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Adam Moss Runs 12-Year-Late AIDS Correction On Andrew Sullivan

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Moss
Last summer, professional blogger and Barack Obama enthusiast Andrew Sullivan defended his 1996 front-page New York Times magazine essay, "The End of AIDS." He wrote: "I was flayed alive for saying the obvious: that this was a huge deal, an end to AIDS-as-plague. And yet, 10 years on, everything in it was right." He was not actually "flayed" nor did time actually prove that everything he had said was right. He also proposed a celebratory holiday, on which we all observe "the year we turned the corner, to commemorate the lost generations, to recall the awful price paid for the era of total liberation." Never mind that that last clause is the straight out of a conservative pastor's speech. Today, his old editor from the NYT mag, Adam Moss, now the editor of New York, issues a corrective to his support of Sullivan's ideas.

In today's New York magazine, Gary Taubes writes: "One of the ironies of the success of [the drug treatment combinations that spurred Sullivan to write his 1996 piece] is that it has fostered the myth that the AIDS epidemic has come to an end, and that living with HIV is only marginally more problematic than living with herpes or genital warts.... At the moment, some 100,000 New Yorkers are infected with the HIV virus, and AIDS remains the third leading cause of death in men under 65, exceeded only by heart disease and cancer." While the era of death and destruction that Sullivan wrote about so memorably may have ended for him and his friends, it certainly continues on for others.

By Choire Sicha   06/09/08 10:35 AM
File Under: Adam Moss, Andrew Sullivan, Maglomania, New York Magazine, New York Times, Politics, Take-Backs
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Right on. Andrew is intensely narcissistic, he writes of his own life and extrapolates broad social trends from them, sipping margaritas in P-Town.

Does anyone but me remember when Sullivan was outed as having accepted money from Big Pharma a few years ago? That he disparaged people who sought access to cheaper drugs, and defended drug co's without revealing conflict of interest?

Another thing Andrew loathes is the idea of universal health care, HATES the idea. He declares the End of Aids but the fact that these drugs are drastically expensive has never crossed his consciousness. If you're a young creative without health insurance and you contract HIV, god bless you. You might have to go tho the bare bones safety net of medicaid, which Andrew also hates.

Never mind that I'm sure Andrew received all his shots and inoculations from the UK NHS which he abhors- he is ferociously against health care for the poors, a total cheerleader for the alleged "free-market". Which was supposed to lower costs, right? Whoops, opposite land. Andrew could truly not give less of a damn.

Posted by: Deschanel on June 9, 2008 12:33 PM

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