11. Gaëtan Dugas, the so-called “Patient Zero”, was blamed for the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic in the United States in the 1980s
Gaëtan Dugas (1953-1984) was a gay Canadian flight attendant and early HIV patient, who during the 1980s was labeled as “patient zero” for AIDS in the United States. In the course of his work for Air Canada, Dugas claimed to have had over 2,500 homosexual partners across North America from 1972; misidentified as “patient zero” in the popular media after a Center for Disease Control researcher referred to Dugas as “patient O”, meaning “outside California” and not the number 0, Dugas was subsequently, and posthumously, blamed personally for the outbreak and spread of the disease in the United States.
Initial medical understanding of HIV was extremely limited, so much so that it was, in fact, originally referred to as “GRID” or gay-related immune deficiency, and a study published in The American Journal of Medicine in 1984 traced several early cases of infection to an unnamed gay male flight attendant. After Dugas was posthumously identified as this person he was subjected to unprecedented public shaming and vilification, being depicted as a sociopathic monster who deliberately sought to infect others.
In the years since the emergence of HIV in the United States, Dugas’s status as the one and only source has been thoroughly debunked, with modern analysis demonstrating that “on the family tree of the virus, Dugas fell in the middle, not at the beginning”; a 2016 study likewise found “neither biological nor historical evidence that he was the primary case in the US or for subtype B as a whole.” Furthermore, the “patient zero” hypothesis, in general, has been heavily discredited by modern medical research; instead of a singular source of HIV, scientists have traced the source of the disease to a multitude of potential individuals simultaneously throughout the 1970s.
Moreover, the average length of time between sexual contact with an infected individual and the emergence of symptoms was ten and a half months, with some persons remaining undiagnosed for years; as Dr. Robert Grant of the University of California poignantly stated in defense of Dugas: “Just because you are the first to be diagnosed doesn’t mean you started the epidemic.”