Bless your heart, TheDeamon, for suggesting all sorts of plausible justifications for inactivity regarding AIDS. I'd love to believe that willful neglect wasn't at the heart of that inactivity. But I don't ****ing believe it. You'll need some hard evidence rather than wistful suppositions. It's not as if we're talking about a society that was notably hostile to gays, after all. Though I suppose just letting us die is an improvement over active execution, so three cheers for progress.
I'm pretty sure it was a combination of both, in all reality. There were the actively malicious, "true believers" in "the gay plague" which was killing "societies reprobates." But I'm also certain there were a large number of other people who opted for willful neglect, either to protect their own political skins, or to protect political allies of theirs. As once again, the CDC pursuing an aggressive containment strategy in regards to AIDS would have lead to the systematic revealing, and outing, of the non-normative sexual activities of thousands upon thousands of people, many of whom were powerful in a number of various ways.
It just comes with the the inherent nature of AIDS being primarily a Sexually Transmitted Disease, while Ebola causes a person to literally leak the most contagious bodily fluids freely, and acts on a much more rapid time scale. If AIDS killed a person in months, rather than years, I'm sure the CDC would have been a lot more aggressive about squashing it, as the World Health Organization has been about Ebola since its first outbreaks prior to the first AIDS case, IIRC.
And the quiet incubation period of AIDS makes it more dangerous, not less. After all, it lets the disease spread quietly for months until suddenly people all over your community are just dropping like flies. Why don't you go to Africa and see how it does on a threat to society level? Say how many Africans have died from Ebola compared to AIDS, again?
Thing is, you're proving your point, but disproving it at the same time. Africa does indeed have a mass contagion problem with AIDS specifically. Whether or not CDC containment efforts inside the US would have made a meaningful difference for them is questionable. But also keep in mind that the CDC likewise didn't undertake any large scale containment effort in the US either, for that matter,
most first world nations didn't attempt such an effort as well. (So it wasn't just the U.S. turning a blind eye to it, so if the United States was being malicious about AIDS, it seems the international community as a whole was as well).
For the First World Nations, even without a massive directed containment effort in regards to AIDS, there doesn't exist any such problem on a scale even remotely close to what happened in Africa. Education, proper sanitation, and ready access to both medical screenings and prophylactics(in particular condoms) were sufficient to keep AIDS from literally destroying society in weeks, months, or even years for those nations. Avoiding an AIDS infection was simple enough for monogamous couples, people who were sexually abstinent, and those who were very scrupulous about testing for STD's. Of course, you had the ancillary of avoiding blood transfusions for much of the 80's, not using used hypodermic needles for intravenous (illegal) drugs, wearing protective gloves before interacting with bodily fluids that were not your own, and so forth, but again the overall number of people impacted by those changes as a percentage of society was fairly small at that time. Present day might be a considerably different story, but they have the lessons learned from the 80's to work with.
Decades later, it's an ever-present issue, but it's pretty much "background noise" on the domestic front at this point. Particularly as we now have HIV/AIDS patients who are still active over 25 years after initially getting infected with HIV. Even for Africa, the mass scale AIDS contagion they do have
took decades to unfold, and is largely attributed to poor education, poor sanitation, and lack of medical services.
Ebola on the other hand, if a mass contagion event happens, will likely run its full course in mere weeks on the inside,
months on the outside, and overwhelm the medical services of any area so impacted. It won't be a slow build-up like happened with AIDS, it will be a rapid swing happening in a matter of days instead. Luckily it seems that access to proper sanitation and education helps a lot with favorable outcomes with Ebola treatment and containment alike, but as the more recent outbreaks have shown, even with all of the proper precautions being taken, that isn't always enough(as is the case with AIDS). Ebola also still remains fully capable of quickly overwhelming even the medical system of a "1st World Nation" even with those advantages at this time. While AIDS at this point is a virtual non-issue for the 1st world at this point, its highly annoying, and very expensive to treat, but it's not likely to become an immediate threat to the destruction of society at this time.
