By Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. 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-Grinder, whose teenage son Ryan White died of AIDS in 1990.
Both Bidens grew emotional during their remarks, empathizing 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 colors, the names in big block letters, renderings of lives and loves, I see it as a mom, and I think of the mothers who stitched their pain into a patchwork panel so the world would remember their child,” Jill Biden said.
President Biden lauded the AIDS advocacy movement and praised Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former top U.S. infectious disease expert who tussled with then President Donald Trump during the COVID 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, moms and dads, partners and friends … we’ve lost to this terrible disease,” Biden said. “We stand united in the fight against this epidemic.”
After their remarks, the president and first lady walked, hand in hand, past sections of the quilt, pausing to look closely, before going back into the White House.
According to the World Health Organization, 42.3 million people have died since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; editing by Diane Craft)
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