A story in last week’s Tribune sounded a familiar theme of misinformation in the midst of a public health crisis blocking out science and reason.
This one happened during the 1980s.
The article, about old TV news tapes saved from the Dumpster, reported that among the local, state and national TV footage unearthed was 10 minutes about Ryan White. Just the mention of the Kokomo teen, who contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion, brings back memories of another time.
A time when a poorly understood virus brought out the worst in many people. For White, who died in 1990, that meant other parents who didn’t want him in the same classrooms with their children. Banished from school in the pre-Zoom era, White struggled to learn by phone. Fellow students marched outside school with a sign reading “Students Against AIDS.” And Ryan, directed to put his lunch trays in the trash, endured the stares and talks about how it “makes you feel kind of like you’re all by yourself.”
A time when the public didn’t fully understand how the virus was and wasn’t transmitted. Bob Sargent, who served as Kokomo mayor from1988-95, later reflected that his city might have reacted differently if residents had better understood AIDS.
A time that was several decades ago, but feels like yesterday.
It’s difficult to read about the ignorance and misinformation that surrounded AIDS and ostracized Ryan White without thinking how much it resembles the current situation with the ongoing COVID pandemic.
As part of a retrospective film about White, Sargent talks about the learning process the public went through with AIDS, and asserts that things “would have been different today.”
Or perhaps, considering the last 20 months of living with another virus, history would repeat itself.
