AIDS vs. COVID: History Repeating

On July 29, 2026, Anthony Fauci sat before Senator Rand Paul’s committee and treated the Fifth Amendment like a personal shield, invoking it more than a hundred times. Questions about COVID origins, gain-of-function research, and the policies he once sold with absolute certainty were met with the same practiced refusal. The man who spent decades issuing decrees on public health suddenly discovered the virtue of silence the moment accountability showed up.

That performance simply closes a long-running circle that began with the AIDS crisis and looped straight through COVID. This one is personal.

In 1981 I was 18 and already moving through the gay clubs of Los Angeles (today’s West Hollywood) when Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID) first appeared—the early name for what became HIV/AIDS. By year’s end, the CDC had tallied 130 “immune-related deaths” and hundreds more hospitalizations. Many of them, my friends.

Without social media or the internet, gay men depended on each other and whatever scraps the medical establishment decided to toss our way. So when a 40-year-old immunologist from the NIH named Anthony Fauci stepped forward, the community listened. He had the credentials, the platform, and the timing.

Fauci championed AZT, the first antiretroviral approved in 1987. But was it safe? Not especially. Synthesized in 1964 as a failed cancer drug and left on the shelf after disappointing animal tests, it was dusted off for HIV. When early trials showed some survival benefit, Fauci publicly promoted the results and pushed expanded access.

The high doses then prescribed delivered severe bone-marrow suppression—anemia that required transfusions, neutropenia, nausea, headaches, and muscle damage. Yet it remained the only approved option for years. (It is still FDA-approved today, though no longer routine for most adults.) Crixivan (indinavir), approved in 1996, joined the early “cocktail” regimens.

Fauci co-chaired the federal panel that put it in the guidelines. He promoted the cocktail and protocols which infectious disease and “AIDS Specialists” championed. The afflicted were told these drugs would make AIDS manageable when the reality was much darker. Both drugs had significant toxicities, especially in the doses and regimens prescribed. Side effects, which included—kidney stones, rigid dosing, metabolic burdens, fat redistribution, Crix-Belly and Buffalo Humps—were less celebrated. Merck stopped Crixivan production around 2020. Today, it is no longer available or recommended in the US.

In a 1983 editorial, Fauci floated the possibility of household transmission—an idea he would later dismiss. But by then the damage was done. Gay men, regardless of their status, were treated as walking biohazards: uninvited to gatherings, confined to AIDS wards, barred from ordinary hospitals, shut out of family events. There was no formal “six-foot rule” back then. The instruction was simpler and colder: “Stay Away.” The gay community immediately fractured; the healthy vs. the sick. Finger-pointing and quiet “unvitations” were constant. The body wasting, humps, and belly that followed became the Gay “Scarlett Letter”.

Fast forward to 2020 when the unvaxxed or those who declined to show a “vaccination card” were locked out of most bars and restaurants, especially in Gayborhoods where Fauci was revered. The unvaccinated, specifically the Gay ones, became the new Hester Prynne—publicly marked and socially exiled. “Saving Lives” was doctrine.

I remember a 1984 Hollywood party, at the height of the AIDS crisis, when a visibly ill man entered. His facial wasting marked advanced disease. As he walked into the room, filled with laughter and revelry, the Gays fell into silence. The host, clearly taken by surprise, awkwardly greeted him while simultaneously steering him into the kitchen, where he spent the entire evening isolated, restricted to disposable items. No one spoke to him. No one dared enter. That man died just before Christmas that same year. This was the original social distancing; it was heartless, void of compassion, and it lasted more than a decade.