have you any thoughts
well you called here so
okay well um
i'll tell you i am uh uh impressed with the uh uh amount of spending that's occurred so far as as far as AIDS research and i think that uh proportionately
maybe uh so far it's been enough it seems like it seems like uh
but there's not uh been any money taken away from uh other necessary medical research uh
uh subjects uh
you know and and allocated towards the AIDS research i think that AIDS research has been a a a lot of the funding has not been done by the government a lot of it has been done by private endowment
uh but i think the government is doing a good job so far
of keeping the uh their portion of the funding up
well i um i agree to an extent um i think the problem is is that
we're spending money and one of the things that the government likes to do when they're under public pressure is to throw money at the problem
um-hum
in an attempt to try and solve it as quickly as possible and they did that with the Pentagon in the eighties and when you have a lot of money in your budget and you don't wanna have it cut back you spend it even if it means throwing it away
um-hum
right
and i think that while we need to spend more effort and money on things like education and maybe even alternative treatments and alternative experiments things to keep those afflicted alive at this point
um-hum
i think that any money that is given must be given carefully just to something that is a proven point not just thrown at it
um-hum
um i i don't see that the money is being removed from any other causes um
AIDS has been a problem though especially in the eighties
when there wasn't a lot of private dollars around because of the stigma of the disease
uh-huh
and that people really didn't groups didn't wanna be associated with it because it was a morals issue
right
i think we're finally getting over that i thought that was ridiculous reading and hearing about that kind of moral dilemma stuff but
i think that it we need to spend a lot more on education and try and get over this thing that we have about
not confronting this head on with some factual advertising for items of condoms and things like that that
um-hum
will help prevent the uh disease as well as instilling the notion that the best way not to get it is not to involve yourselves in unsafe practices in the first place
exactly um it although i was uh i i was shocked at the public um uh outrage uh that occurred after after i uh think it was Dan Quayle who said um
you know who suggested that maybe maybe we you know maybe that is a a possible and and uh
uh likely most effective solution is you know abstinence and and yet the a large portion of the community said well that's stupid you know that just shows that you have no interest in in in spending any money on the on the problem and i thought
that that that that that's not that's not the point at all
well the the problem is that with this administration at least when they say abstinence
they often couch that in other things that turn into one of these morals issues
which uh makes it turn into a political issue now you see the problem is you have people in the National Institutes of Health in Atlanta and the like the Centers for Disease Control which
um-hum
have fundamentalists in charge of the thing who won't even let you say condom in a meeting
right
and these things have been spread around and immediately immediately people think well abstinence okay here we have these religious zealots telling us
where they're trying to ignore the problem blah blah blah and of course they overreact when you say that the fact that it's just good medical safe practice you know don't expose yourself in the first place
um-hum
um-hum
but the it's because the the the you know this administration was around when Reagan when the disease first was discovered here and all the social you know implications of the Reagan administration ignoring it when it first became an issue and
um-hum
see that's all carrying over now
right
and that's why you're seeing that
okay that that makes a little bit of sense uh i i hadn't i was not aware that that was uh such a a within the NIH that uh that was that much uh
yeah there is because what happened is a lot of these people and staff members are political appointees
um-hum
from the south especially who come along with a variety of different religious beliefs
some of which held very fervent beliefs
and will take their beliefs into the workplace in and in this case a lot of people consider that to be standing in the way of science and medicine to try and solve this thing
um-hum
um-hum
but i i don't like throwing money at the problem uh because
