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Four Ways HIV Activists Saved Lives During COVID | Opinion Monica Gandhi
, infectious disease expert On 4/12/21 at 2:00 PM EDT
What a whirlwind.
That is remarkable progress. And for that, we owe a debt of gratitude to a group of people who have spent decades fighting another deadly scourge: HIV.
Through their hard work, HIV activists with support from clinicians and researchers helped restructure the government s response to health crises, getting new treatments to patients faster than ever before. Although their primary purpose was to help people with HIV, their work has likely saved many lives that would have been lost to COVID.
AIDS first came to the world s attention with a June 5, 1981, report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about five cases of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) among young gay men in Los Angeles. A second report on cases of PCP and Kaposi sarcoma in New York City and California followed a month later.
The disease that would come to be known as AIDS was first mentioned in the Bay Area Reporter in a July 2 Health Shorts column about Gay Men s Pneumonia potentially linked to poppers buried on page 34.
Dr. Robert Boland s gay health column in the August 13 issue was headlined New Bugs . No Alarm. Boland suggested Kaposi sarcoma (KS) and PCP might be linked to cytomegalovirus, a virus in the herpes family. No one knows what these new bugs have to do with gay life, he wrote. This is a truly hot issue and a number of eager researchers are involved. . Stay tuned for developments.
Michael Callen (1955-1993) is not as well remembered today as he deserves to be. But during the peak years of the AIDS crisis, Callen was known the world over not only for his AIDS activism, but for his music. Callen was a gifted singer-songwriter who made a name for himself both as a solo artist and as a member of the gay a cappella singing group The Flirtations. But it was his AIDS advocacy for which Callen made his greatest impact.
Callen loved being gay, and he loved sex, celebrating both unashamedly. In 1983, soon after his own AIDS diagnosis, Callen published
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In the early 1980s, as AIDS was beginning its deadly tear, a Catholic priest told a radio audience in Boston that he sympathized with people who didn’t want to be around anyone who had the disease.
Robert “Chip” Schooley about popped a vein.
The young Harvard physician and infectious disease expert got in touch with the station and relayed a blunt message to the priest: If you ever make a comment like that again, I will reveal that the church is keeping priests who have AIDS out of sight at a monastery in Newton.
“He was stoking fears people had about those with HIV. It was wrong,” said Schooley, who has spent the past 16 years on the UC San Diego faculty.