Jesse's Reviews > And the Band Played On: Politics, People, And the AIDS Epidemic

A strange book-- exhaustively researched and detailed, yet written in the turgid, melodramatic style of an airport thriller. Possibly TOO detailed, it can frequently be tiring in its attention to the tiniest details of funding squabbles between various government, public health, and medical agencies, though a valuable resource that is uniformly crushing. No group of people comes out of this book looking as though they weren't partly responsible for the AIDS epidemic's terrible destruction. Reagan and the US government, of course; people in the CDC, the NIH, and the National Cancer Institute who sat on their hands while people died; those who ran blood banks like the Red Cross who denied the illness was transmissible while their organizations were giving it to thousands of people it would kill; activists in the gay community who believed closing the bathhouses would be the first step to putting gays in concentration camps and so defeated a measure that would likely have reduced by some portion the number of people infected; the administration of New York Mayor Ed Koch who gave only peanuts to the largest population of AIDS patients in the US. Not to mention spineless doctors like Robert Gallo more interested in their own fame for discovering AIDS than in getting information about the disease out as fast as possible, and journals like the New England Journal of Medicine (among others) that forbade doctors from making their research public during the six-month lead-up to publication, therefore delaying public knowledge of the disease in its early stages.

The book can best be summed up in this passage: "Later, everybody agreed the baths should have been closed sooner; they agreed health education should have been more direct and more timely; And everybody agreed blood banks should have tested blood sooner, and that a search for the AIDS virus should have been started sooner, and that scientists should have laid aside their petty intrigues. Everybody subsequently agreed that the news media should have offered better coverage of the epidemic much earlier, and that the federal government should have done much, much more. By the time everyone agreed to all this, however, it was too late. Instead, people died. Tens of thousands of them."