The first time I came across Anthony Fauci’s name was in the mid-1990s while reading journalist Randy Shilts’ searing book And the Band Played On (1987), which is widely considered the definitive history of the early years of the AIDS epidemic. One of the book’s central themes is the failure of the left-wing public health and political establishments to be honest about who was at risk for AIDS and how it was spread—because, at the time, telling the truth meant violating leftist political pieties. This failure occurred even though infection with the virus at the time meant almost certain death.
Today Shilts, who would later die of the disease he chronicled, is viewed as a hero; at the time, he was spat on in the street and called a traitor or sexual fascist by many others in the gay community. Like many skeptics of establishment policy on COVID-19 today, those who dissented from the “approved” views about AIDS were treated brutally by the public at large. Of course, COVID-19 and AIDS are very different diseases. Still, there are eerie echoes of the destructive political bias that contributed to our AIDS failures, both in public health policy and in the activist community’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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