Health GAP was founded in early 1999 by Dr. Alan Berkman, a veteran civil rights activist and HIV clinician in New York City.
Dr. Berkman brought together people living with HIV, fair trade lawyers and economists, academics, progressive clinicians, human rights activists, and direct action AIDS activists. This group had a shared outrage that life-saving treatment – recently available in the world’s wealthiest countries – was being denied to millions of people with HIV worldwide, that efforts to expand access through the use of cost cutting generic medicines were triggering retaliation by the U.S. government, and that the U.S. and other wealthy nations were spending nothing to combat preventable AIDS deaths with treatment. These forces were resulting in the preventable deaths of millions of people with HIV around the world.