What the HIV/AIDS Pandemic Can Teach Us About COVID-19
The impacts of stigma, fear, and bureaucracy in emerging epidemics.
In 1981, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received abrupt reports that five people in Los Angeles, California were suffering from a rather odd form of pneumonia. Eventually, as more research and tests were carried out, their illnesses were identified as secondary infections that arose from the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).
That was the beginning of a global pandemic still alive today. A pandemic that claimed nearly a million lives in 2017 alone. (Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation).
Nearly forty years later, in late December of 2019, a different kind of respiratory disease emerged within weeks doctors began to take notice. Doctor Li Wenliang is credited with having initially described an illness similar to SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in Wuhan, China. From then onward, this unforeseen illness has been identified as COVID-19 — the global killer of just over seven hundred and fifty thousand people worldwide.
“A million lives were lost to HIV/AIDS in 2017 alone.”
Many have argued that the most effective countermeasure for many infectious diseases is restricting contact with infected people. Yet, medically screening for such rampantly infectious diseases has proven to be rather difficult. Without an effective way of medical detection, it’s easy for both the general public and officials to make broad assumptions about who may or may not carry the disease. These “assumptions” are often based on social groupings — leading to xenophobic, racist — and in the case of HIV, homophobic stereotypes.
While HIV and SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 may not exhibit biological similarities, both were accompanied by widespread fear, stigma, misinformation, hindering public health efforts.
During the start of the HIV epidemic in the United States, a “fear of foreigners” ultimately resulted in the restriction on immigration and travel to the US for non-US citizens living with HIV, lasting from 1987 to 2010. These bans were guided to avert the rapid spread of HIV but were effectively a xenophobic attempt to safeguard the economy which was experiencing a recession in the early 1980s.
This move was utterly baseless considering the fact that during the 1980s, there were more people living with HIV in the United States than anywhere else in the world.
“Treating HIV as an issue external to the United States was based on stigma and provided barely any effect on the HIV epidemic.”
This motivation to treat a public health threat as foreign was also presented in the US’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which featured a heavy focus on China. Initially, travel from mainland China by the United States in early February 2020 was entirely restricted. This action was likely to have delayed the speed at which COVID-19 spread in the United States.
Nonetheless, it’s estimated that of the total US COVID-19 infections, 60–65 percent of them were seeded by spread from New York. In New York, genetic analysis has shown that the virus was likely imported from Europe, not China — whereas, travel restriction from Europe was implemented a month after that of China.
Currently, the United States has the highest number of COVID-19 cases globally.
Countries are often reluctant to acknowledge health crises out of fear that it will be seen as a weakness by the global community and have negative economic impacts. (ThinkingGlobalHealth)
So, the question must be asked — what should be done in the face of an unknown epidemic? Broadly, remaining calm and educated can be effective ways to start. Contagious illnesses have frequently been used as a fear-mongering tactic to aid xenophobia, racism, and homophobia.
Gay and bisexual men experienced an incursion of hate crimes as cases of HIV grew in the United States. Similarly fueled hate crimes have recently launched against Asian-Americans in the United States amidst COVID-19.
It is vital to denounce any discrimination and hate crimes resulting from a rising epidemic, both to look after marginalized people’s well-being — and to ensure that the public is not acting on disinformation and misinformation surrounding the virus.
“Fear, misinformation and stigma”
Fear, misinformation, and stigma prevent an accurate understanding of a disease, and amplify epidemics rather than halt them. The public and government should ensure to apply the lessons learned at the outset of the HIV epidemic — and even other pandemics and epidemics — to better understand the reality of a threatening pandemic and to help mitigate social injustices that those who are infected may face.
While epidemics and disease outbreaks are difficult to prevent, they can be controlled — but only with a government’s and public’s timely acknowledgment and the conformance to suggested disincentives.
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Edited by: Rena Watanabe, Director of Research Bloggers
