C. Everett Koop was nominated as Surgeon General in 1981, the year the CDC published its First Reports, and served from 1982 to 1989 under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. For his first four years, he was kept on the sidelines of the AIDS debate. Journalists were told in advance of press conferences that the Surgeon General would not answer questions about AIDS. He joined the federal executive task force on AIDS in 1985, and in February 1986, nearly five years into the epidemic, President Reagan asked him to prepare a report on the disease.

Koop wrote much of it himself after months of consultation with 26 groups representing political, civic, religious and fraternal institutions. On October 22, 1986, he released The Surgeon General's Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome at a press conference in Washington. The report explained in plain language how the virus could and could not be spread and how people could protect themselves. In it Koop urged…