Cal Report HIV/COVID

August 3, 2020 at 11:26 AM PDT

Speaker 1: 00:00 Speaker 2: 01:01 Speaker 1: 01:12 Speaker 2: 01:22 Speaker 1: 01:28 Speaker 2: 01:31 Speaker 1: 01:36 Speaker 2: 01:44 Speaker 1: 01:53 Speaker 2: 02:22 Speaker 1: 02:36 Speaker 2: 03:00 Speaker 1: 03:13 Speaker 2: 03:34 Speaker 1: 03:57 Speaker 3: 04:03 Speaker 1: 04:07 Speaker 3: 04:28 Speaker 1: 04:38 Speaker 3: 04:42 Speaker 1: 04:55 Speaker 2: 05:06 Speaker 1: 05:18 Speaker 2: 05:29 Speaker 1: 05:37 You're listening to midday edition on KPBS. I'm Alison st. John with Maureen Kavanaugh. Well gay activists marched and demanded the government invest more in AIDS research back in the 1980s and nineties, there were some forms of government help that the gay community did not want contact tracing used by public health officials to contain the spread of the virus was very controversial during the AIDS era, similar tensions around it are arising. Now that it's a key pillar of California strategy for containing the Corona virus. KQBD health correspondent, April Demboski explains. We have a lot to learn from the past experience of veteran contact tracers. In 1968, John Potter had finished his tour of duty in Vietnam and came home to LA where syphilis was rampant. He started working for the CDC in what became a 40 year career as a contact tracer. A given day, I would be in the clinic for two or three hours. I would interview one or two people, and then I would go out in the field and drive around and locate the people that had been named Sexual contacts in the free love era required private ice skills. A lot of people infected with an STD didn't know the names of the people they slept with. As an example, there is somebody who works in a deli on South Broadway, But they don't remember the name of the deli either. They know that it's the only deli in that neighborhood that doesn't serve breakfast, Potter out, drives up and down Broadway until he finds it. Then leaves a note for an employee with a thick Brown mustache and scorpion tattoo on his bicep. The day later, the person calls he was located and he was tested, turns out that he was positive In the seventies. When gonorrhea took center stage Potter out, moved on to a new contact tracing job in Colorado. He sat at his desk in his Paisley shirts, clashing Paisley tie, and shag haircut working the phones. Then at night, he tracked people down at the biker bars and gay bars where Giorgio Moroder was always playing. We would spend time there. It's sort of a see and be seen type of a approach. And we gained that trust through the seventies, but everything changed with AIDS. A new virus arrived in the eighties and it wouldn't go away with a round of antibiotics. There was no test for AIDS. We don't have a test. There was no treatment or we don't have treatment. And it was 100% fatal. The health department felt pretty helpless. Contact tracers were in a moral quandary, many felt it was unethical to tell someone they might have been exposed. What did we have to offer these people? We didn't have even hope. And these were young people. How do you tell a 23 year old, you might have two years to live. And here I am working for a medical clinic. This is not a damn thing I can do about it. But just a couple years later, Potter rock concluded. That was a mistake they could have at least educated people and stop them from spreading the virus further. Eventually they traced HIV infections back to the origin of the epidemic in Colorado Springs. And if you had done that in real time, it would have made a difference. I think that had, we had the courage and the conviction to go ahead and do that and go visit these people. We could have saved several people. I don't know, dozen 20. So I still feel when you mentioned something like that, you make me feel guilty and you should, because on some level I failed, I made up for it later, but failure is failure, But the gay community did not share Potter ads, enthusiasm for contact tracing aid spreads. So does the debate Over who should be tested and who should know the results? Even when a test was developed. And even when the first antiretrovirals came out, gay advocates in San Francisco were opposed to contact tracing. They were afraid what would happen if local governments collected a list of gay men in 1987, gay rights, lawyer, Ben Schatz, warned of discrimination, lost jobs, lost housing. We create public health measures, which are doomed to scare people into avoiding public health departments, nobody gains, and the epidemic spread Schatz and other advocates said public education was the way to go. Not naming names. People have to be able to protect themselves. If they think that the state is going to swoop in and say, you're a sexual partner has AIDS, then they're just going to continue burying their head in the sand. Epidemiologists thought the money needed for contact tracing would be better spent on other things, dr. George Rutherford led the CDCs AIDS response in San Francisco at the time he's a professor at UCF. Now A lot of my thinking about contact tracing back in those days was, well, what exactly is it supposed to add? We've already told every single gay man they're at high risk and they should get tested that the time, you know, the answer was Awesome in smaller places like Colorado, where Potter at worked, they could do it. But in San Francisco where a third of the population was infected, Rutherford says it wasn't cost effective. Now with, you know, much better drugs, it's become a much more standard part of the standard operating procedure for any AIDS control. Now veterans like Rutherford are relying on lessons learned in the AIDS era to build the state's new core of Corona virus, contact tracers. Hello, this is Lisa Fernandez. It is June 30th, just finished another team lead shift. We have a law with 20 pages of context. It's just getting crazy busy today. It's Latino immigrant communities who are disproportionately impacted by COVID, but the mistrust and fears of discrimination are the same lost jobs, lost housing. And now getting deported. People are a little hesitant, much like gay men were hesitant to get on a, a list of gay men. It makes doing the work very difficult because they're a lot more Curt and resistant or suspicious or scared and upset for contact tracers to overcome the mistrust they need backup. They meet a leader with a unifying message us against the virus. But the president today just like the president in the eighties is doing the opposite COVID or HIV pretending that it wasn't there or that it would go away. John Potter out remembers how Ronald Reagan alienated the gay community by ignoring AIDS. Now he sees Donald Trump alienating the communities of color most impacted by well, if it doesn't go away, well, it's not affecting people that are really, really very important or the same without a coordinated national strategy to combat the virus. History will repeat itself. The epidemic will spread and more people will die. I'm April Demboski.

By KPBS Public Media

While gay activists marched and demanded the government invest more in AIDS research back in the 1980s and 90s, there were some forms of government help the gay community did not want. Contact tracing, used by public health officials to contain the spread of the virus, was very controversial during the AIDS era. Similar tensions around it are arising now that it's a key pillar of California's strategy for containing the coronavirus.