Dr. Edward N. Brandt Jr., who oversaw the nation’s initial response to AIDS as the top-ranking doctor in the government in the early 1980s, died Aug. 25 at his home in Oklahoma City. He was 74.
The cause was lung cancer, his son, Edward III, said.
Dr. Brandt, who also eventually led several medical schools and a university, became assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and acting surgeon general of the Public Health Service in 1981, when doctors were discovering AIDS. At the time, its cause was unknown and it was regarded as inevitably fatal.
Soon, many AIDS activists and health officials criticized the Reagan administration as being slow to investigate and find effective therapies for the disease, which has now infected an estimated 65 million people worldwide, killing 25 million of them.
In 1983, Dr. Brandt said that investigating the disease had become “the No. 1 priority” of the Public Health Service. At the time, only 1,450 AIDS cases had been reported.
Dr. Brandt, coming to his government job as a medical school administrator, found himself in a difficult position. While AIDS was his first priority, it was not for the rest of the Reagan administration, whose policy was to cut costs. But as a physician, Dr. Brandt knew that scientists needed money to study AIDS, although money alone would not suffice.
Dr. Brandt maintained a public position that the government was spending enough money on AIDS and other diseases. But he worked internally and with great difficulty to try to overcome bureaucratic and political obstacles to allocating more money for AIDS.
Dr. Vivian Pinn, who directs the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health, said that Dr. Brandt was also recognized as “the godfather of women’s health” for his efforts as assistant secretary of health and human services to encourage more study of the issue.
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After leaving his job as assistant secretary of health in 1984, Dr. Brandt became president of the University of Maryland at Baltimore. In 1989, he returned to the University of Oklahoma, teaching until shortly before his death.