The Moral Danger of Declaring the Pandemic Over Too Soon
By Gregg Gonsalves,
The New York Times
| 02. 17. 2022
The early 1990s were in many ways the most terrible of those first years of the AIDS epidemic in America. Research on the disease was in high gear, but drug after drug failed to stop H.I.V. Funerals for friends and family in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s continued unabated, and many of us at risk for getting sick had given up hope of a normal life. My friends and I, most of us just a few years out of college, lived in the moment because we weren’t sure of how much time we had left.
My cousin Carl died from AIDS-related lymphoma in July 1995. That was also the year I found out that I, too, was H.I.V. positive. I wondered if Carl’s fate might be my own soon enough.
But then we got lucky. In 1996 a new generation of treatments called protease inhibitors emerged that were able to control H.I.V. Doctors talked about the Lazarus effect: watching their patients go from near death to health. I enrolled in a clinical trial and started taking the drugs that...
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It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
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Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...