Ryan White’s Attorneys on Huckabee Controversy

In response to Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s recent refusal to retract his statement 15 years ago that people living with AIDS should be isolated, the attorneys for Ryan White, a teenager who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion and died of AIDS-related illness in 1990, have written a letter to the editor of the Journal and Courier, an Indiana newspaper (www.jconline.com, 12/18).

Huckabee has stated that his comments were a reasonable reaction to the epidemic at the time; however, the attorneys, Charles R. Vaughan and Charles V. Vaughan, say that Ryan White’s struggle with stigma and his battle to teach the country that AIDS couldn’t be spread through casual contact, was the number-one news story in 1985, and the number-two most-covered news story in 1986.

“Evidently, Mr. Huckabee did not read a newspaper in 1985 or 1986,” they write. “Isn’t it astounding that someone running for president of the United States could take a position that is so wrong in light of the medical evidence available in 1992?”

On December 12, the Los Angeles Times reported that Mike Huckabee agreed to meet with Jean White-Ginder, Ryan White’s mother.