Lunch Break Video: An interview with Elizabeth Taylor, the AIDS activist, about the disease’s ongoing threat

Came across this video the other day – footage of the late Elizabeth Taylor that I had never seen before.

My guess is it was shot around 2006 and Miss Taylor was still in fine form despite being confined to a wheelchair.

She was participating in an AIDS event that also included fellow activists Elton John and Sharon Stone and sat down for an interview.

The legend had been housebound for much of the previous year due to several compression fractures in her back. But she continued to work on the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation and giving money all over the world. She was always very proud that her foundation had no overhead with the money raised going directly to hospices, patient care, needle exchange and condoms as well as education.

What she said then is still, sadly, very true today: “People need to listen, people need to be aware that the disease has not evaporate,d it hasn’t gone away. the medicine we have now improve the life of people, wit aids, but it doesn’t eradicate it, there is no cure.”

Miss Taylor also talks about the early days of her activism – in the mid-80s – and how it was then she decided to stop resenting her fame and to instead use it to the AIDS epidemic.

“I was sitting back and becoming outraged that no one was doing anything about this oncoming epidemic. I went to Congress, went on The Hill, knocked on senator’s doors and none of them wanted to know. But I was a pest. It was the first time I’d been an activist but I was a raucous one, I still am.”