What a bunch of steaming Horse manure, page-44

As late as 1983, people were being reassured that their chances of catching AIDS from transfusions of untested blood were “extremely remote.” Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler went on nationwide television on July 3, 1983, to “assure the American people that the blood supply is 100% safe.” But, just one year later, the Centers for Disease Control began reporting dozens of cases of people who caught AIDS from blood transfusions and, just two years after that, the AIDS deaths from blood transfusions were in the thousands. More than half of the nation’s 20,000 hemophiliacs were infected with the AIDS virus as a result of the numerous blood transfusions they require. The long incubation period of the disease proved to be like a time bomb.

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The problem was not simply with what medical authorities did not know at the time but with what they presumed to know and to proclaim to the benighted—to those who, in Secretary Heckler’s words, had “irrational fears” and “unwarranted panic.”