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You may or may not know that legislation has been submitted to replace Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill with the image of former president Ronald Reagan.
For me and the estimated 20,000 American lives that were lost to AIDS before this president even mentioned this health crisis, this would be a stab in the heart.
Reagan's first remarks on the AIDS crisis came on May 31, 1987 at the Third International Conference on AIDS in Washington. This was near the end of his second term.
With the first reported cases coming to light in 1981 and over 1,000 cases being reported by 1983, this indifference to American suffering is the Reagan legacy, in my opinion.
Dr. C. Everett Koop, Reagan's surgeon general, said he was kept out of all AIDS discussions for the first five years of the Reagan administration "because transmission of AIDS was understood to be primarily in the homosexual population and in those who abused intravenous drugs." The president's advisers, he said, "took the stand, 'They are only getting what they justly deserve.'
For me and the estimated 20,000 American lives that were lost to AIDS before this president even mentioned this health crisis, this would be a stab in the heart.
Reagan's first remarks on the AIDS crisis came on May 31, 1987 at the Third International Conference on AIDS in Washington. This was near the end of his second term.
With the first reported cases coming to light in 1981 and over 1,000 cases being reported by 1983, this indifference to American suffering is the Reagan legacy, in my opinion.
Dr. C. Everett Koop, Reagan's surgeon general, said he was kept out of all AIDS discussions for the first five years of the Reagan administration "because transmission of AIDS was understood to be primarily in the homosexual population and in those who abused intravenous drugs." The president's advisers, he said, "took the stand, 'They are only getting what they justly deserve.'