druggas wrote:It was considered a death sentence. Then there was speculation about his sexuality.
Yeah, I remember being in high school and people were shocked that Magic Johnson had HIV because we thought that getting it only happened to drug addicts using needles or gay men and there was a bunch of speculation.
What was interesting though is that the treatment of HIV was so very incremental and effective and it really followed along the lines of what was happening to Magic, i.e., he was still healthy and didn’t develop AIDS. Then he made his comeback in 1996 and didn’t look anything like an HIV patient, i.e., the pictures of those men from the ‘80s who would be 90 pounds and near death.
And then everyone assumed modern medicine was making more and more advances that could keep HIV at bay without ever developing a vaccine. In the ‘80s, HIV was a death sentence and then slowly but surely and quietly, it’s not and it’s really one of the outstanding achievements of modern medicine that goes unappreciated since it’s not the headline grabbing cure-all or vaccine.