Short Memories: AIDS Denialism and Vaccine Resistance

A friend of ours was telling [my partner] Ingrid about this new woman she's been dating. Things were going along swimmingly ... until it turned out that the new inamorata, a youngish thing in her early thirties, was an AIDS denialist. She was swallowing all that bullshit about how HIV doesn't really cause AIDS, AIDS drugs are what causes AIDS, and the whole thing is a vast conspiracy by the drug companies to get rich selling people drugs they don't need and that just make them sick.

This was absolutely the wrong thing to say to our friend, who had been an AIDS activist since the early days of the epidemic, had nursed several beloved friends through the illness, had seen way too many of those friends die ... and had seen others come back from the brink of death when the protease inhibitors and combination therapies finally came out.

So Ingrid and I were talking, not only about how ignorant AIDS denialism is and what a perfect example of the Galileo Fallacy it's proving to be ... but also about how profoundly insensitive and clueless it was for this woman to talk this way to someone who'd been through the worst days of the epidemic. Doesn't she remember? we said. Doesn't she know what AIDS was like before the drug cocktails came along?

And it occurred to both of us:

No. She doesn't remember.

And that's the problem.

There are some AIDS denialists who were around in the '80s. But an awful lot of them don't remember. They weren't around during the early days of the epidemic, when there was absolutely no treatment and your life expectancy when you got diagnosed was a few months, a year or two if you were lucky. They don't remember the days when a diagnosis was pretty much a death sentence -- a sentence to a slow, painful death. (Some people with AIDS lived through those days to tell the tale, but not many.) They don't remember having half their gay male friends get sick and die. They don't remember people lying in the streets screaming for the medical establishment to fucking pay attention and work on a treatment, some treatment, any treatment at all.

And they don't remember what it was like when the cocktail came along, and suddenly people started getting better and living longer. They don't remember the wonderful (although not entirely trivial) "problem" of people with AIDS who had quit their jobs and run up huge credit card debts, and now actually expected to live for a while. They don't remember what it was like when AIDS turned, almost overnight, from a deadly illness to a chronic but often survivable one.

To them, AIDS has always been what it is now. They look at HIV and AIDS, and they see a bad disease, one that still kills a lot of people and makes a lot of people pretty damn sick, but also one that people have a decent chance of surviving for a good long time. They see the cocktail making some people feel crappy. And they see the cocktail being really expensive, and making drug companies very rich indeed.

What's more, they have little or no awareness of what AIDS is still like in Africa, and other places where prevention and treatment still range from lousy to non-existent ... and where the pandemic is as bad or worse as it ever was in its early days in the U.S.

So it's much easier for them to ignore or dismiss the effectiveness of the cocktail, and to treat it as a drug-company conspiracy. It's easier for them to see themselves as brave Galileos for resisting the "lie" of HIV drugs ... because they have no memory of the harsh, horrible truth of HIV before the drugs came along.

And I think the same thing is happening with the vaccine resisters: the people who insist that vaccines -- measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus, what have you -- are useless poison, foisted on an unsuspecting public by a Big Pharma cabal of cackling men in expensive suits.