A fraudulent text campaign targeting state Sen. Shevrin Jones with a false HIV claim is not merely an attack on one openly gay Black candidate. It is a reminder that, in Florida and across the country, HIV stigma remains a political weapon shaped by decades of government abandonment, criminalization and anti-LGBTQ fear.
In the Reagan era, the United States watched HIV/AIDS become a national catastrophe while federal leadership lagged behind the urgency of a virus disproportionately devastating gay men, Black and Brown communities, people who use drugs and poor people.
The administration’s delayed and inadequate response left communities to build their own systems of care, mourning and mutual aid as discrimination spread through hospitals, workplaces, schools and families.
By 1987, years into the epidemic, President Ronald Reagan created the Presidential Commission on the HIV Epidemic; its recommendations came after tens of thousands of people had already died. Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute notes that the commission’s major recommendations were largely ignored by the Reagan administration.
That legacy did not end when the country finally began to fund HIV care. Political leaders of different parties have, at times, joined in creating or preserving systems that treat people living with HIV as potential criminals rather than neighbors entitled to health care, privacy...
A Mobile-based company, Continental Aerospace Technologies Inc., which previously had ties to the Chinese government, has agreed to pay roughly $11.77 million to resolve federal accusations that i...