Those who heard Act Up’s message the least were the folks at BMS, since the pharmaceutical companies were shrewd enough to leave their kiosks unmanned. MSD (Merck Sharp & Dohme) had a gleaming white Kubrick-like mini-theater with empty benches facing a blank screen. Subdued slogans like Boehringer Ingelheim’s promise of a “quiet evolution in HIV treatment” read like retreats more than rallies. Pfizer’s swank attempt at Buckminster Fuller looked more like a broken eggshell, and may well have reminded activists of the many broken promises science has handed them over the years. Still, with no vaccine in sight, and companies like Roche getting out of HIV/AIDS research altogether, activists need to build bridges with big pharma, not burn them. Protesting these companies for being profit-driven is like protesting a porcupine for being spiky.
Less informed than Act Up’s targeted action were the more numerous unfocused protests. One such march pierced through a crowded Banamex concourse, past the zigzagging wall of information upon which hundreds of international scientists hung “poster presentations” of their studies and experiments. Ignoring this massive source of data, protesters brandished signs with empty statements like “Stop AIDS Now!” Scientists generally greeted these outbursts with a collective, “Well, duh!” Had the marchers stopped to read some of the scientists’ posters, they might have learned something.
Mixed messages
Countries had their own booths too, each one staking ground on a pertinent AIDS issue and offering an avalanche of free publications. The Dutch booth professed a “practical and non-judgmental approach to society’s difficult issues,” and focused on the plight of sex workers. A beautiful candy-colored dildo lovingly framed in a pink, fuzzy, heart-shaped diorama was surrounded with wall panels affecting traditional blue and white Dutch tiles. The booths from sub-Saharan African nations (home to 75 percent of HIV/AIDS cases) were less playful, presenting both hope and despair: hope mainly in the form of increased condom use, and despair in pretty much every other statistic, including the inability to get better statistics.
A booklet from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime prescribed nothing less than the complete overhaul of prisons worldwide, since prisoners are yet another in a long list of at-risk groups. The UNODC’s exhaustive list divided even the small fraction of those infected through intravenous-needle use into subgroups, including “female drug users, sex workers who inject drugs, spouses or partners of drug users, injecting drug users who may also exchange sex for drugs or money, and returnee/refugee drug users.” Also at risk: MSM’s (Men who have Sex with Men), PVHT’s (Persons Vulnerable to Human Trafficking), and “young people.” Fine, but where do we start?
The US government’s plain, standard-issue booth offered a modest brochure touting the recent passage by Congress of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Over-simplified graphics concealed the fact that the overall increase in PEPFAR funding to $6 billion in 2008 includes a decrease in research funding for the National Institutes of Health, and an increase in money for Third World programs that push the ABCs (Abstinence, Be faithful, use a Condom).
That made an easy target for protesters who occupied the booth and held a wide range of signs. One read: “PEPFAR, you jerk! We know condoms work!” But who’s the “we” — First World protesters or Third World sufferers? The Ugandan minister of health has praised PEPFAR and the ABCs for reducing HIV transmission in his country. The protesters didn’t clarify their position any further by including someone in a smiling condom suit waving condoms, or by tying the booth up with string (meant to symbolize the strings attached to PEPFAR funds) but then taping condoms to the string. I’m still not sure what they were trying to say about condoms.
Mixed messages rose to new heights in the Global Village, where small organizations from Africa desperately fought for attention among nude-body painting, break-dancing, amateur art exhibits, and curiosities like the marionette show in the “Deaf Pride Zone.” A booth sporting posters promoting stretching, yoga, and meditating as a healthy lifestyle for gay men stood next to a stage with drag queens gyrating to relentlessly thumping techno music. When I asked the booth rep what he thought about the dichotomy he retorted, “Everyone likes techno!” Ironically, at that very moment in the main seminar hall of the Banamex a scientist was dryly presenting years of gloomy research on behavioral patterns and transmission rates. It seems the activists didn’t get the memo.
Seeking understanding
Thirty years into this crusade, not one single person has ever recovered — naturally or otherwise — from HIV infection. With 25 million dead, 40 million plus currently infected and another 25 million children expected to be orphaned because of HIV/AIDS by 2010, a more productive dialogue between science and activism is badly needed.
