We can learn from the "end" of the AIDS crisis.
 | By Alexandra Sifferlin Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
How will we know when the pandemic is over? |
This week, Gregg Gonsalves, a longtime AIDS activist and epidemiologist, offers a way to think about the answer in a guest essay that looks back on the "end" of the AIDS crisis. After losing several of his friends and family members to the disease, he found out that he too had H.I.V., which causes AIDS. But soon after, a new generation of treatments called protease inhibitors emerged that could control the virus. They were revolutionary, he writes. "I am alive because of them." |
The drugs fundamentally changed what it meant to have H.I.V., but the AIDS pandemic didn't conclude with their introduction, Gonsalves writes. "In a way it did end for many white middle-class gay men like us; we had access to these drugs and to good medical care overall and could start to think about getting back to normal. But AIDS still lingered and flourished in America in places that were easy for people like us to ignore." |
He notes that H.I.V. remained a crisis in African American and Latino communities, and it moved from cities to rural areas. It continued to spread through countries in Africa, where there was limited access to lifesaving drugs. |
Gonsalves draws parallels to this current moment in the Covid-19 pandemic. There are now vaccines as well as other new drugs that have altered what it means to get infected with the virus. But if Covid will continue to be with us, Gonsalves argues that it too will "follow the fault lines of social and economic inequality in America" and beyond. |
We may be at some sort of pandemic end, or at least the conclusion of an emergency situation and serious health risks for those who are fully vaccinated and have access to treatment. But Gonsalves shares a warning and argues for a better way forward: |
"Variants can emerge because of our desire to put it all behind us. No one is truly safe until we all are. Yet might we act to save millions of people not just in the interest of self-preservation but also simply because it's the right thing to do? That would be a signal that this pandemic has changed us. For good." |
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