Meaning | I shudder about imagining Kennedy running our health agencies.

The Senate has just confirmed as health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, a science -denying Who once said There is no vaccine that is safe and effective that has suggested that Covid may have been genetically constructed to spare Jewish and Chinese people, and which spent more than 100 pages in his recent book Breathing new life in the idea This HIV does not cause AIDS.

Of course, all this is rubbish, but hardly a laugh. I am afraid of our country because I know what happens when science -denial comes to power.

In the mid-2000s, I lived in South Africa and then ruled by President Thabo Mbeki, who was also no stranger to the ideas of AIDS denying. In the midst of an explosive AIDS epidemic in the late 1990s, Mr. Mbeki, probably in Last night surfing Of the Internet, on the Frys, that HIV does not cause AIDS and that the antiretroviral drugs used to keep it in check – the same type of drugs I take every morning and have for almost 30 years – were married.

Mr. Mbeki, in Thrall to these ideas, many of which came from America, refused to have antiretroviral therapy used in the country’s health system. His Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, recommended healthy eating, with lots of beets, ginger and garlic, to avert disease.

ONE Harvard Study Later it found that at least 330,000 people died, and over 35,000 children were born with HIV as a result of Mr. Mbeki’s error in the error of AIDS treatment policy.

We risk watching the story repeat itself in the US with our own Manto Tshabalala-Msimang-I-events in Mr. Kennedy Jr., whose science refusal is a more harmful variant of the South African version.

In his book “The Real Anthony Fauci,“ Mr. Kennedy revives debunked canards about HIV – just like the idea that it is an “harmless passenger virus” and that gay men’s promiscuity and use of recreational drugs and even antiretroviral substances like AZT were the real causes of AIDS – while “I” I “I” In use ‘m just asking questions’ strategy to allow him to deny that he himself is an AIDS denial.

As a gay man living with HIV, I can’t tell you how grotesque and offensive all this is and how hard it is to wrap my head around the thought of Mr. Kennedy now wants to president for AIDS research, care and prevention programs on federal agencies.

Mr. Kennedy’s science refusal has the potential to be worse than for his South African colleagues. Because not only is his AIDS denial we need to worry about it is his rejection of vaccines and Flirtation with rejection of germor theoryAn important foundation for modern biomedicine.

For all the dangers he presents, I have heard a lot of defeat in the last few weeks when Mr. Trump has flooded the zone of executive orders and other actions that have had their desired effect of overwhelming his opponents. We can’t beat all this back, the logic goes, we have to accept our destiny and find a way to meet this brave new world under Mr. Kennedy and President Trump.

But if South Africa has a precautionary narrative for us, it also shows us a way forward.

Twenty-five years ago, President Mbeki’s African National Congress had a lock on power, and many in the party refused to break with him on AIDS self-self his policy was a death sentence for South Africans living with HIV bodies to save the dying were out of reach As a matter of national policy. It all seemed hopeless. How should anyone fight, so much less victory against the liberation party that released South Africans from apartheid?

But there were many who were unwilling to accept defeat, such as Zackie Achmat, a founder of the treatment action campaign to demand access to antiretroviral agents. He visited me in New York in 2000 and inspired my move to South Africa in the first place.

Activists with the treatment of treatment acts organized in urban areas and rural areas that taught HIV science to fight the lies that their government was running and used this knowledge as the handle to build a mass movement. They knew there were drugs that could save their lives. The South African constitution guaranteed the right to health and they would live. They recruited the help of AIDS doctors and nurses, researchers who worked with HIV, lawyers who knew the young country’s constitution from the inside out. In the end, however, it was ordinary South Africans who made the difference.

The merciless campaign to confront the government’s views on AIDS held both the president and his health minister in the warm seat for years. At the time the internal party politics forced President Mbeki and Minister Tshabalala-Msimang to resign, activism had laid the basis for South Africa to establish The largest antiretroviral drug program in the world.

So there is always hope for something else, something better. It is in ordinary people who organize like my peers in the treatment campaign, against the odds, because failure would come at too high a cost.

It is in the lessons that many of us learned in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States when we were going to funerals week after week when we refused to accept death without a fight.

Over the next few years, Americans who hope for something better will have to go toe to toe with this administration, at all government levels that challenge its attacks on science in courts, find ways to protect public health through state and local action , Training our society about what’s going on and ways they can help push back, so that our own Manto Tshabalala-Msimang leaves in shame can pick up and build from the ashes.

And this is already happening: Litigation was filed in the first weeks of administration to challenge harmful executive orders that would hobby National Health Research Institute, People Downloading and Saving Data on HIV and LHBT -Health, that Trump Administration scrubs from centers to disease control and prevention sites. People refuse to accept buyout offers to clean them from agencies where they have worn on behalf of the US public for years.

In the bravest examples, then Mr. Trump ordered foreign aid to stop, workers on an American-funded program in Sudan refused to comply – They weren’t willing to give up 100 children for hunger. And yes, thousands of people organized to oppose the nomination of Mr. Kennedy, and although they failed, their efforts have left us better prepared for the fight to come.

Yes, sometimes you persist and you fight “the long defeat.“Because as the Health Service’s Justice Master Paul Farmer once said, you don’t turn your back on those who have the most to lose. And sometimes you win sometimes.