that would run in January, and you know, was a look back. And so I was writing the one that was January of 1997, or probably December of ’96, and I was writing to look back on top 10 medical advances in 1996. Well, that was the year that highly active antiretroviral therapy or HAART became available, and it was utterly game-changing for people who were infected with HIV. It made HIV not a death sentence. And at that time, people had been dying. You’d learn you had AIDS. You’d go home and you tell your parents, “I’m gay, I’m dying. I have AIDS, and you’re probably dead in 14 months.” I mean, I think that was the average time from diagnosis to death.

Thomas: So here I’m writing a story about this revolutionary, new treatment so effective, and I’m thinking, “We have this treatment that’s so good. Why don’t we have a vaccine that can prevent this terrible disease in the first place, instead of trying to do something about it later, when people have one foot in the grave practically?” So that idea came to me in the shower. And it’s always you scratching your head. You get these inspirations and I said, “You know, if I don’t know why there is no HIV vaccine, and I’m the editor of the Harvard Health Letter, then chances are that most people who are less privileged in terms of their access to information — most people probably have no idea why there is no HIV vaccine.”

Thomas: So I set out to answer that question. And I found, of course, that there were barriers, enormous scientific barriers. It’s hard to make a vaccine, to keep HIV from getting into ourselves, and leading to AIDS. Money. Vaccines are not as profitable as treatments and never will be a shot that you get once a year or once every 2 years, never going to make the money have a pill you take every day. So pharmaceutical companies are not going to do it without a big infusion of money. And I think that’s exactly what we saw with Operation Warp Speed. What will go down in history as President Trump’s positive contribution to the history of medicine will be the enormous amounts of money put into vaccines because that’s what it takes. It takes a lot of money. And then politically.

16:38, Laguaite: Just as COVID was heavily politicized. HIV was as well. At the beginning of the episode, we heard examples of the politicized nature of the AIDS epidemic. But Pat elaborated even further on that. 

16:51, Thomas: Because AIDS was — the first communities that it penetrated were gay people, people of color, people engaged in sex work, and really poverty. That’s a big thing, because it got into those communities. First, they were marginalized. They didn’t have the political pull of other communities when the disease hit, and they were easy to other you know, the gay man who still today make up the largest percentage about three-quarters of all newly diagnosed cases of HIV in the late ’60s in San Francisco.

Thomas: These were boys who came to San Francisco having been disowned by their families, beaten up at school, shunned. They were the lepers of their world, and sometimes killed because they were gay. So when they flocked to San Francisco, and the post-Stonewall gay liberation movements began in 1968, being free to express their sexuality was their most important political issue. It’s a little bit like people today who think that their guns are their only issue. Gay men thought that their sexuality was their only issue. And it was so important to them after the lives that they had led in the communities where most of them came from. So the casual sex, the bars on Castro — this was the definition of living life to its fullest.

Thomas: And so, you know, when you have a president, a Republican president, like Ronald Reagan, and you have federal legislators, members of Congress, Senators, they found it so easy to demonize these libertarians. And you know, most men are really queasy about the idea of gay male sex. They want to watch lesbians, but they don’t want to hear anything about gay men. And so it’s very easy to other these men and demonize them and say, “This is not where public money should go.” So when I began to work on my book, I quickly identified these sets of barriers. And I thought, “Well, I’ll just find me some people who are trying to change this.” People who believe that yes, treatments are important, but what we really need is something to keep the world, the uninfected world, safe, because you’ve studied the history of medicine, the only thing that’s ever defeated an infectious disease is a vaccine, and the only public health intervention more important than the smallpox vaccine and the polio vaccine are flush toilets. I mean, those are, those are your major public health interventions. So you know, I thought a vaccine was important, and so did the researchers I wrote about and in my book, what I did is I tracked from the early ’80s through 2000, the history of people I told the stories, the narrative stories of people who made finding a preventive vaccine their whole life. And there were a lot of these people and they worked for companies and they work for universities and for the government and they tried really, really, really hard in an uphill battle. And we still don’t have a vaccine.

19:56, Laguaite: Pat also spoke to how the discourse about HIV and AIDS change From the ’80s, to the 2000s, when her book came out.

20:04, Thomas: The image of it as a disease of someone other than mainstream Americans that I mean— the Reagan years, you know, those years really enabled most Americans to believe that this wasn’t their disease. Now, gradually, the death of their sons and husbands and nephews chipped away at that, but admitting that a disease was transmitted by sex and the sharing of needles for intravenous drug use? That was pretty hard for most Americans to do, even as the heterosexual spread of the disease moved into the 1 in 4 area, but most of those women were women of color, or they were women in some other country. And so that that idea that they weren’t mainstream people who were affected, that was a persistent thing.

Thomas: Now, the Clinton years helped. Clinton made a big commitment to vaccine development in something called the of the state speech, a forerunner of Donald Trump’s commitment to Operation Warp Speed. I’m not sure if Donald Trump knew that when he did Operation Warp Speed, but his advisors I will bet you did. But no, the disease remained and remains to this day stigmatized because we still live in a very homophobic and racist culture. And those are the enemies of effective public health intervention. But we also need to think about the resistance of the people most at risk, because as I said, gay people in the ’80s were they were single-issue voters. What they wanted was sexual liberation. They did. And of course, that changed with the rise of the AIDS activist groups who were white, college-educated, living on the coasts. Educated white men realized, if we don’t take action to lobby for ourselves, no one else is, and so that that movement was tremendously effective. But even those activists met resistance from their peers and friends. These public health measures are always going to feel to the young and dumb, they’re always going to, or the old and obstinate, they’re always going to feel like somebody is being you’re wagging me and telling me not to do what I want to do. And that public health just faces that all the time.

22:27, Laguaite: Giiven her experience reporting during the AIDS epidemic, and as a queer journalist, myself, I also wanted to know if Pat had faced any societal stigma.

Laguaite: And I kind of wanted to jump back to something you mentioned earlier about activists having a hard time during this period just because of all the societal stigma. So was that something that you faced while you were reporting in the newsroom or outside with sources?

22:54, Thomas: Yeah, well, our ideas— I have thought a lot about this, because, you know, I’m gay. And I’ve always been gay. But when I was covering the early days of AIDS for national publications for physicians, and I’d be in the newsroom at the first International AIDS Conference in ’95, the third in Washington and ’97, the fifth in Montreal. In the newsroom, there was one out gay person. And that was Randy Schultz because his whole career in San Francisco was based on the fact that he was the first openly gay man hired by a mainstream newspaper. There were a lot of gay men and women working for mainstream news organizations, trust me, but the belief that was that if you were a member of a specialized community, you could not be fair and objective in your coverage of that community. So a lot of us in the newsrooms at these international meetings and the smaller HIV meetings we covered, a lot of us had the feeling that if our top editors knew that we were part of this community, they would take us off the beat, you know? We’d be back on cholesterol, and that’s so bizarre because now, of course, the push with newsrooms is we cannot have fair coverage of our whole communities unless our newsrooms are inclusive and diverse. And we have reporters who look like the demographics of the audience we serve, but that’s the opposite of how we were of the social pressures we felt in the news business in the ’80s.

Thomas: And I will never forget in the newsroom of the Washington International AIDS Conference, and I will believe it was ’87. There was a huge cicada bloom that year, I remember walking this conference over bodies of you know, Brood whatever. Anyway, in that newsroom, there was a woman who worked for an advocacy group on Cape Cod, I want to say Provincetown or someplace. And she— we all knew each other a lot, but she went around and she was like, “We’re having a lunch of all the gay journalists. Meet us at such and such a place and So I went there at lunchtime.” And I will tell you, I was surprised to see who else was at that table. People from The Post and the Wall Street Journal and a lot of places who were not especially men who were not identifiably gay. They were not on my gaydar. They were conservative, big-city reporters, but they were not they were gay men, and they were pissed.

Thomas: So yeah, we just kept trying to write the fairest, best coverage we could. But they’re really bad together, although I think it was also in ’87 that the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association was organized. And you know, that was a step forward. But honestly, they really believed that gay people could not write about a disease that mostly affected gay people. Now, how does that make sense? That is having such a low opinion of our moral fiber and what sways our judgment calls as reporters. You know, they treated us like we had no ethics, no professional ethics, which was just wrong.

Thomas: Yeah, there was a lot of us. I mean, David Frace’s book, when he writes about the early days of AIDS in New York, you know, he knew plenty of gay journalists. The trouble is, a lot of them are dead. Randy Schultz is dead. I went to Randy Schultz’s funeral. Just these gay men who reported on AIDS, they were part of the community, and a lot of them are not with us now.

26:24, Laguaite: That must have been difficult. How did you, you know, sort of mitigate covering something that’s so devastating to a community like that?

26:36, Thomas: Needless to say, during the Reagan years, and during the reporting of this book, and during a lot of other administrations, I felt angry about how my people have been disrespected, and shunted aside and not treated like valuable contributing members of society. I think it’s inevitable that you would feel that but what it sometimes does is if you can channel that, that anger into determination to redress what you think is wrong, then that’s a powerful force. That’s a powerful motivational force. I think that’s part of what carried me through, you know, the 5 years of my life that I spent working on this book because you don’t get a big advance for a narrative nonfiction book about essentially scientific research. Even if you try to put a lot of social context and turn it into a narrative with character, plot, action nevertheless, advances, low. So you know, I scrambled for money, I was lucky to get some grants from private foundations. I won one prize along the way that helped. I would work, doing work for hire writing pieces for Harvard and other institutions for high pay. And then I would turn around and take that money and send myself on a reporting trip somewhere that I needed to go. That vaccine trial was subsidized a ton of interviews because I would kind of paid for to go to Washington and I would just schedule a ton of interviews while I was there, but it was hard. It was some tough years, it was very lean years to pay for this book myself, and then to have it come out a week after 9/11 when no one cared. Terrorism ruled. If you hadn’t written about the Middle East or terrorism, you were kind of screwed in that marketplace. And by the way, terrorism is often used to move the spotlight off of a public health crisis and divert funding. This is exactly what happened with AIDS. After 9/11, no one gave a shit about AIDS. AIDS fell. And I can tell you as someone whose book didn’t sell 12 copies, you know, it fell off the public agenda for about 2 years and the Trump administration, terrorism has been their buddy. We want to talk about terrorism. Well, not domestic terrorism, but we want to talk about terrorists and immigrants. We don’t want to talk about how what you really need to do to stay safe is wear a mask and stay home for a while. We really don’t want to talk about that.

Thomas: So the lack of investment in sound preventive strategies, the skepticism of the public, who basically doesn’t want to stop doing what they enjoy doing and doesn’t want to stop living life, the way they live it these are all totally predictable, and they are typical of the AIDS years and the COVID years, no different. And then the other thing that’s gonna happen here, and I think a little bit of it is happening now. Just as there was a skeptical backlash against the public health recommendations, we are also I believe, going to see a wave of survivor guilt. The people who poo-pooed the recommendations and as a result, lots of people died, including people they loved and were related to you hearing some of this regret come out in interviews now. I think you can definitely hear it and Dr. Deborah Birx now that she’s talking about some of her experiences in the White House. I don’t think Tony Fauci feels like he has anything to regret. Maybe that early mask advice doesn’t sit too well with him now. But, yeah, a lot of commonalities. 

30:18, Laguaite: Given your experience, and especially covering diseases, did you expect COVID to be politicized in the end?

Thomas: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s easy to stay to stigmatize them as foreign. I knew that would happen. I knew that what happened knew it and especially with since Trump had used China as a straw man for many, many things. You know, it’s obvious that this was going to be the politics of it a foreign play, nothing to do with us. We’ve cut off travel, it’s all cool. And by the time you’ve cut off travel, the bar the horse has already left the barn. You know, we saw that with SARS, you know, MERS, all these things, these viruses, they move fast. Just need one person in one hotel somewhere, you know?

31:02, Laguaite: During the COVID pandemic, former President Donald Trump suggested researchers look into whether COVID could be treated by UV light. He also tweeted about hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug that's controversially used to fight COVID-19. Although the Food and Drug Administration cautioned against using it to fight COVID Trump advocated it as a treatment. In a similar way, desperation for a treatment for HIV and AIDS was a huge issue.

31:31, Thomas: Desperation for treatment also sparks lunacy about what might constitute treatment. I mean, can we fight this by putting a strong light into your body? Can we fight this by injecting bleach? You know, does hydroxychloroquine work? During the early days of HPV anti-retroviral therapy, the movie Dallas Buyers Club is based on fact, and there were bands of desperate, mostly gay men importing all kinds of crap from everywhere and ingesting it because they were desperate. They knew they were gonna die if something didn’t help and they're willing to try anything. And the problem with that is it’s an open door for quacks and profiteers. There was always a snake oil salesman. And as my physician friends said, back when they had a few drugs, a small armamentarium of antivirals, and that would help treatments ways of approaching pneumocystis pneumonia, things that would help a little bit. They were OK most of them who said they were OK with somebody taking mega doses of vitamin C, advocated by Nobel laureate Linus Pauling or some of these other herbal things, as long as the people didn’t turn their backs on conventional therapy, which they knew helped by a small percentage. And I think we see a lot of that in American culture, especially with the rise of the Internet, people who think that they don't need to take the COVID vaccine because I don’t know, their belief in God will help or their diet will help. So that’s just that is also a universal theme. Just desperation causes people to open themselves to all sorts of fraud and misuse and profiteering and that’s a terrible thing. And the Internet has made it worse. God, I sound like person who hates the internet, who actually use the internet. You know, I'm not, I'm not sitting here in la la land. But I do believe that it’s that it has brought a lot of peril for people who are not educated to think critically.

33:30, Laguaite: Well, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to chat with me.

Thomas: It’s been fun. Yeah, thank you, Madeline for thinking of me.

Laguaite: Although we do have vaccine options for COVID through companies like Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, there is no vaccine for HIV and AIDS. About 1.2 million people in the US are living with HIV, and it still disproportionately affects certain populations, like racial and ethnic minorities and gay and bisexual men. To see a list of global and local HIV and AIDS organizations, check out the show notes on social media or via the To Health and Back website.

Laguaite: This has been To Health and Back. Thanks again for joining me on this health history journey. Tune in next time. Until then, don't forget to rate the podcast and subscribe. Feel free to shoot me an email at healthandback@gmail.com and I'm also on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as @healthandback. Thanks. See you next time.