Join me, Professor Jay Bhattacharya, as I sit down with Ooana Trien, a poet, writer, and theatrical artist living in New York City to explore the stark differences in how society responded to the HIV/AIDS crisis versus COVID-19. In this conversation, we discuss how the artistic community played a vital role in humanizing HIV/AIDS patients, emphasizing empathy and understanding, while the response to COVID-19 often fueled fear, division, and the stigmatization of dissenters. We discuss how politicized health narratives and vaccine mandates have impacted individual freedoms and access to society, drawing lessons from the HIV/AIDS crisis on the importance of dignity and compassion. We also examine the influence of SOC realism on art and propaganda, and the power of truth in challenging totalitarian narratives.Tune in to explore these crucial insights and discover what we can learn from past health crises to shape a more compassionate and thoughtful response in the future.
Timestamps:
00:18 Introduction to Ooana Trien
04:46 The vaccine mandate prejudice
07:45 A whole memory being eradicated
10:18 The philosophy: you're a biohazard
14:00 The AIDS epidemic
21:00 "Dr Faucci, I'm going blind"
25:30 Support for HIV patients in the '80s
28:41 The political witch-hunt ritual
34:36 Covid, deviants & scapegoating
40:00 Social control
51:23 The dancing nurses & mass compliance
01:02:32 Medicine and the arts
01:06:22 The story was all the mattered
01:11:16 The totalitarian automaton
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Interesting interview. She is well entrenched in her learnings. I felt she was trying to get us up to speed in a very short time which of course is impossible. She digressed a lot to new avenues which lost me. It was all very deep which took years of experience and reading by her. I believe she has a lot of vision but needs to break it down into manageable bites.
Ominous Parallels. https://youtu.be/HfAFKDxICyM?si=78AgmpUyNGgOiVLQ