Former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, a pediatric surgeon turned public health advocate, died Monday. He was 96.
He's perhaps most famous for his running battles with the Reagan Administration to acknowledge and effectively prevent the spread of AIDS. From Randy Shilts' And The Band Played On:
Koop spent much of 1986 interviewing scientists, health officials, and even suspicious gay community leaders. Once the text was prepared, he took the unusual step of having tens of thousands of copies printed—without letting the White House see it in advance. When Koop went public with the report, it was clear why. The “Surgeon General’s Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” was a call to arms against the epidemic, complete with marching orders. For one of the first times, the problem of AIDS was addressed in purely public health terms, stripped of politics. AIDS education, Koop wrote, “should start at the earliest grade possible” for children. He bluntly advocated widespread use of condoms. Compulsory identification of virus carriers and any form of quarantine would be useless in fighting the disease, Koop concluded.
The surgeon general’s research also had led him to some inescapable conclusions about AIDS antibody testing, which continued to be a controversial issue. Mandatory testing would do little more than frighten away from the public health establishment the people most at risk for AIDS, the people who most needed to be tested, Koop said. He reiterated what health officers had been saying for nearly two years—large-scale testing would not be feasible until people did not have to worry about losing their jobs or insurance policies if they took the test. A push for more testing should be accompanied by guarantees of confidentiality and nondiscrimination, Koop said.
Such safeguards proved an anathema to conservatives, who viewed them as coddling homosexuals. In California, conservative Republican Governor George Deukmejian vetoed anti-discrimination legislation for people with AIDS or the AIDS virus, not once but twice in 1986 alone. Koop, however, saw such laws as tools with which the epidemic could be fought.
The report proved an immediate media sensation. The calls for sex education and condom use at last gave journalists something titillating on which to hang their stories. This wasn’t some tedious call for a blue-ribbon commission or bureaucratic coordination, this was about rubbers and sex education. At last, there was also a sensible explanation about why compulsory AIDS testing wasn’t such a good idea. Uncorrupted by the language of AIDSpeak, Koop was able to talk in a way that made sense; at last, there was a public health official who sounded like a public health official. Not only that, he was able to utter words like “gay” without visibly flinching.
"Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again."
- Stephen King, The Stand
"Ozone Man, Ozone. He's crazy, way out, far out, man." — George H.W. Bush, speaking about Al Gore during the 1992 presidential campaign
