Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recognized the “incredible courage and dignity and strength” of the gay community while standing next to Vice President Mike Pence during a White House press briefing Tuesday.

While discussing how COVID-19 is killing Black Americans at disproportionately high rates, Dr. Fauci drew comparisons between the current coronavirus pandemic and the HIV/AIDS crisis regarding how they affect minority communities.

“A greater portion of my career has been defined by HIV/AIDS," said Dr. Fauci, who has held his position since 1984. “During that time, there was extraordinary stigma, particularly against the gay community. It was only when the world realized how the gay community responded to this outbreak with incredible courage and dignity and strength and activism… I think that really changed some of the stigma against the gay community.”

Fauci gave his address next to Pence, who has long been known for supporting anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and seriously mishandled an HIV outbreak in Scott County, Indiana, back when he was governor of the state. While the HIV/AIDS epidemic continues to disproportionately affect queer Black and Latino men and trans women, with an estimated 38,000 new HIV infections per year, the crisis peaked in the mid-’80s when there were an estimated 130,000 new HIV infections.

Dr. Fauci continued to note “similarities” between the coronavirus and AIDS crisis. “Health disparities have always existed for the African American community,” he said. “With the [coronavirus] crisis, it’s shining a bright light on how unacceptable it is. It’s not that they’re getting infected more often, it’s that when they do get infected, their underlying medical conditions — the diabetes, the hypertension, the obesity, the asthma — those are the kind of things that wind them up in the ICU and ultimately give them a higher death rate.”

A new Vox report outlines exactly how drastic death rates among Black American populations are. “As of Tuesday, Black people made up 33 percent of cases in Michigan and 40 percent of deaths, despite being just 14 percent of the state’s population,” writes journalist Fabiola Cineas. “In Illinois, black people made up 42 percent of fatalities but make up only 14.6 percent of the state’s population. In Chicago, the data is even graver: Black people represented 68 percent of the city’s fatalities and more than 50 percent of cases but only make up 30 percent of the city’s total population.”

On April 3, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet that part of the reason that coronavirus is ravaging Black and Brown communities is because “the chronic toll of redlining, environmental racism, wealth gap, etc. ARE underlying health conditions.”

“COVID relief should be drafted with a lens of reparations,” she concluded.

How the coronavirus is changing queer lives

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