Gay Rights in the 80's were almost non-existent and for many of a religious bent AIDS was portrayed as gay people being punished by God and in the UK Margaret Thatcher was reluctant to 'promote' the AIDS campaign as she thought talking about unprotected gay sex would make people more likely to engage in such practices, a view shared by the American President Ronald Reagan who was beholden to the Christian right wing electorate and backed away from doing anything that would alarm voters such as telling gay men how to have safe sex which could be seen as 'encouraging or promoting homosexual activity'.
One soundbite from Reagan representatives at the time was that this was a legal problem, not a medical problem as 'these people were breaking the law' with reference to sodomy laws although the 650,000 Americans who died from the disease were probably not concerned with the legal ramifications as they died painfully.
Despite the pandemic, the Catholic Church refused, and still does today, to sanction the use of condoms and have recently repeated it's claim that Catholics should not use them while the South African President, Thabo Mbeki, stated that he didn't believe HIV caused Aids and it was a conspiracy of the pharmaceutical companies and the CIA against him and blocked the distribution of anti-Aids antiretroviral drugs claiming that they were poisonous and compared AIDS scientists to latter-day Nazi concentration camp doctors.
Mbeki was forced out by his own Party and replaced by his former deputy, Jacob Zuma who during a court trial where he was accused of raping a HIV sufferer, admitted to having unprotected sex with his accuser but claimed that he took a shower afterwards to 'cut the risk of contracting HIV'. Unbelievably, Zuma at the time headed the National AIDS Council.
Unfortunately, the 'Don't Die of Ignorance' did not make it through to some of the people making the decisions and many people DID die because of their ignorance.
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