Just a minor bit of clarification, but I think it's more fair to say that the medical research establishment writ large ignored HIV and AIDS. Physicians were largely powerless until researchers focused (with the aid of US government funding) and developed effective treatments toward the middle of the 1990s.

And it's not like the researchers themselves weren't interested at first. They could only study and work on things that they had grant money for. Policy makers, usually in the US government but also in academia, demonstrated a great deal of depraved indifference by not funding research as if HIV were truly a crisis.