C. Everett Koop Quotes
We are fighting a deadly disease. We are not fighting the people who have that disease. Homosexuality does not produce AIDS.
C. Everett Koop, U.S. Surgeon General, Speech to students, Cardozo High School, Washington DC, February 1988
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The vast majority of the AIDS victims were then and are today heterosexual.
Five years earlier, the World Health Organization classified homosexuality as a mental disease. When he made this statement, Guterres went against his own political party and most public opinion in Portugal. Two decades later, when he was elected Secretary General of the United Nations, he had flip-flopped on the homosexuality issue.
Roberta Actenberg as Assistant Secretary of HUD She was appointed over Helms’ objections.
No one knows whether Helms actually believed such an absurd, counter-factual statement or it was part of his anti homosexual appeal to religious fundamentalists. Most AIDS cases in America were transmitted through heterosexual intercourse. And then there were many tragic cases where AIDS was contracted through contaminated pharmaceuticals, and the substantial number of cases transmitted via intravenous use of illicit drugs where needles are shared by the addicts. Transmission by homosexual sodomy is a very small proportion of the AIDS cases.
Charles Everett Koop was an American pediatric surgeon and public health administrator. He was a vice admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, and served as the 13th Surgeon General of the United States under President Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989. According to the Associated Press, "Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name."
