Hillary Clinton's recent misstatement about the early days of the AIDS epidemic and her effort to give the Reagans' some credit for a sensible reaction, in order to make nice at Nancy Reagan's funeral, inspired me to go back over the period. Here is a timeline of some pertinent events, without unnecessary editorializing. June 1981: Reports of clusters of Kaposi's sarcoma and pneumocystis carini pneumonia in New York and California. Clusters involved gay men, later in the year clusters cases involving users of IV drugs appeared. In the following years, the presence of haemophiliac-patients among the victims will become clear. April 13, 1982: Rep. Henry Waxman convenes the first Congressional hearings on these deaths. July 1982: Somebody coins the term "AIDS" for what is going on. March 1983: CDC mentions a clustering of cases of AIDS among Haitians. May 1983: Scientists in France gave a name to a virus there, LAV. July 1983: San Francisco Gener...
