🌮TACOBELLA🌮

In 1983 America faced a disease doubling every six months. The government called it a gay problem. A man with a 103 fever was denied hospital care - until doctors learned his healthy twin could donate blood. Nurses bet on when patients would die. A herpes outbreak killing 30 horses in Austria got more coverage than 800 dead Americans. In the video below a 1983 news special captures the moment America realized it had a crisis - and had been ignoring it for years. It started in 1979 in New York and San Francisco. Because it was killing gay men first, Washington looked away. No mandatory reporting. No emergency funding. No front page coverage. A congressman asked why the response was so slow. The answer was blunt - when Legionnaire's disease hit, the government broke down every door. This disease was killing the wrong kind of people. By the time it spread to drug users, Haitian immigrants, women, infants and hemophiliacs, it was already everywhere. The CDC claimed they were tracking everything. Meanwhile one city alone had four times more cases than the CDC's count for the entire state. One patient described watching himself fade in the mirror every day. Everything I used to do alone, I now need help with. It's scary the way I'm not what I was. He was 27. Was the AIDS crisis a failure of medicine, or a decision that some lives were worth less than others?