The Trump administration bears troubling parallels to Reagan’s in its pandemic response. The federal government has thousands of medical and public health experts working to stop the spread of Covid-19, but the White House has discounted some of their work for political reasons. In so doing, it is courting catastrophe, as the early response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic shows. By placing restrictions on what information public health officials could share with the public and disregarding experts’ early and insistent warnings about the potential severity of the crisis, Reagan’s White House put forward policies that contributed to the virus’s rapid spread and steep death toll.

Covid-19 is a very different disease than AIDS. It is much easier to transmit and has a shorter incubation time. It also does not have the nearly 100 percent fatality rate that HIV/AIDS did when it was first discovered. But the importance of a science-based response from the federal government is no less important.