What happened
The first CDC report describing what would become known as AIDS was published in June 1981. Reagan's press secretary was still making jokes about it in briefings as late as 1982. The president himself did not say the word "AIDS" publicly until asked directly by a reporter in September 1985 — by which point Rock Hudson, a personal friend of the Reagans, had already announced his own diagnosis. Reagan's first substantive speech dedicated to the epidemic came in 1987, with over 40,000 dead and 60,000 diagnosed.
This was not simply slowness. Administration officials actively blocked federal health agencies from communicating the scale of the funding shortfall to Congress, and CDC and NIH budget requests for AIDS research were repeatedly cut back by the White House budget office even as the caseload doubled year over year. Much of the political calculation was explicit: AIDS was, in its first years, overwhelmingly diagnosed in gay men, and a administration whose political base included the religious right had every incentive not to be seen spending federal money to fight a disease coded as a gay disease.
By the time Reagan left office in 1989, more than 89,000 Americans had died of AIDS-related illness. Historians and public health researchers have consistently identified the lost years of 1981–85 — when public information, funding, and leadership could have slowed transmission significantly — as the single most consequential failure of the epidemic's first decade in the United States.