<
https://48hills.org/2024/10/opinion-is-it-time-for-an-act-up-for-long-covid/>
"While I’m far from the only person worried about Long COVID and our society’s
general inclination to look away and pretend it’s not there, people like me
certainly feel badly outnumbered. It’s beginning to feel reminiscent of how
people with AIDS and their loved ones felt circa 1986—and maybe it’s time for
the same kind of response.
For those of you lucky enough not to have lived through that era, by the end of
1986, AIDS had killed nearly 25,000 Americans, but president Ronald Reagan had
yet to speak the word “AIDS.” His press secretary had joked about it and the
White House press corps laughed. While individual scientists were doing
important work, the bureaucracies running the NIH and FDA seemed very much to
be in business-as-usual mode. Because the casualties had largely been gay men
and injection drug users, it seemed like no one with any power cared whether we
lived or died.
So, a group of New Yorkers – mostly gay men – decided it was time to start
raising hell. Calling themselves ACT UP, they disrupted the New York Stock
Exchange and, as chapters sprang up nationwide, they staged protests that shut
down the FDA and NIH. Eventually, people like Anthony Fauci began to see they
had a point. I joined the Los Angeles ACT UP chapter in 1988 and ended up
getting arrested half a dozen times in protests at the LA federal building, the
County Board of Supervisors and the U.S. Capitol, among others. We won major
improvements in HIV/AIDS care in the Los Angeles County health system, which
cared for thousands of people with AIDS who had no health insurance. When I
landed in San Francisco in 1993, I connected with ACT UP Golden Gate.
Here I am (with my late boyfriend Tim at the left) at one of the protests in
that L.A County healthcare campaign. Most of my closest friends from that era
have been dead for decades.
I get that COVID has played out very differently than HIV/AIDS. AIDS ramped up
slowly and seemed not to affect “normal” people until it killed closeted gay
movie and TV star Rock Hudson in 1985, and even then officials largely looked
the other way. Only scientific breakthroughs in the 1990s finally stemmed the
tide of death. In contrast, the much more highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 virus
came on fast and furious, turning Americans’ lives upside-down almost
immediately.
But now, we’ve arrived at what seems in some ways like an eerily similar place.
When needed precautions to curb a highly infectious airborne virus spurred
frustration and political pushback, officials largely threw up their hands and
gave up. Even measures that don’t involve mandates or restrictions on behavior
have mostly either been dropped or never happened in the first place."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: October 10, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-113718299
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
