White House hosts Aids Memorial Quilt for first time

Marking World Aids Day, President Joe Biden lauded the Aids advocacy movement and praised Dr Anthony Fauci

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The Aids Memorial Quilt on the South Lawn of the White House. Photo: Reuters

Published: 7:48am, 2 Dec 2024Updated: 11:38am, 2 Dec 2024

US President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden on Sunday hosted Aids survivors, advocates, and family members who lost loved ones to the disease for a display of the Aids Memorial Quilt at the White House, the first time it has been shown there in its decades-long history.

The event, marking World Aids Day, featured remarks by the Bidens and Jeanne White-Ginder, whose teenage son Ryan White died of Aids in 1990.

Both Bidens grew emotional during their remarks, empathising with those in the crowd who had lost family members and friends. President Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and baby daughter Naomi died in a car crash in 1972 and his son, Beau, who Jill Biden helped raise, died of cancer in 2015.

“As I look at this beautiful quilt, with its bright colours, the names in big block letters, renderings of lives and loves, I see it as a mum, and I think of the mothers who stitched their pain into a patchwork panel so the world would remember their child,” Jill Biden said.

Jeanne White-Ginder, whose teenage son Ryan White died of Aids in 1990. Photo: EPA-EFE

President Biden lauded the Aids advocacy movement and praised Dr Anthony Fauci, the former top US infectious disease expert who tussled with then-president Donald Trump during the Covid-19 pandemic, for his efforts to fight the disease.

“This movement is fully woven into the fabric and history of America, shining a light on the memory and the legacy of all the sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, mums and dads, partners and friends … we’ve lost to this terrible disease,” Biden said. “We stand united in the fight against this epidemic.”