Petrelis Files

DC Monthly: S.F. STD Boss
Said AIDS Quarantine a Possibility in 2001

Poll-surging GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, is causing a stir today because of an AP story about his previously stated views on AIDS and ways of stopping its spread.

As a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 1992, Huckabee answered 229 questions submitted to him by The Associated Press. Besides a quarantine, Huckabee suggested that Hollywood celebrities fund AIDS research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies. [...]

In 1992, Huckabee wrote, "If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague."

Shocking opinions, to be sure, and I speak as a person with AIDS, but Huckabee's ideas didn't disappear after 1992 and were echoed as recently as November 2001 in the Washington Monthly.

An article that month in the magazine about a rise in HIV infections among gay men, a top employee of the San Francisco health department made some radical proposals, when tossing around ideas with a reporter, for preventing new transmissions.

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, director of Sexually Transmitted Disease Prevention and Control Services in San Francisco, has suggested a number of measures, some coercive,which he thinks would slow the increase of new HIV infections among gay men. Among them: closing sex clubs and adult bookstores; enforcing no-sex ordinances in bars and clubs; enforcing no-drug policies in bars and clubs; and Internet-based outreach and education, particularly in chat rooms where many gay men meet new sexual partners.

Putting aside political realities when brainstorming on this subject, Klausner also raised the possibility of quarantining those who cannot control their infectivity---e.g., those barebackers who've infected 20 different people and still refuse to use condoms.

Many of these measures would probably be infeasible in the current political climate. Still, this doesn't mean they shouldn't be discussed. After all, in an environment where there are no consequences for actions that threaten the public health, it may be necessary to create some. [Italic emphasis added.]

San Francisco's STD control chief is no stranger to controversy, even after he made his outrageous remarks to the Washington Monthly.

In August 2005, Klausner filed a petition with the Food and Drug Administration to reclassify Viagra because the drug was allegedly increasing HIV and STD infections, angering a spokesman for UCSF who also served as the Mayor's HIV/AIDS liaison:

From the August 8, 2005, Bay Area Reporter:

"Jeff Klausner wants the dicks of people with HIV in his back pocket and he wants us to ask him permission to use it. And I am not giving him my dick," said an outraged [Jeff] Sheehy, a gay HIV-positive man who volunteers as Mayor Gavin Newsom's adviser on HIV and AIDS policy. "Jeff Klausner is specifically targeting gay men with HIV. This is not what city funds should be used for. There is no science to justify this."

Kind of odd, I think, that Huckabee and Klausner have both publicly expressed similar views on potential AIDS quarantines and other gay sex-related matters, given that one hails from a conservative state and other works in the health department of America's most liberal city. All of which may just prove the old saw that politics makes for strange bedfellows.