AIDS activists' 'irrational actions' - July 25, 2008
Posted for Erika Check
Two respected AIDS campaigners have posted a critique of the vocal activist group ACT UP Paris.
The critique was be published in the latest issue of the Journal of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society, say its authors, Gregg Gonsalves and Nathan Geffen, both working in South Africa. The criticism is sure to spark discussion at the biennial AIDS conference, which starts in Mexico City on Sunday 3 August: ACT UP Paris has for years been one of the loudest activist groups at such meetings.
Gonsalves and Geffen allege that the group’s “irrational” actions are hurting, not helping, the cause of people with HIV -- a critique Gonsalves has been making for a few years now. The new article recounts how ACT UP Paris’s protests at the 2004 Bangkok AIDS meeting derailed planned clinical trials to test whether antiretroviral drugs could prevent HIV infection. According to Gonsalves and Geffen, ACT UP Paris is now trying to block a planned trial to circumcise 20,000 men in South Africa; circumcision has been shown to decrease an individual’s risk of HIV infection.
Gonsalves and Geffen have both criticized AIDS research and researchers in the past – Gonsalves himself was heavily involved in ACT UP when it was first formed in New York in the 1980s. They object to what ACT UP Paris is doing because, they write, the group distorts facts and lashes out at scientists and scientific research reflexively. Rather than ensuring that life-saving research is done in ethical ways, ACT UP Paris’s approach appears to be to discredit research and researchers, thereby stopping and stalling trials that could help the millions of people living with HIV, write the pair.
Their conclusion is a call to arms for the many activists who will converge on Mexico next week: “Act Up-Paris’s actions have done a great disservice to people living with HIV and those at risk of HIV transmission,” write Gonsalves and Geffen. “We find this a dangerous development in AIDS activism and one which demands that AIDS activists around the world speak up against this trend.”
Image: HIV / Getty
Comments
I am Jérôme Martin, from Act Up-Paris.
Please find below our answer to Geffen and Gonsalve's text :
www.actupparis.org/article3482.html
On the Orange Farm, please read the letter from the director of the French Aids Agency, Jean-François Delfraissy, who describes the exact work of the French organizations - and shows that Geffen and Gonsalves mistook. They read this letter last fall and I don't understand how they can repeat the same accusations today knowing they are wrong :
htthttp://www.actupparis.org/IMG/pdf/ANRS_and_Orange_Farm_2_study.pdf
I am really surprised that you never ask for a comment before posting this report. Is that a model of rational journlism ?
Please ask also the comments of sex workers from Cambodia, civil society of Cameroon or Aids activists of Uganda or Zimbabwe who were the first to work on these trials and who call for help. Please, tell them that just because they are sex workers, or African, they do not need the same level of precaution in a trial that the white american or european male. Tell them that the Helsinki Declaration is not for them.
I hope that you will correct the mistakes of your report according to the evidence that we bring to you, and according to the interviews you will do with the local communities that Geffen and Gonsalves are ignoring,
Best regards
Jérôme Martin
Act Up-Paris
Posted by: Jérôme Martin / Act Up-Paris | August 15, 2008 04:55 PM