Our Story

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.

Health GAP was formed to take urgent action to confront these life-threatening barriers to global access to HIV treatment and care.

In collaboration with AIDS activist movements from South Africa, Brazil, Thailand and elsewhere in the global South, Health GAP helped build a bold new social movement fighting to win realization of the human right to access to treatment for all; rejection of the racist, xenophobic belief that HIV treatment should only be reserved for the wealthiest nations; rejection of the tenet that pharmaceutical corporation monopolies should come before public health; and to replace the refusal of wealthy governments to support recurrent costs of lifetime antiretroviral therapy with billions of dollars in new funding to fight HIV. 

Our Founding Purpose

Health GAP was Founded To:
  • Overcome U.S. government policies obstructing access to affordable treatment through broad-based grassroots activism;
  • Expose U.S. government-supported global trade policies that impede access to HIV medicines and advocate for policy alternatives;
  • Explode the widely held belief that powerful combination HIV treatment had no place in the AIDS response in the global South;
  • Develop and advocate for bold alternatives to the current broken patent system;
  • Slash drug prices and challenge the myth that drug company monopolies are a viable means to encourage innovation;
  • Secure billions in new funding needed to fund life-saving HIV treatment scale up;  
  • Support activism in the global South targeting harmful government policies and practices, as well as the policies and practices of multinational organizations; and,
  • Take action with other international treatment access activists to win affordable treatment for all.

CASE STUDY

Activists Use Direct Action to Force Policy Change and Deal Pharma a Major Defeat

One of Health GAP’s earliest actions took place in 1999. At that time, virtually no one in sub-Saharan Africa had access to life-saving HIV medicines, and the U.S. was doing almost nothing to expand access in the region: the U.S. had a policy of spending nothing on global AIDS treatment, instead only funding prevention and palliative care.

Activists were astonished to learn that the Clinton administration had been working with pharmaceutical corporations and U.S. Congress, aggressively pressuring governments that were expanding access to generic HIV medicines to respond to crippling AIDS crises in their countries. In South Africa, home to the world’s biggest HIV epidemic, Clinton’s government subjected South Africa to massive trade pressures, including an ‘out-of-cycle-review’ by the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), and listing on the “Special 301 Watch List,” for making less expensive, generic HIV drugs available to its people as part of an effort to reform its apartheid-era Medicines Act. The pharmaceutical lobby worked hand in hand with the White House, USTR, and members of Congress to punish South Africa for its efforts to save lives because drug companies claimed the policy would cut into its profits.  

This issue had no attention – from policy makers, the media, or others in civil society. Rather than despair, activists got bold. They saw an opportunity to put pressure on the administration and make an issue that had never before been subjected to public scrutiny a major national story. Vice President Al Gore had been the point person for carrying out the U.S. government’s harmful policy on trade and access to medicines, as the co-chair (with then Vice President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki) of the U.S.-South Africa Bi-National Commission on Trade. Gore was about to launch his presidential campaign with an event in his home state of Tennessee. AIDS activists, including Health GAP’s founders, interrupted Gore’s campaign launch by chanting “Gore’s greed kills, AIDS drugs for Africa,” leafleting his events with information about the deadly policy being formulated at big pharma’s behest, and doing strategic media work to increase pressure on Gore to force a change from the administration.

The group repeated their initial action, disrupting Gore at multiple campaign stops in multiple states, all while the national media was focusing on these events. These direct actions were followed by meetings with top-level administration officials and Gore campaign officials, massive protests in Washington, D.C. targeting Charlene Barshefsky, then the U.S. Trade Representative, along with many other actions. These bold, high profile protests forced the Clinton administration to drop its punishment of South Africa for attempting to utilize generic HIV drugs and launched Health GAP.