Trump’s Revenge on Public Health

If the United States learned any lesson from HIV, it should have been that negligence can be a death sentence. In the early 1980s, the virus’s ravages were treated as “something that happens over there, only to those people,” Juan Michael Porter II, a health journalist and an HIV activist, told me. But the more the virus and the people it most affected were ignored, the worse the epidemic got.

Reckoning with that reality changed the course of the HIV epidemic—and transformed how American public health was practiced.