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I have seen a whole lot of comparisons of Trump's response to Covid with Reagan's to HIV and, yes, a lot more people have died of HIV but the *response* is really not the key thing that makes that difference; Trump's response has been far worse. https://twitter.com/iamgmjohnson/status/1335604073052172288
First off: for the first few years of the epidemic they really weren't clear wtf was going on, or that a virus was even responsible, or what kind of virus if so. With covid we were sure from the outset what it was.
Second: if you get covid you can quarantine for 2 weeks and then you're usually fine. With HIV until quite recently, once you got it you were contagious forever. And lots of people didn't know they had it! This is a very different model of spread.
Third: the US government doubled funding for HIV research every year under Reagan. He didn't talk about it, it's true, but the government was not ignoring the issue. They could have done FAR more but they weren't doing nothing, which brings us to the biggest difference:
Reagan didn't go on TV and deny HIV was a thing. He didn't say it would go away. He didn't suggest crackpot science to cure it. He didn't spread disinformation about how it spread. Trump *actively* made the situation *worse*. Reagan's sins, though severe, were sins of omission.
HIV is a more pernicious disease. We have a covid vaccine after 11 months; we don't have an HIV vaccine after 40+ years and it's NOT through lack of trying. More people are dying of HIV because it's a way nastier virus, not because Reagan was a dumbass (and he was).
Reagan's response to HIV is certainly not to be praised but it is not in the same league as Trump's intentional, reckless exacerbation of the covid pandemic. The two responses are not in the same league of terribleness.
