Thabo Mbeki’s government in South Africa could have prevented the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, a new study from Harvard University says. Denial, bias, and homophobia probably caused the premature death of some 365,000 Africans, reports the New York Times. Mbeki famously denied science, rejected foreign assistance, and withheld life saving treatments. Evil Mbeki. But not so fast.

This is a story for the file we call, "Them Not Us." What about us?

In the US where AIDS was first identified in 1981, the mainstream media were almost as quiet and wrong about AIDS as Mbeki was 20 years later. Most editors and reporters did not feel that the disease, then afflicting mostly gay men, was real "news." So they ignored it.

And the government under Ronald Reagan did worse. By the time Rock Hudson's diagnosis in 1985 made AIDS the big story in Newsweek and Time and the New York Times, infection rates -- and deaths were soaring.

It's thought now that one million people are living with AIDS in the US. More than 500 thousand have died, in part because people didn't get accurate information fast enough. They weren't warned.

One commentator told the Times this month that, "the tragedy of Thabo Mbeki is that he's a smart man who could have been an international statesman on this issue." Instead he lied while people died.

“He is like Macbeth,” another source told the paper. “It's easier to walk through the blood than to turn back and admit you made a mistake.”

In this the most powerful country in the world, does that remind you of anyone else?