The Age of AIDS Revisionism [or, Frontline does David Lean one better]

Frontline's production, The Age of AIDS, was only interesting in how it revisted a chronology many of us have forgotten. It offered visuals to events I was too young to witness so added a dimension to history, maybe like being able to see Queen Elizabeth I recite her Tilbury speech to troops fighting Spain. But it glossed over shamelessly the historical record. Not mine, theirs. Like, those early patients, whom the doctors were quoted as saying were healthy one day and sick the next with PCP pnuemonias. Really? Their own literature documents these gay men had had multiple std infections, were drug users, including poppers [amyl nitrates, implicated in Kaposi Sarcoma], and had had regular treatments of antibiotics. These are not immune builders but toxins. So keep in mind this is what "their" doctors describe as healthy. They truly white washed the AZT controversy: yes it was developed in the 50's as a cancer treatment, but they failed to tell us why it was not on the market from the 1950's to the 1980's: its toxicity. Apparently it was bad for the general population but just fine for gay men. At any rate, their own studies report that AZT disproportionately ill-effected BLACK men. This was also not said. There were no doctors like the ones I have come across who use terms like "kill" and "murder" when they express remorse about administering AZT to any patient. There were none of the other scientists at all actually. Injection drug use was casually referenced but never linked from the LA beginning to Thailand to the former Soviet bloc where AIDS is allegedly rising. Needles. Could it be what's IN the needles and not the needles themselves? The April 1984 news conference with Secy of Health Margaret Heckler is the stuff of legend. It was unprecedented since at that juncture, no consensus had been formed as to the cause of AIDS, more scientists than the Gallo and Montaigner were trying to solve this riddle, yet there she was literally choking on her words with the controversial Dr Gallo at her side. I had often referred to and read about that news conference, and last night got to see it for the first time. Then there was the overshadowing character, much like the expansive and overwhelming desert was in "Lawrence of Arabia," of AFRICA. AFRICA The Sinister. The Dark Continent. From beginning to end, the lone hunter/gatherer in the bush and his strange ways with the green monkeys. Those monkeys. Savages!! I realized the empire is a weak sickly thing that can only rely on pushing old buttons to weave its ridiculous tales. One wonders at this point if the germ theory - barely a hundred years old - has any credibility. I am close to declaring it not. No where in this movie did I see what THEY call long-term nonprogressors. These are people who have been told they have HIV and after 5, 10, 20 years have had no unusual illnesses. They uniquely do not take those medicines, which are said to save but also explode your liver, collapse youe kidney, destroy bone marrow, wear awar at your joints, cause blindness, nausea, vomiting, rashes. Remember: healthy one day, sick the next? They call them long-term nonprogressors: some of us are just made to question whatever HIV might be, it does not cause AIDS.