Come To Our Next Action: Memorial Sloan-Kettering

New York: ACT UP, 1987. Very good. Item #10490

Flier for an early ACT UP protest at New York’s Memorial SloanKettering hospital in July 1987, just a few months after the founding of the group in mid-March 1987.

The major focus of the organization in its earliest days, facing a massive and institutionally unrecognized mass death event, was to get “drugs into bodies,” spreading effective treatment as quickly and cheaply as possible.

One of their earliest demonstrations, recorded here, was a vigil at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital between July 21 and July 24, 1987, to honor its AIDS Treatment Evaluation Unit (ATEU), and call attention to the fact that it had only 31 patients, and did not produce significant results. As the flier describes, nationwide “less than 600 persons are enrolled, and in almost every case AZT is the only drug being researched while less toxic and more promising drugs go untested.”

This demonstration led to the investigation of the ATEUs by Congressman Theodore Weiss, and the subsequent admission by Anthony Facui, then chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, that the ATEUs weren’t working, partially because of year-long staff shortages.

“EVERY DAY COSTS LIVES”

Price: $250.00