The Reagans track record when it came to HIV/AIDS was less than admirable.
Nancy Reagan has often been praised for her work on a range of causes including Alzheimer’s but Hillary Clinton goofed up at her funeral when she accidentally suggested the Reagans talked about HIV/AIDS awareness. She said: “It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s. Because of both President and Mrs. Reagan, in particular Mrs. Reagan, we started a national conversation when before nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it. That, too, is something I really appreciated with her very effective low-key advocacy, but it penetrated the public conscience and people began to say, ‘Hey, we have to do something about this too.”
Realising her mistake, she apologised two hours later, saying “While the Reagans were strong advocates for stem cell research and finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, I misspoke about their record on H.I.V. and AIDS. For that, I’m sorry.”
Sadly, the truth is that the Reagans said little or nothing about HIV/AIDS. The CDC had first identified the disease in 1981, but President Reagan, despite desperate claims, said nothing. Regan didn’t publicly talk about the disease till 1987 and it’s estimated 40,000 had already died of the disease while roughly 36,000 were also diagnosed with the disease.
When the CDC said that AIDS virus couldn’t spread through casual person-to-person contact, he wondered whether they should be allowed to attend school.
He had said: “I can well understand the plight of the parents and how they feel about it. I also have compassion, as I think we all do, for the child that has this and doesn't know and can't have it explained to him why somehow he is now an outcast and can no longer associate with his playmates and schoolmates. On the other hand, I can understand the problem with the parents. It is true that some medical sources had said that this cannot be communicated in any way other than the ones we already know and which would not involve a child being in the school. And yet medicine has not come forth unequivocally and said, This we know for a fact, that it is safe. And until they do, I think we just have to do the best we can with this problem. I can understand both sides of it.”
In fact, Reagan was outraged when Surgeon General C Everett Koop, recommended a program for compulsory sex education for kids.
An article in The Advocate, written after Reagan passed away, compared him to Hitler: “Our murderer is dead. The man who murdered more gay people than anyone in the entire history of the world, is dead. More people than Hitler even. In all the tributes to his passing, as I write this two days after his death, not one that I have seen has mentioned this. The hateful New York Times (“all the news that’s fit to print”) of course said nothing about this. We still are not fit to write about with total honesty in their pages. Not really. Just as we were not fit for Ronald Reagan to talk about us. What kind of president is that?”
And if you want to understand how the Reagan administration treated HIV/AIDS, this video of Larry Speakes, Reagan's White House Press Secretary:
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