Lee Suckling: Fear incited by coronavirus nothing new to gay community

We've been through this confusion. We've inherited the anger and the frustration of governments not doing enough - or indeed anything at all. All this anxiety is not new to us. Photo / Getty Images

COMMENT:

This is not a column about the world's overreaction to COVID-19. It's about the double standards that exist when a virus starts to affect wealthy, white, heterosexuals. That's why we're all in this current terror, writes Lee Suckling.

Imagine this hypothetical with me: There's a drug so highly effective that it reduces the risk of contracting COVID-19 by 99 per cent. When used correctly, it stops the virus in its tracks. It's not a vaccine, but rather, renders the disease unable to spread or mutate. This enables the existing cases out there to be effectively treated, and the global crisis to be contained.

But here's the kicker. One pharmaceutical company owns the patent to this drug. In New Zealand and Australia, it will be available on the black market for another six years before it is funded for public prescription. You'll have to buy it on the internet from a dodgy source overseas and have it illegally mailed to your home.

You're furious, aren't you? The Crown-owned entity that decides what medications have met the cost-benefit requirements is going to make you wait until 2026 – when it has deemed your community is being sufficiently infected to compensate for the cost to the taxpayer – until you can get a proper prescription from your GP.

This is the case the LGBT+ community went through in the last decade as we campaigned and waited for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV. This is a drug that prevents a disease from spreading – a disease that killed 319,849 people in the US alone during the 1980-1995 period known as the "AIDS Crisis".

Now, there isn't a pre-exposure prophylaxis for the new coronavirus at the moment so none of this really feels relevant to most of you. Yet for us gay people – those from within a community that lost all its grandfathers to one virus – the current health panic is something we've experienced before.

We've been through this confusion. We've inherited the anger and the frustration of governments not doing enough – or indeed anything at all. All this anxiety is not new to us.

Until PrEP was funded in March 2018 (after an arduous year-long campaign to PHARMAC from within the community), we lived with this same fear you're feeling right now about the new coronavirus. We thought our mere existence was warrant enough for infection. That's what the media told us for years, after all. It led us all to believe that we had a death sentence just for touching each other.

This is not a column about the world's overreaction to COVID-19. It's about the double standards that exist when a virus starts to affect wealthy, white, heterosexuals. That's why we're all in this current terror.

The virus isn't just affecting a minority group anymore. It's not just people in China. The situation is similar to when the world woke up and realised AIDS didn't just affect "the gays".

Promptly, people then took it seriously. When Alice from Remuera who's planning a trip to Spain might have it interrupted, it's worth the panic. When schools in a middle-class neighbourhood may or may not have to close down, it's worth the panic. When we can't buy lush three-ply toilet paper at New World, it's worth the panic.

We don't know a lot about COVID-19, but we know it can be treated. Yes, over 3000 people have died. This virus is awful and vicious and undiscriminating. But it also will be contained eventually, simply because of public outcry for a solution by the posh and the pale.

AIDS still kills 700,000 people globally each year, but no one really cares because it's seen as a disease for "others". Nobody from the West is rushing to push PrEP out to the African nations that could effectively eradicate the virus in one generation – if they only had access to a simple, albeit mildly expensive, drug.

The only people that really cared for the gay men who were dying in the 1980s were lesbians. We as the wealthy and white didn't care about the people of Wuhan a month ago, but now the coronavirus is infecting people that look just like us, precipitously, it's all we can talk about.