This is the transcript for the new podcast, Fig Tree Revolution. You can find it on Stitcher and iTunes.
By Bill Mefford
During the first week of October in 1982, cyanide was found in Tylenol capsules in the Chicago area, touching off a national scare that captured the national TV and print media for months to come and it resulted in the coordination of national and state law enforcement as well as federal government agencies like the Food and Drug Administration. To see who was responsible for this action and to ensure that no further capsules were tainted, no expense was spared. It was said repeatedly by officials from all agencies involved, all of this was done in order to, “ save peoples’ lives.” Saving lives was the top priority.
In the end, millions of dollars were spent, hundreds of local, state, and federal law enforcement officials were tasked with the priority to restore public confidence in the medicines on store shelves, and the New York Times featured front page stories every day for the entire month of October and then another 23 stories in the next two months that followed. Ultimately, no one was found responsible for the crime and sadly, 7 people died.
By contrast, at this exact same time, by October 5, 1982, 634 Americans had been stricken with a new disease called AIDS, 260 of whom were dead. There was no mobilization of governmental money, no rush to coordinate agencies to respond, and the media hardly even noticed. For example, the New York Times had written 3 stories on AIDS in all of 1981 and 3 stories in all of 1982. None made the front page. 634 AIDS cases and 260 people dead.
The difference between these two tragedies? The victims of the cyanide Tylenol capsules were not gay.
Hello my name is Bill Mefford and welcome to the Fig Tree Revolution Podcast where we take a deep dive on lesser known people throughout history who have helped to mobilize their communities to create real change. Sometimes we bring in a little theology, or missiology, but always, we want to learn all we can from people who created real change so that we can then impact our communities in the same way. So let’s get started.
In the early 80s, the emergence of the AIDS epidemic was deemed by some leaders in the medical field as well as most public health officials in the federal government to be a low priority.
Those who pushed government and national healthcare officials to look more seriously at this new disease were local doctors whose patients were becoming sick and shared some of the rarely-seen-before symptoms, and local public health officials in places where the AIDS epidemic hit hardest like New York City and San Francisco for they could not help but see how devastating and rapidly-spreading this new epidemic was. Also responsive were low-level researchers in agencies like the Center for Disease Control, which I will refer to from now on as the CDC.
Local doctors like Dr. Arye Rubinstein from the Bronx kept seeing purplish lesions on some of his patients that were called Kaposi’s Sarcoma and he knew what the governmental and media response had been to other epidemics like Legionnaires Disease and there was no comparison to what was happening now to his patients.
Again, to see the conspiracy of indifference in response to AIDS, I think it is helpful to see the response to Legionnaires Disease in 1976. For four days in late July of 1976, American Legion members met inside the Philadelphia Bellevue-Stratford hotel for their convention before returning home. Within days of their return a number of Legion members started dying. By August 2, 12 people had died and three dozen more had been hospitalized with a mysterious respiratory illness. The pneumonia-like symptoms were nearly the same in every case. With a dozen people dead from the same kind of symptoms, there was understandable fear as news of this new disease spread like wildfire. In response, the CDC launched the largest investigation in its history. According to the History Channel,
“A team of 20 CDC epidemiologists joined state health workers in scouring hospital records and poring through autopsy findings. Laboratories remained open throughout the night as helicopters flew in the latest blood and tissue samples. In hospitals across Pennsylvania, the medical investigators interviewed patients about their every move in Philadelphia…[and] Investigators even checked into the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel and combed the premises for clues…They considered everything from the hotel’s ice machines to its toothpicks, and they crawled into its heating and cooling systems to take samples. They considered causes ranging from food poisoning to foul play by anti-war protestors who had previously threatened violence against military veterans.” (https://www.history.com/news/the-discovery-of-legionnaires-disease)
No stone was left unturned. And the media’s coverage was just as intense, running front page headlines for days on end in most of the major newspapers across the country while dubbing it Legionnaires Disease.
In the end, they found the disease was not contagious and that antibiotics could effectively treat it. Because of the fast response and the coordination and mobilization of resources lives were saved. Again, saving peoples’ lives was the top priority.
Unless those lives were gay. In contrast, nothing like that was happening with this new deadly and growing epidemic in the early 1980s. But doctors like Dr. Rubinstein, Dr. Michael Gottlieb, Dr. Don Francis (who also worked for the CDC), Dr. Mary Guinan, Selma Dritz, and numerous others are the ones who tried sounding the alarm, but their cries for help went largely unheeded.
The outbreak of AIDS went largely unnoticed and the number of people infected grew literally by the day and began spreading to other groups. Dr. Mary Guinan studied the spread of the disease in heterosexual groups, like intravenous drug users, but her findings were not welcome as there was considerable resistance on the part of some public health officials to agree that this disease had spread outside the gay community. Though the drug users who were interviewed insisted they weren’t gay, some public health officials refused to believe them and insisted that they were in fact gay.
Many public health officials and government leaders wanted to make this a gay-only disease. For as long as this was a gay disease, the necessary alarm and the corresponding coordination and mobilization of resources to meet this disease was not sounded and did not occur.
The failure of the media in their absent coverage of this new disease, which in 1981 and much of 1982 was evident through at least the first 5 years, which was a vital time as this disease was spreading with little awareness of what was in fact happening.
Let me give you an example of the conspiracy of indifference between the federal government and the media. At a White House press briefing on October 15, 1982 - and remember at this time, there were 634 cases of people with AIDS and 260 people had died - a journalist, who was also an Episcopal priest, Lester Kinsolving, asked a question about a new epidemic called AIDS among gay men. This is the first public question on record of the White House regarding AIDS. 260 people had died, but the media did not question the White House until 260 people had died.
I am going to play the audio and then read the transcript afterwards as the audio might be hard to hear. Kinsolving is asking Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes what the White House is doing in response. Speakes is the one with the southern accent.
Here is the transcript of the press conference and I have this linked in the transcript of this podcast on figtreerevolution.com.
Lester Kinsolving: Does the president have any reaction to the announcement by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that AIDS is now an epidemic in over 600 cases?
Larry Speakes: AIDS? I haven't got anything on it.
Lester Kinsolving: Over a third of them have died. It's known as "gay plague." [Press pool laughter.] No, it is. It's a pretty serious thing. One in every three people that get this have died. And I wonder if the president was aware of this.
Larry Speakes: I don't have it. [Press pool laughter.] Do you?
Lester Kinsolving: You don't have it? Well, I'm relieved to hear that, Larry! [Press pool laughter.]
Larry Speakes: Do you?
Lester Kinsolving: No, I don't.
Larry Speakes: You didn't answer my question. How do you know? [Press pool laughter.]
Lester Kinsolving: Does the president — in other words, the White House — look on this as a great joke?
Larry Speakes: No, I don't know anything about it, Lester. (https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids)
The audio goes on to show another press conference in 1984 when AIDS is more well-known and widespread and has killed thousands and still, the same joking and laughing is heard between Kinsolving and Larry Speakes.
As Larry Kramer, an AIDS activist, said at that time, if Kaposi’s Sarcoma, which was being found at that time in two people each week in New York City alone, was a “new form of cancer attacking straight people, it would be receiving constant media attention, and pressure from every side would be so great upon the cancer-funding institutions that research would be proceeding with great intensity.” (Shilts, p. 109) But there was no intensity from the federal government or the media. Instead, there was laughter.
The media’s deliberate and intentional neglect of AIDS was evident even when Congress tried to shine a light on what was happening. It was in August of 1981 that chief counsel to the House Committee on Health, Tim Westmoreland, and one of only two out gay staffers on Capitol Hill at that time, started hearing about cases of an odd disease from his boss’ district in Los Angeles. His boss was Chair of the Health Committee in the House of Representatives, Henry Waxman.
In February of 1981 Westmoreland had received the first budget from the new Reagan administration, which slashed the budget for the CDC from $327 million under President Carter to $161 million - cutting it more than half. The CDC was an organization designed to focus on preventing deaths through unexpected illnesses - meaning, their top priority was to save lives - and now it’s budget was being cut in half. In practical terms, this meant that the CDC was not able to hire more scientists to conduct the painstakingly long work it took to discover new diseases, systematically cull through numerous hypotheses, conduct needed studies, and find out the root causes not to mention begin the process of research into possible cures. Preventing deadly diseases is long, tedious, and labor intensive. Using the false cry of federalism and pinning yet another overwhelming task on states meant that Reagan officials were comfortable with a lack of federal coordination and with states possibly duplicating work. Cutting the funding so drastically also meant that raising the funding levels again was going to be a long and tedious process that would likely result in money being made available to scientists and researchers long after it was needed. This is in fact just what happened.
Westmoreland saw the budget slashing and anticipated a public health crisis and that crisis was AIDS. But he had no idea how devastating that crisis would be. Due to Westmoreland’s efforts and the efforts of other Capitol Hill staffers like Bill Krause, his committee, chaired by Representative Waxman, started holding hearings on this new outbreak and started appropriating funding for the National Institutes of Health, which had the CDC in its jurisdiction. The first hearing was held in Los Angeles at a local gay men’s health services center to highlight the impact that this new disease was having in gay communities and the resources it was demanding local communities to provide for necessary care. Westmoreland hoped this hearing would shine the media spotlight on AIDS and force the Reagan administration to justify its intention to defund necessary programs. The result of the hearing? Crickets. No TV coverage, not even health journals covered it and the Los Angeles Times wrote one story on it, but did not cover the lack of federal leadership. Instead, they wrote a story, hidden on the back pages of their paper, about how this was a gay disease.
Seeing virtually no media push back against their intentions to starve necessary programs to support communities facing a public health crisis, the Reagan administration felt safe to continue to annually send budgets to Congress that repeatedly defunded agencies like the CDC and others that could have conducted necessary research into finding out what was causing the excruciating sickness and death of so many people.
Tim Westmoreland and activist Bill Kraus who became a Congressional aide to Representative Phil Burton - a champion for greater AIDS funding on the Hill - both came to see a pattern from 1981 through at least 1985. As the number of people contracted AIDS mounted and even multiplied the budget proposals from the Reagan administration actually lessened. It was a constant fight that Westmoreland and Kraus and other faithful staffers had to diligently keep track of and push back against. What made this constant battle between the Democratic-controlled House and the administration so difficult to understand is that the Department of Health and Human Services, the very department that housed the CDC and National Institutes of Health, were the ones literally refusing funding from Congress. They wanted less money to do their job! Listen to HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler testify before Henry Waxman’s committee in 1983:
In terms of AIDS, the Department of Health and Human Services has made a very strong commitment. In fact, I have spoken to the head of the Center for Disease Control personally on a number of occasions on this subject and there is no stone being left unturned to pursue an answer. This is a serious, very serious problem and every single research avenue of the Department is being directed toward the resolution of the problem...The Public Health Service is going to use every dollar necessary to try and find an answer because the fatality rate of this disease is so staggering and so high that it threatens the whole society...I have to say that, in the AIDS situation, I really don’t think there is another dollar that would make a difference, because the attempt is all out to find the answer.” (Shilts p. 273)
Did you hear that? We are leaving no stone unturned, but please do not send us anymore money. Who can say that they have ever been so passionate about something that they refused more funding? Money is the very thing that allows you to unturn every stone! Something tells me that Secretary Heckler left A LOT of stones unturned.
But here is the thing, when you see that the victims of a disease that you are tasked with researching are not people you value; they are not people you know or people you are in relationship with, then you are so much more likely to leave stones unturned. You are much more likely to be so much more passionate about cyanide in Tylenol capsules or Legionnaires Disease than you are about AIDS.
What Secretary Heckler, the other members of the Reagan administration, and the media were doing in the early 80s was a classic case of blaming the victims. It is blaming the poor and oppressed for the problems of poverty and oppression. Throughout history and sadly, driven largely by the preaching and teaching of too many of our churches today, particularly among evangelical churches, we have accepted the practice of categorizing the poor between deserving and undeserving. Michael Katz writes about this in his book, “The Undeserving Poor.”
Katz locates one of the first attempts historically to separate the “deserving” poor from the “undeserving” poor to the mid-nineteenth century, right about the time of the dawning of the Industrial Revolution, just when there was an increasing chasm between the rich and the poor in the United States. Shockingly, though many churches have policies that guide their outreach and missional engagement that are rooted in this belief in distinguishing between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, there is no widespread biblical support for this at all. I have said this elsewhere, but this distinction between deserving and undeserving poor people is the single greatest heresy that the church faces today. It has done more to destroy peoples’ lives, degrade the value of church mission, and harm the church’s faithfulness to God than any other thing facing the church.
Instead of separating poor or vulnerable groups into good or bad, Scripture overwhelmingly prefers that those who follow God address the systemic causes of poverty and oppression instead. When we fail to address the systems of injustice that create poverty or oppression in the first place an unjust status quo will remain unchallenged and the people we so carelessly judge get harmed or even killed. Indeed, this is exactly what happened during the first five years of the public outbreak of AIDS. The Reagan administration, the media, and most faith communities did nothing because it was a gay disease and it wasn’t deserving of our attention or action or money or resources. People afflicted with AIDS weren’t deserving of action, or funding, or research, or cures. They were gay.
What changed?
In 1985, movie star Rock Hudson contracted AIDS. Though he was known as a leading man in the movies who always got the woman, his closeted gay life shocked the nation and woke the public up to the fact that someone they knew personally had contracted AIDS.
Yet, even after one of their personal friends died of AIDS, it was still two years later in 1987 that President Reagan publicly mentioned AIDS for the first time. By the time he publicly stated the name of the disease - AIDS, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 people had died.
This was the textbook definition of what I call a conspiracy of indifference. The media failed in their job. The federal government, especially President Reagan, completely failed the test of leadership. They failed with their highest priority: saving peoples’ lives.
But it was people like Dr. Ayre Rubinstein, Dr. Michael Gottlieb, Dr. Don Francis (who also worked for the CDC), Dr. Mary Guinan, Selma Dritz, and numerous others are the ones who not only sounded the alarm about AIDS, they treated the victims of this disease. And it was Hill Staffers like Tim Westmoreland and Bill Kraus and others who tediously studied and analyzed federal budgets, mobilized activists and advocacy organizations to more effectively lobby for greater funding and attention. In this day and age when federal workers are demonized and attacked, we would do well to remember that there are many, many faithful people like Westmoreland and Kraus who are passionate about the people whose lives are directly impacted by injustice and by a public and media’s indifference to their suffering.
And the struggle for equal rights for LGBTQ people continues. Legislation such as the Equality Act and the Do No Harm Act are still needed to ensure that we no longer demonize people for who God has created them to be. I hope you will call your legislators and urge them to suport both of these bills so that discrimination can be ended, and we too can end the conspiracy of indifference to the suffering of others
Thank you for listening to today’s podcast. Remember, you can find the transcript on the blog part of figtreerevolution.com. And I want to especially thank Randy Shilts and his book, And the Band Played On, as well as Michael Katz and his book, The Undeserving Poor.
See You in February!