Published January, 2011

The Early Days of AIDS, As I Remember Them, C. Everett Koop, ANN. FORUM. COLLAB. HIV RES. (2011)

Dr. Koop, who was Surgeon General during the Reagan Administration, here provides a blunt account of how the socially conservative politics of the Reagan Administration stood in the way of an appropriate response as the first signs of the HIV epidemic began to surface. Through a first hand account of his experiences, given first as a speech at the 2010 National Summit on HIV Diagnosis, Prevention and Access to Care and formalized in this article, Dr. Koop provides an inside view of the opposition he met and how political influences slowed a prompt response to the spread of HIV/AIDS in the United States.