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[Vera]

Oh, HIV/AIDS isn't that bad a disease, huh? It's hard to contract, huh? Well, they sure learned. But this show is about Ebola...

Ever watched And The Band Played On? One of the films that's shaken me the most in my life, still remember sitting in my armchair while the credits rolled. The main character, Don Francis, one of the first people to work with AIDS, had worked with Ebola before that (actually, the movie starts with him in Zaire, during a mysterious outbreak that was later identified as Ebola). I have immense respect for this guy. I've also hated Reagan's guts ever since watching the movie. According to Francis the epidemics could've been stopped in its tracks (or greatly diminished if they'd received proper funding from the government (and in light of the American budget) it was a laughable sum, but they were, apparently, perfectly happy to let gay men and IV-drug users just die, maybe that nice little disease could take care of *that* problem

"I despise Ronald Reagan and the people around him for what they did to public health in the United States and the rest of the world. He's seen as a benign individual by most, as a nice man trying his best, but this man did not have the appropriate understanding of the responsibility of government protecting citizens. Regardless of what a nice man he was, I don't give the benefit [of the doubt] to nice people who do bad things, and either he or the people he surrounded himself with did bad things. I don't know their reasons behind this, but they could not be convinced, despite our great attempts to go to high levels and convince them, that there was something going on that needed major government involvement to intervene.

They set the stage, the early Reagan people who were anti-government, no doubt certainly not a caring group for homosexuals or IV drug users, and I think were perfectly happy to see them leave the world, but did not have the logic of a government, elected or appointed official, to do their job to protect the public's health. I don't know what was going on in their mind to obstruct our efforts to protect the public's health, but they did, and have been hardly held accountable for that."

Oh, but I'd totally forgotten about a brilliant story by the brilliant Gren Egan, The Moral Virologist, about "a fundamentalist Christian who is disappointed that safe sex has limited the spread of HIV/AIDS, which he considers to be God's punishment for sexual immorality; consequently, he becomes a virologist, so that he may create a new, more lethal virus."