E 

veryone treats it like a 

death 
sentence, 
even 

when it’s just a cough. 

Stores close their doors, people 

keep their distance. Most infected 

people don’t know they have it, so it 

spreads uncontrollably, eager to kill 

the moment it finds a compromised 

immune system. It’s not coronavirus, 

it’s HIV.

The media, medical experts 

and politicians alike have shown 

us time and time again the federal 

government’s response to COVID-19 

has been unsatisfactory for a virus 

of its scope. Americans expect our 

government to take proper action to 

protect us — as they should. Rewind 

four decades or so, though, and you’ll 

find that most people didn’t mind the 

radio silence.

The first reported cases of HIV 

in the United States were in 1981 

(though an unknown number of cases 

existed before the turn of the decade), 

kickstarting 
the 
nightmarish 
epidemic. 

In just its first year, HIV infected 270 

people and killed 121. Despite the 

numbers and despite being more or 

less equally fatal among everyone 

— it is not the virus itself that kills 

but the deterioration of the immune 

system, thereby leaving everyone 

equally vulnerable. The death toll 

continued to rise before peaking in 

1995 
with 
around 
50,000 
deaths. 
Even 

today, HIV kills thousands; in 2016, it 

was the ninth-largest cause of death 

for Americans aged 25 to 44, killing 

more than 6,000 people. Despite this, 

modern America seems to treat HIV 

like it isn’t severe, even though the 

disease is called an epidemic by the 

United Nations, something that likely 

won’t 
change 
until 
2030, 
at 
the 
earliest.

How could a disease stay this 

deadly for so long in a nation as rich 

and powerful as the U.S.? Simply put, 

our government allowed it to.

At the outbreak of the epidemic, 

it was impossible not to notice that 

almost everyone with HIV was a gay 

man. It was so apparent that the virus 

was originally labeled GRID, gay-

related immune deficiency, by the 

medical establishment (though this 

often goes unacknowledged because 

it subtly supports the rhetoric that 

HIV is “God’s punishment” for being 

gay) and the “gay plague” by the 

general public. It wasn’t until 1983, 

when women were diagnosed with 

it, that anyone thought it could be 

transmitted heterosexually, but this 

knowledge went under the radar 

because those cases were vastly 

outnumbered by those of gay men.

Because it was a “gay plague,” 

the government treated it as such. 

Homophobia became increasingly 

intertwined 
with 
public 
policy 

during the election of Ronald Reagan, 

putting an end to the post-Stonewall 

surge in LGBTQ+ civil rights. In 1982, 

Reagan’s press secretary (and others 

in the room) openly laughed when 

asked whether the White House 

was monitoring the disease, saying, 

“I don’t have it, do you?” That year, 

the death toll would reach 618, a five-

fold increase from the 121 deaths the 

previous year. In 1984, Health and 

Human Services officially discovered 

the virus and promised a vaccine by 

1986; the vaccine still doesn’t exist 

despite successful proof-of-concept. 

A year later, Reagan finally said the 

word “AIDS” in public — by this time 

the death toll had surpassed 12,000.

If not for the work of gay activists, 

even less action would have been 

taken. Community leaders formed 

health centers like the Gay Men’s 

Health Crisis and promoted safe 

sex (a practice that even the medical 

community was not yet teaching) 

as early as 1982. Gay establishments 

closed themselves to slow the spread. 

As AIDS prevention campaigns 

grew, the government suppressed 

them. In 1987, Reagan signed into 

law a ban on the use of federal funds 

for AIDS prevention and education 

programs that “promoted” (that is to 

say, acknowledged) homosexuality. 

Campaigns that were eligible for 

funding 
disingenuously 
claimed 

that everyone was at risk, siphoning 

resources away from the masses 

of dying gay men and toward the 

few 
heterosexual 
HIV-positive 

people. In theory, this campaign 

could 
have 
destigmatized 
the 

virus and fought the “gay plague” 

reputation, but in practice, it did the 

opposite, as gay men grew even more 

disproportionately affected once 

resources were diverted into other 

communities.

Finally, we come to coronavirus, 

and the parallels are frightening. The 

response of our current president 

isn’t much better than Reagan’s 

was. He claims that “the risk to the 

American people remains very low.” 

Declaring coronavirus as not an 

“American” disease but a “Chinese 

virus” echoes the rhetoric about HIV 

being a “gay” disease and displays 

xenophobia. 
President 
Donald 

Trump has put Vice President Mike 

Pence in charge of handling 

the disease, a man who actively 

worsened Indiana’s HIV outbreak 

as governor by preventing needle 

exchange programs (even his own 

party supported them) and cutting 

funding for Planned Parenthood, the 

only clinic offering HIV tests in the 

affected area. Even in the ’80s and 

’90s, AIDS activists were protesting 

the inaction of a certain New York 

City mayor named Rudy Giuliani — 

now the President’s attorney. Those 

running our government have long 

since proven that they cannot, or will 

not, properly handle an epidemic, let 

alone a pandemic.

However, just as the public was 

partially 
at 
fault 
with 
HIV, 
our 
approach 

to the coronavirus reflects the 

shortcomings 
present 
during 
the 
AIDS 

epidemic. 
Like 
HIV, 
COVID-19 
does 
not 

affect 
everyone 
equally; 
the 
elderly 
are 

at much higher risk for severe or fatal 

cases. 
The 
rush 
to 
close 
establishments 

has prioritized schools and colleges 

— in Michigan, every K-12 school is 

closed until April 5 — despite the 0.2 

percent fatality rate for college-age 

people, and those under the age of 

nine 
not 
having 
any 
recorded 
fatalities. 

Closing nursing homes has been 

discussed less frequently despite the 

much greater risk residents face. The 

repeated failure of most U.S. nursing 

homes to control previous infections 

is being all but ignored — less than 

10 percent of infection prevention 

specialists in American nursing 

homes have any sort of training or 

certification. Although quarantining 

youth is effective at preventing young 

carriers from potentially spreading 

it to the elderly, we know a certain 

demographic is at heightened risk but 

fail to focus our resources on helping 

those 
groups, 
favoring 
an 
“everyone 
at 

risk” narrative.

Our 
country’s 
response 
to 

coronavirus is failing. Most know 

this because they are being told so on 

the news, but gay Americans know 

it from lived experience. And yet, 

we are making the same mistakes 

and giving those who failed us 40 

years ago the power to fail us again. 

This has already had a hefty human 

price tag. During its first year, 121 

people died of HIV in America; 

it is mid-March, and COVID-19 

has killed at least 108 Americans. 

That number will only rise until we 

learn to acknowledge what we have 

done and continue to do wrong: 

F

or as long as I can remember, the 

western basin of Lake Erie has 

become coated with slick, green 

slime at the end of each summer. As one of 

the Great Lakes, Lake Erie experiences a 

sudden increase in microbial life that festers 

into coats of toxic algae that can span over 

620 square miles on its surface. Although a 

phenomenon of natural contamination, these 

algal blooms occur mainly due to increased 

agricultural runoff made possible by no-till 

farming. 

In a recent paper, Dr. Jennifer Blesh, 

an assistant professor at the University 

of Michigan, addressed the relationships 

between agricultural practices and water 

quality downstream in the Lake Erie basin. 

She and her colleagues explain that soil 

health assessments in agriculture are critical 

for improving water quality because soil 

properties influence water filtration and 

nutrient availability, both of which contribute 

to overall soil function. Given that there are 

methods to assess soil health’s impact on 

water quality in smaller water entities, the 

University should dedicate more research 

toward developing reproducible soil health 

indicators that can be implemented to a 

regional extent.

As of now, research teams like Blesh’s 

utilize regulated modeling to no avail: The 

models are insufficient and inconsistent 

among ecosystems across the basin. Blesh 

and her team detail the faults of the current 

modeling systems: “Most modeling studies 

in the Lake Erie region were validated with 

limited field observations, consider a limited 

range of best management practices and lack 

data linking different management strategies 

to changes in soil health.” This type of 

modeling highlights specific issues that can 

be solved with efforts by large academic 

institutions, an endeavor that the University 

should pursue to improve the effectiveness of 

the tools used by teams in this important field 

research. Furthermore, it’s worth detailing 

these specific issues in order to indicate 

what the University could resolve with more 

allocated resources. 

These models pose issues because they 

lack the detailed simulation and visualization 

of biological processes important to soil 

function, such as microbial community 

makeup and diversity. They are restricted 

because they only evaluate biological 

processes of interest on topsoil, leaving the 

subsoil unevaluated even though these 

same processes occur there. Additionally, 

these models are insufficient because they 

include oversimplified representations of 

macropore flow that are easily manipulated 

by agricultural practices when there are 

other interactions between processes that 

are worth noting. Given that simulation 

model development is an ongoing process, 

the University should work to adjust these 

models using empirical and mechanistic 

methods and focus on applying them as a 

regulated policy tool.

In improving these models accordingly, 

the University could help research teams 

consolidate generalizable knowledge on 

how agricultural practices affect soil health 

and water quality at the regional scale. 

Administration may argue it doesn’t make 

sense to pursue such efforts to compile 

a comprehensive understanding of soil 

ecology. In essence, it doesn’t make sense to 

develop an all-encompassing evaluation of 

a large area that consists of several different 

ecosystems with unique needs. While this 

rationale could stand for areas with drastic 

changes in their landscapes, it’s important 

that we don’t ignore the benefits that 

comprehensive evaluation could bring for the 

various watershed regions of Michigan and 

the Midwest. In other words, it’s essential 

the University understands how critical this 

research in the Great Lakes is in advancing 

our understanding of watershed ecosystems 

everywhere.

Furthermore, the University should 

understand that advanced research efforts 

toward soil health and water quality could 

create advantages to academia, to Michigan’s 

agriculture and to Michigan’s watersheds. 

As one of the largest public institutions in 

the state and one of the most influential 

academic institutions in the world, the 

University should allocate more resources, 

personnel and attention toward research for 

developing comprehensive evaluations at 

watershed scales. We need this research for 

the improvement of our state and the water 

quality of one of the world’s largest freshwater 

sources, especially since we have continued 

to enable destructive agricultural policy in 

Michigan.

Above all, we have a responsibility as a public 

research institution to inform the public of the 

benefits of imposing different management 

practices on soil health and water quality. The 

need for public reaffirmation is clear. “Despite 

decades of awareness among stakeholders that 

eutrophication presents a global sustainability 

challenge, minimal progress has been made, 

in large part because of social and economic 

barriers within the agricultural sector,” writes a 

number of authors including Thomas Zimnicki 

and Yao Zhang from the American Institute of 

Biological Sciences.

4 — Friday, March 20, 2020
Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Alanna Berger
Zack Blumberg

Brittany Bowman
Emily Considine
Jess D’Agostino

Jenny Gurung
Cheryn Hong
Krystal Hur
Ethan Kessler
Zoe Phillips
Mary Rolfes

Michael Russo
Timothy Spurlin
Miles Stephenson

Joel Weiner
Erin White 

ERIN WHITE
Managing Editor

Stanford Lipsey Student Publications Building

420 Maynard St. 

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890.

ELIZABETH LAWRENCE

Editor in Chief

EMILY 
CONSIDINE 
AND 
MILES 

STEPHENSON
Editorial Page Editors

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of The Daily’s Editorial Board. 

All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

KIANNA MARQUEZ | COLUMN

The University should invest more in water quality 

This has happened to us before

RAY AJEMIAN | COLUMN

Ray Ajemian can be reached at 

rajemian@umich.edu.

Kianna Marquez can be reached at 

kmarquez@umich.edu.

LEENA GHANNAM | CONTACT CARTOONIST AT LZGHANNA@UMICH.EDU

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

