While this is correct, my point was that the experience of the HIV/AIDS seemingly had no impact on our handling of COVID. But Reagan/AIDS, Trump/COVID, is a pretty bleak manifestation of “first as tragedy, then as a farce.”
I guess, how did you want the HIV/AIDS experience to inform the COVID response? I don't want to defend Trump and his bleach-injection suggestions etc, but we did:
- develop vaccines at a really rapid pace (it's too bad they aren't more effective)
- learn a lot about how to treat COVID
- shut down broad categories of activity which would have contributed to spread
- gave everyone free vaccines and tests (I think this is the only 'free for everyone' health care I've seen in my life)
Trump _wasn't_ able to ignore the crisis the way Reagan did for years.
But we landed at a place where the vaccines help but don't offer good immunity from infection, and where many people are more comfortable getting infected repeatedly than they are cutting out shared space and public events. It's not clear to me what lessons we're supposed to draw from the HIV/AIDS experience now. Do you think that a generation of people should have fastidious habits around mask use?
By contrast, with HIV/AIDS, 'taking it seriously' in the 90s meant doing research, and messaging about being paranoid about sex and drugs. Most people did not need to disrupt their lives. And frankly, they could watch a TV special about the crisis, victim-blame quietly, and cheaply virtue-signal by talking about how important it all was. But if slowing down HIV/AIDS transmission had required that most people inconvenience themselves, or behave differently for even a week, I think the story would have been very different.
> But if slowing down HIV/AIDS transmission had required that most people inconvenience themselves, or behave differently for even a week, I think the story would have been very different.
Here, I would ask you to compare changes in behavior around condom usage to the near blanket rejection of wearing a mask in healthcare settings. Irrationality and denialism has fully won out, despite the former being a more intrusive constraint on one’s behavior.
The 'worst' that Trump/COVID did was lose him the election. If he had a lick of sense, he would have won in a landslide.
All he did was what he always does - act like an easily-distracted petulant child on television. It had next to no bearing on vaccine development, distribution, or uptake.
Just about everyone already made up their mind on those three questions, without his input. There's a lot he can be blamed for, but this really isn't one of them.
