Don Francis, doc on the forefront of the AIDS, talks vaccines and “doofuses.”

There reached a point in the early days of the AIDS crisis when Don Francis stopped going to funerals. “I got so bummed out,” he says. “I’d never been in an outbreak before where I knew so many people. With HIV, there were so many leaders and people I knew who died.”

Francis had been witness to many outbreaks, but he’s never been a bystander. An epidemiologist and doctor of infectious diseases, Francis spent his life’s work on researching and trying to eradicate diseases: smallpox in Sudan, hepatitis B among gay men in the U.S. and infants in China, Ebola in the world’s first outbreak in Africa in the ’70s. And AIDS in the early ’80s before it even had a name.

Back then, he directed the AIDS laboratory for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta – what happened with government policy on research and prevention of HIV is well-chronicled in the book And The Band Played On by late San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts.

What happened was a bloodbath.

THEY TOLD US, ‘LOOK PRETTY AND DO AS LITTLE AS YOU CAN.’

“I think we went to sleep before everyone understood how bad it was. We at the CDC who were used to outbreaks were shocked,” he says. “We knew it was bad, but we didn’t know the size and mortality of the epidemic was so great.

“We had the Republican administration, and literally I made the first prevention plan for the nation, we put it together at CDC and sent it to the administration and it was going to cost $15 to $20 million. They told us, ‘Look pretty and do as little as you can.’”

He declined. He asked to be transferred to California (he grew up in Marin) because California was at least trying.

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Francis spoke at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies on Tuesday night, along with Christopher Helfrich, director of Nothing But Nets, a United Nations Foundation campaign aimed at preventing the spread of malaria. The talk was sponsored by the Monterey Bay Chapter of the United Nations Association.

Before the talk, I spoke to Francis on the phone.

I graduated from college in the ’80s, making me just old enough to remember the horror of the AIDS crisis. A friend died at age 23 of AIDS and I can still remember the paramedics reluctant to remove his body from his mother’s home because they didn’t want to get what he had.

So talking to Francis was, for me, talking to a hero. This is a man who worked with French virologists at the Pasteur Institute who isolated the virus – you can’t treat a virus if you can’t isolate it. We talked Ebola (the difference between Ebola and HIV, he says, is the difference between pollution and an acute house fire – people ignore the importance of the pollution because they’re so busy running toward the fire). He had his medical degree and was at Harvard working on his doctorate, studying feline leukemia (“AIDS in cats,” he says) when the CDC asked if he could go to Africa to look at an outbreak they thought was Marburg virus. (“Marburg? That’s a class 4 virus,” he told them. “I don’t do that.”) The 4 signifies a virus for which no vaccine is available and that’s normally fatal to humans. Just take a week, the CDC told him. And he was still there, in Africa, two months later.

When I asked him about the anti-vaccine movement, he inhaled sharply.

“I think,” he says, “these people are primitive, stupid and dangerous. They’re primitive in that they don’t understand science.”

I asked him about the best and the worst things he’s seen over his nearly 40-year career.

The best is how communities respond to outbreaks: “No matter where I’ve been, in the states or in Africa, people will put their arm out for experimental work and vaccines.”

The worst: the political response to outbreaks.

“Especially by nasty politicians,” he says. “When I came back to California to continue working on HIV, the doofuses would line up and say really silly things about prevention and public health. It’s noise. I understand noise, they can make their noise, but when it comes to public health, they should shut up.”

MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com