Fauci and Larry Kramer in 1993

Not much progress has been made

The following is a recorded show from November 30, 1993. It’s a 55 minute call-in show on C-SPAN discussing the President’s Task Force on AIDS, with featured guests Dr. Anthony Fauci and the late AIDS activist Larry Kramer, founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis. It’s well worth watching to get a snapshot of what the national conversation about AIDS sounded like a full thirty years ago. Below the linked video, I provide approximate time stamps to notable moments. I apologize for not embedding the video directly in this post, but that option has been disabled, so you’ll need to click through.

Larry Kramer and Tony Fauci 1993

4:30: Kramer makes the amazing claim that fully one billion people will be “infected with HIV” and potentially dead by the year 2000. He repeats this multiple times in the video, only to be corrected by Fauci — but not until very near the end.

11:40: “We need more drugs and we need them faster!” Or some variation on that theme, which was the theme of early AIDS. Everything was happening too slowly — or so was mistakenly believed. Then Kramer says, “We have willing Guinea pigs [AIDS patients desperate for medication] out there to get you your answers.” Unfortunately, time has proven him far too correct on this assertion. Incredibly, thanks to PrEP, we have many HIV-negative individuals willing to be Guinea pigs for the pharmaceutical companies.

13:00: This was one of my favorite moments in this whole conversation, in which Fauci point blank admits that “We don’t have really good drugs.” He asserts that the problem isn’t that the drugs aren’t being developed quickly enough, it’s actually that they’re, well, quite shitty drugs.

At the 14-minute mark this turns into a call-in show (remember those?). I don’t know how callers get selected from what is presumably a very wide pool, but the variety of calls that came in was pretty interesting.

At about 14:40, a caller asks why can’t we just find everyone who’s HIV-positive and quarantine them in sanitariums. Kramer won’t dignify that with an answer, but Fauci immediately condemns the idea of locking down HIV-positive people as being useless and a violation of human rights, which is absolutely correct. (A broken clock is still right twice a day.) To be completely fair to Fauci, he does say that his approach might be different for a “deadly respiratory virus.” Foreshadowing?

This has nothing to do with a caller, but at 17:25 Kramer states that he has “no doubt that this is an intentional genocide of certain groups of people.” Again, I agree with him, but not at all in the manner he thinks it is happening.

My next favorite moment in the video comes in the form of the caller at 17:40 who asks why funding for people like Robert Root-Bernstein and Peter Duesberg is being cut when funding for HIV AIDS proponents is increased. Fauci counters with the predictable statement that the role of HIV in AIDS is “overwhelming,” while providing no actual evidence, and then he goes on to claim that people like Root-Bernstein and Duesberg are in fact saying that “AIDS is caused by aberrant homosexual behavior and aberrant behavior by IV drug users,” rather than being caused by an infectious agent. To the best of my knowledge, neither of these scientists has used their views on causation to point fingers or to assign blame. One can honestly and legitimately critique the “lifestyle hypothesis,” and this needs to happen, but this is just more obfuscation by Fauci in an effort to avoid the scientific question by spinning it into an accusation of bigotry. Also, he claims that “the link between HIV and AIDS is incontrovertible,” and in the next breath he admits we have no idea how it works to actually destroy T cells. (We still don’t. THIRTY YEARS LATER.)

At 20:23 we get a call in from an obvious homophobe who wants to blame the entire gay community for AIDS, and she gets cut off quite quickly. Don’t know what that was about.

At 23:20, Kramer is right once again when he states “The New York Times is the worst paper on AIDS in the world.” There’s some stiff competition, but in my view, they’re all terrible including the Times.

Finally, at 36:20, Kramer again makes the incredible statement that there are, or soon will be, a billion people “infected with the AIDS virus.” Finally, finally, Fauci interrupts to correct this massive overestimate. He says that “even the worst estimates” have as a high figure, 100 million. (In 2000, there were 26.6 million people worldwide “living with HIV,” so Kramer was way, way off.) Kramer keeps pushing back, saying you should go with the worst case scenario, Fauci counters that he’d lose credibility if he did that, which is probably true.

The video sort of hobbles to a close after that, including some weird sparring between Fauci and Kramer alternated with a love fest (Fauci says “I love you, Larry” at least twice). I’d encourage you to go watch it, because it’s absolutely fascinating to see how little things have changed in thirty years. The President’s Task Force on AIDS was established by Bill Clinton in order to find a cure. We’re still waiting.

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If you’re a new reader and would like some background as to my views on HIV AIDS, including the “existence” question, please refer to this post and the links contained therein.