Today is World AIDS Day a day that the World Health Organisation selected in 1988 to mark the struggle against a disease that was part of the backdrop of the 1980’s and 1990’s. It’s been nearly 40 years since AIDS first reared its ugly and lethal head and as someone who lived through the first years of it and who lost friends and colleagues to this illness, I saw first hand how, as with coronavirus today, many people made false assumptions about AIDS and also made predictions that turned out to be completely false.

AIDS seemed to come out of the blue, as if from nowhere and killed people in the prime of their lives. Like some twisted version of an Eagle it swooped down and took the lives of some of the most creative, intelligent and delightful people around. It carried off everyone from actors to singers, to sportsmen to a few of the ordinary people that I encountered who contracted AIDS. What’s worse is that in the early days of the epidemic, nobody knew anything about this disease. Nobody knew what was the infectious agent, what the transmission method was, who was most vulnerable or how it could be prevented. There was also no cure. There was only one end for those who had AIDS and that was a horrible death ravaged by fungal diseases of the lungs that those with normal immune systems fought off easily and with cancers of the blood and lymph vessels that presented as horrifically disfiguring skin lesions.

When it was discovered during the 1980’s that sexual activity was one way of passing and acquiring AIDS two things happened. Firstly there was an increase in the use of condoms not as a birth control method, but as a way of preventing the spread of AIDS. The second thing that happened was the British press did what it did at that time the best, which was to engage in scaremongering.

I recall vividly the sorts of headlines that were about at this time. They screamed about the ‘Gay Plague’, gave platforms to any loony vicar who wanted to claim that AIDS was ‘the wrath of god’ and treated any celebrity who was rumoured to be gay, or even if they were unmarried, as if they were on some sort of AIDS death-watch. The sort of scaremongering that the press engaged in at the time is very similar to the scaremongering tactic that the press have used over Covid. The press talked up the number of potential deaths from AIDS, sensationalised the stories of those who had contracted the disease and frightened the public to a degree that was not necessary. Yes of course people needed to be given information about AIDS by the press but most of the British press did not do that, they often put out any old bollocks that they could link with AIDS knowing that frightening stories about the disease would sell papers to a public eager for even more scary stories about a scary disease. This public was also one that was not as comfortable as today’s public with gay people as it was only fifteen years since homosexuality had been decriminalised in the UK and the press played on that suspicion of gays that existed at the time.

However it’s not just the British press that got things badly wrong about AIDS and whose errors can teach us much about today’s Covid panic. Many experts both in medicine and epidemiology got AIDS dreadfully wrong. These experts, once it was established that there was a sexually transmitted aspect to AIDS, predicted that there would be a massive pandemic of heterosexual AIDS. We used to hear lurid stories from experts that the West would be decimated by heterosexual AIDS transmission but this prediction, like many of the UK government’s Covid predictions, have not come true. The vast majority of sexually active people in the West quickly went over to practising safer forms of sex by using barrier methods and reducing the practise of those sexual activities that were proven to be more risky such as unprotected anal sex. There have been epidemics of heterosexually transmitted AIDS cases but these are from areas of the world like Africa where education is limited and women have little in the way of rights to refuse sexual contact that is risky. The prediction that the West would be subsumed by heterosexual AIDS, a prediction that many, including myself took very seriously indeed, has been proven to be utterly false.

Both the Gay and Straight communities made massive and superhuman efforts to prevent the spread of AIDS in the West and that effort mostly worked. It has only been in the last decade or so that the West has seen a rise in AIDS in both Gays and Straights and that is partially down to AIDS no longer being an automatic death sentence but instead a nasty but chronic condition that can be suppressed with anti-retroviral medications and other treatments. This change in the nature of how AIDS is viewed and the existence of treatments for it, has caused those younger than me to take sexual risks that I would not have dreamed of taking when AIDS was first rearing its ugly and destructive head. For too many young people AIDS has become just another sexually transmitted disease and like these other diseases also have treatments to either cure or retard them. The young are failing to learn the lessons of AIDS which is that it is not the STD’s that we know about and understand which should be protected against, but the STD’s that we do not know about.

The reason for writing this article is firstly to mark World AIDS day but also to draw attention to the massive failures that accompanied the start of the AIDS crisis, failures that seem to be being repeated today over the Covid issue. These were failures by the experts who made extremely erroneous predictions which had massive and damaging social and political fall out and also failures by the media who sensationalised and scaremongered about AIDS in a manner that is eerily reminiscent of how the media has done the same with regards Covid. This scaremongering probably did a great deal of harm both by frightening people unnecessarily and also by preventing a sober and thoughtful view of AIDS and those who contracted it to prevail. We also saw the same public panic as we see today over Covid about AIDS which was caused in large part to the actions of the experts and the media. This was a panic that created unnecessary hostility against gay men and which also caused outbreaks of stupidity, such as monogamous straight couples engaging in condom use when they were at very little risk of contracting AIDS, something that reminds me very much of the unnecessary mask wearing that we see today.

A lot of people got AIDS dreadfully wrong, mostly the media and the medical experts. Ironically one of those who actually got things correct was Margaret Thatcher who at the instigation of her health ministers created a nationwide anti-AIDS campaign that didn’t overly frighten people and just set out the facts as they were known at the time. As an aside it was one of her ministers, Norman, now Lord Fowler, who broke the taboo about saying the word ‘condom’ on television. Lord Fowler drew attention to AIDS but didn’t, as the British media did, scare people unnecessarily.

We, or rather those who govern us, should have learned from the past. We should have learned the dangers that come with scaremongering about diseases and we should have learned to soberly discuss disease using only the facts that are available and make decisions based on those facts. Sadly it seems that the current UK government has failed to learn the lessons of the past which is why we have so many of the social, political and economic problems that we are currently suffering from.

This article is in memory of ‘W’ a friend and colleague who was taken by this terrible disease and who taught me about the reality of AIDS, its devastating effect on the gay community and the utter dishonesty of how the British press dealt with it.