The Senate has just confirmed the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a denial of science Who said once There is no safe and efficient vaccine, suggested This covid could have been genetically designed to save the Jews and the Chinese and who spent more than 100 pages in his recent book breathe a new life at the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS.
All this is a nonsense, of course, but barely a question of laughing. I am afraid for our country because I know what is happening when the scientific denial comes to power.
In the mid -2000s, I lived in South Africa, then governed by President Thabo Mbeki, who was not foreign to the ideas of denial of AIDS either. In the middle of an explosive AIDS epidemic in the late 1990s, Mr. Mbeki fell End of evening surfing Internet, on the marginal vision that HIV does not cause AIDS and that the antiretroviral drugs used to keep it under control – the same type of medication that I have taken every morning and that for almost 30 years – were poison.
Mr. Mbeki, in Thrall to these ideas, many of which came from America, refused to allow the use of antiretroviral therapy in the country’s health system. His Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, recommended a healthy diet, with a lot of beets, ginger and garlic, to push the disease.
A Harvard study Later, at least 330,000 people died and more than 35,000 children were born with HIV due to the reign of Mr. Mbeki’s error on AIDS treatment policy.
We risk seeing history repeat itself in the United States, with our own Tshabalala-Msimang-in-Waiting manto to Mr. Kennedy, whose scientific denial is a more pernicious variant of the South African version.
In his book “The real Anthony Fauci,“” Mr. Kennedy revives demystified ducks on HIV – as the idea that it is a “harmless passenger virus” and that the promiscuity of gay men and the use of recreational drugs, and even medications Antiretrovirals like AZT were the real causes of AIDS – while using the “I” I simply ask questions “to allow it to deny that it is itself a denial of AIDS.
As a homosexual living with HIV, I cannot tell you how grotesque and offensive it is and how difficult it is to understand the idea that Mr. Kennedy will now chair research programs, care and AIDS prevention in federal agencies.
Mr. Kennedy’s scientific denial has the potential to be worse than that of his South African counterparts. Because it is not only his denial of AIDS that we must worry about, it is his rejection of vaccines and Flirt with the rejection of the theory of germsA key foundation of modern biomedicine.
For all the dangers he presents, I have heard a lot of defeatism in recent weeks while Mr. Trump has flooded the area with decrees and other actions, which have had the desired effect to overwhelm his opponents . We cannot repel it all, the logic goes, we must accept our fate and find a way to welcome this new courageous world under Mr. Kennedy and President Trump.
But if South Africa holds an edifying story for us, it also shows us a way to follow.
Twenty-five years ago, the African National Congress of President Mbeki had a lock on power and many of the party refused to break with him on AIDS-even if his policies were a death sentence for South Africans living With HIV bodies, while the pills to save the dying, it was out of reach, in matters of national policy. Everything seemed desperate. How was someone going to fight, and even less prevailing against the Liberation Party, which released the South Africans from apartheid?
But there were many who were not willing to accept defeat, like Zackie Achmat, founder of the treatment campaign to require access to antiretrovirals. He visited me in New York in 2000 and inspired my move to South Africa first.
Activists with a treatment campaign of treatment organized in cantons and rural areas, teaching themselves the science of HIV to fight against the lies that their government colored, and use this knowledge as a lever to build a mass movement . They knew there were drugs that could save their lives. The South African Constitution guaranteed the right to health and they wanted to live. They recruited help from doctors and AIDS nurses, scientists working on HIV, lawyers who knew the constitution of the young nation upside down. In the end, however, it was ordinary South Africans who made the difference.
The relentless campaign to face the government’s opinions on AIDS has maintained the president and his Minister of Health on the hot seat for years. At a time when the internal party policy forced President Mbeki and Minister Tshabalala-Msimang to resign, that activism had laid the foundations of South Africa to establish The largest program of antiretroviral drugs in the world.
So there is always hope for something else, something better. It is in ordinary people who organized themselves as my comrades in the treatment campaign, against the chances, because failure would have too high a cost.
It is in the lessons that many of us learned in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States when we went to the funeral week after week, when we refused to accept death without fighting.
In the coming years, Americans who hope for something better will have to go aside with this administration, at all levels of government, contesting its attacks against science before the courts, finding means to protect public health by the State and the local action, educate our communities on what is happening and the ways they can help repel so when our own Tshabalala-Msimang manto starts in disgrace, we can pick up and build from ashes.
And this already happens: judicial affairs have been tabled during the first weeks of the administration to challenge the harmful decrees which would hinder the National Institutes of Health Research. People download and save data on HIV and LGBT health that the Trump administration strikes the websites of centers for disease control and prevention. People refuse to accept buyout offers to serve them with agencies where they worked on behalf of the American public for years.
In the most courageous examples, when Mr. Trump ordered aid for foreign aid to stop, workers of a program funded by the United States in Sudan refused to comply – They were not willing to abandon 100 children to famine. And yes, thousands of people organized to oppose the appointment of Mr. Kennedy, and although, without success, their efforts left us better prepared for the upcoming struggle.
Yes, sometimes you persist and you fight “The long defeat.“Because the champion of the health care justice Paul Farmer said one day, you don’t turn your back on those who have the most to lose. And sometimes, sometimes you win.