On Thursday, May 16, 2019, the House Oversight Committee conducted a hearing to try and get to the bottom of the Truvada pricing and patent scandal. They were not messing around. The title of the hearing was, “HIV Prevention Drug: Billions in Corporate Profits after Millions in Taxpayer Investments.” The hearing was the culmination of [...]
Gilead Sciences, the pharmaceutical that makes Truvada, the only FDA-approved drug for PrEP, is having a great week in the public relations department. First, Gilead announced they were surrendering their patent for Truvada a year early, and now Federal officials have announced that Gilead will donate enough Truvada for 200,000 people in the United [...]
James Krellenstein and Nicholas Faust of #PrEP4All at AIDS Watch in Washington, DC Advocates pressuring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to claim royalties from sales of ‘Truvada as PrEP’ report “strong interest” in congressional hearings on the growing controversy, based on visits to the Hill today between HIV advocates and [...]
You are going to read this story and think it is too outrageous to be true. You would be wrong. And, especially if you are an HIV advocate attending AIDS Watch in Washington, DC, this week, you must demand that our elected officials answer for it. Here’s the story, and some simple questions for [...]
Mark S. King (This Op-Ed written by me appeared in The Washington Blade on February 22, 2019.) When I was diagnosed with HIV in 1985, there were no medications to treat it. Not one. I never imagined that the medical community would achieve the advancements in HIV treatment and prevention we see today. In [...]
Meeting of Trump's team to end HIV on Feb 6, 2019. (Photo: Carl Schmid) Today is National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, so let’s hear it for the Trump USA team behind his master race plan to end the HIV epidemic by 2030. I’ve even included an actual photo of their meeting on January [...]
A protest against AIDS2020 being held in San Francisco. (Sean Black for A&U) The breaking point has been reached. After months of activism that has failed to convince the International AIDS Society (IAS) to withdraw their “AIDS2020” conference from San Francisco, activists have now announced an alternative conference, “HIV2020,” to be held in [...]
“A Trump appointee walks into an AIDS conference” sounds like the beginning of a terrible joke, doesn’t it? Just wait until you hear the punchline. It’ll kill you. The sight of the Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar standing before more than 4,000 public health and community-based providers of HIV services is shocking [...]
Original ACT UP activists Mark Harrington, Peter Staley, Gregg Gonsalves, and Ann Northrup at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on October 11, 2018. The AIDS activists who regularly stormed the homes, offices and even churches of the powerful beginning in the late 1980’s weren’t the only ones who were scared [...]
Very little happens by accident. The most iconic moments in HIV/AIDS activism – the appearance of the early SILENCE=DEATH meme, the footage of AIDS activist Peter Staley being peeled from a building during a protest, the photos of Sen. Jesse Helms’ home wrapped in an enormous condom – were the product of weeks of careful [...]
