How Trump, by Hurting Gay People, Will Hurt Straight People
Medical Knowledge Already Gained in Fighting AIDS Will Save Millions from Covid
By
David Gottfried
Julia Roberts’ performance in “The Normal Heart” was based on a real doctor, Dr. Linda Laubenstein of NYU Medical Center in New York, who died, at the age of 45 in 1992, exhausted and beleaguered from the steady drumbeat of dying and dead patients.
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The New York Times reported that nearly half of the health-related research grants cancelled by the Trump Administration were grants pertaining to the health of “sexual and gender minority groups.” (The New York Times, May 4, 2025). These grants had been dispensed by the National Institute of Health, an entity responsible for the most breathtaking breakthroughs in medical science in the past 60 years.
How Undermining the Health of Gay People Will Endanger the Health of Everyone
I suppose that during this new incarnation of the Dark Ages, when barbarians trashed the classical culture of Rome and Greece, things like medical science are being replaced by the idiosyncratic witchcraft of people like Bobby Kennedy, Jr., who according to his cousin Caroline Kennedy, had a penchant for putting mice and baby chickens in blenders and then feeding the mammalian baby slush to his predator birds.
Trump’s actions will, no doubt, imperil the health of sexual minorities. But it will do so much more than that: It will harm medical science in general and harm straight people.
Do you think that I am being hyperbolic by claiming that cutting funds for gay health will endanger Straight people. If you think so, look at recent medical history and consider two deadly and pervasive diseases: AIDS and Covid.
Ritonavir, synthesized in the Fight Against Aids, has been Saving People from the Ravages of Covid
One of the drugs used to fight Covid is Norvir, also known as ritonavir. This drug was found in the hunt for drugs to combat HIV.
By 1995, Norvir was shown to be very promising in reducing the replication of HIV; by 1996, it was commercially available in the United States to treat AIDS. This drug was clearly a “game changer.” Deaths from HIV infection, which had been rising like a parabola on a Cartesian plane, suddenly began to plumet. Lesions from Karposi’s sarcoma melted away like a hurricane replaced by a rainbow. Opportunistic infections, or rare infections that only infect the immune deficient, such as Pneumocystis Carini (usually infects the lungs), Cryptosporidium (Severe diarrhea in which patients have 10 “frothy” bowel movements a day) and Toxoplasmosis (Infects the central nervous system) once again became only strange Latinate terms that resided in medical textbooks.
And, hey, brainless Trumpers. Norvir has been instrumental in fighting Covid.
For starters, Norvir is one of the drugs in Paxlovid.
Look at this commercial. About 10 seconds into the commercial, you will see the names of the two constituent drugs in Paxlovid. The second drug is “Ritonavir.” That is identical to, and is the genetic name of, Norvir. And if you don’t believe me, look up Norvir; it was one of the protease inhibitors, released in 1996, which had been instrumental in dousing the holocaustic flames of the AIDS epidemic.1
Medical Research has Beneficial Ripple Effects; the Cure for one malady may`cure many disparate and seemingly unrelated maladies.
1. By learning how to fight AIDS, we learned how to fight viruses.
When the AIDS epidemic began, our arsenal of anti-viral and anti-retroviral compounds was very, very bare. Although we had fantastic anti bacterials to combat bacterial infections (For example, we had Penicillin and a large army of drugs derived from penicillin), we had very, very little to combat viruses.
Viral infections were usually prevented by vaccinations, in which a part of the offending virus, or a dead or disabled version of the disease-causing virus, was injected into the patient, and the patient would synthesize defending antibodies which, hopefully, would be around to fight off the real thing when it hit him some time in the future. Consequently, viral infections such as smallpox, polio and measles are combatted with vaccines. By learning how to fight AIDS, we finally learned how to make anti viral compounds for other viral ailments, such as Covid.
2. By learning how to Fight AIDS, we increased our power to combat cancer in two ways:
Learning how to fight viruses can reduce the incidence and prevalence of cancer. Many cancers are, in part, caused by viral infection. This shouldn’t be surprising. Viruses are very primitive creatures. They don’t even have mitochondria. (Mitochondria stand at the very base and fulcrum of almost all living things. It is where sugar and oxygen are brought together to create the awesome majesty of BIOLOGICAL ENERGY.) As such, viruses are little more that strands of nucleic acid (either DNA or RNA) that take it upon themselves to invade cells, and when they break into the cell nucleus, they engineer either cell death or the reckless acceleration of cell replication which is cancer.
Also, some researchers find that the HIV virus can fight cancer through another route: The HIV virus can be reengineered to invade cancer cells and then kill those cancer cells. 2
Re-Learning Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor”
I remember that back in the 1980’s, during a dispute regarding cancer and AIDS, Senator Jesse Helms, in one of his characteristic fits of anti-gay hysteria, said that he would rather have “straight cancer” than “homosexual aids.”
Contrary to the detritus of Mr. Helm’s fertile and febrile imagination, viruses and bacteria do not have sexual orientations. Indeed, they do not even have penises or vaginas. (If a virus had a prick, it would be even smaller than Donald’s little dickie.) They don’t go to bars, or the gym or the hairdresser while engaged in the hunt for sexual satisfaction. A petri dish, contrary to Helm’s sex-starved stream of consciousness, is not a licentious playground of manly syphilis bacteria (Under the microscope, they look like a rod with a corkscrew) screwing voluptuous strep bacteria. (Strep bacteria are in the “cocci” branch of bacteria which are spherical in shape). Indeed, bugs just make people sick and kill them.
The tendency to anthropomorphize infections reminds me of a lesson Susan Sontag gave us, ages ago, in her book entitled "Illness as Metaphor." She scolded us for attaching very human experiences and attributes to bugs, beings without brains. For example, tuberculosis was often seen as a malady caused by want and misery and the industrial slums of capitalism. (Actually, Sontag never made complete sense to me re TB which often is a disease of poverty, of poorly ventilated slums and sweat shops.) Similarly, for whatever weird reason, the bureaucratic character of communist states was, to some people, causative of cancer.
Sontag said: Enough of this nonsense. Keep your eye on the ball. Forget the emotional and dramatic and political bullshit as to what sort of moods and colorful socioeconomic thoughts you can attach to a bug and focus on concrete stuff such as a bacterium’s tough walls. (For example, penicillin often works by piercing the relatively tough walls of some bacteria.)
Of course, a given disease may be concentrated among one portion of the population. But it can change its focus in a few days. In this country, AIDS was first seen in Gay people, but in a very short span of time we saw it in heterosexual immigrants from Haiti.
For example, at present Ebola has only been found in Africa. It is an extremely deadly, infectious hemorrhagic fever (Small blood vessels in the body bleed uncontrollably and you become a hyperthermic inferno.) Just as Trump says disease X afflicts Gay people so we shouldn’t fight that disease, people could say Ebola is in Africa so we shouldn’t worry about Ebola.
However, Ebola is only a plane ticket away from making people drop like flies all over America.
When we disregard minority groups because we are not a member of that minority, eventually the angel of death will come for us. As Pastor Martin Niemoller said in this poem/sermon:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
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By contrast, if we help a beleaguered minority, a society can save itself, e.g., by finding Norvir in the fight against AIDS, we helped protect the nation at large from Covid.
And not to get too sentimental, but as Lennon and Mc Cartney said, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
Ritonavir is less used today in treating HIV; it has been largely superseded by drugs which have fewer side effects.
“HIV-Encoded Gene Therapy as Anti-cancer Therapeutics: A Narrative Review,” by Pachamuthu Balakrishnan , Sankar Sathish, and Shanmugam Saravanan. Found at this web page: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10909071/