Hiv Positive Motivational Quotes

It would be a mistake to imagine that drug companies are the only people applying pressure for fast approvals. Patients can also feel they are being deprived of access to drugs, especially if they are desperate. In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s the key public drive for faster approvals came from an alliance forged between drug companies and AIDS activists such as ACT UP. At the time, HIV and AIDS had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and young, previously healthy gay men were falling ill and dying in terrifying numbers, with no treatment available. We don’t care, they explained, if the drugs that are currently being researched for effectiveness might kill us: we want them, because we’re dying anyway. Losing a couple of months of life because a currently unapproved drug turned out to be dangerous was nothing, compared to a shot at a normal lifespan. In an extreme form, the HIV-positive community was exemplifying the very best motivations that drive people to participate in clinical trials: they were prepared to take a risk, in the hope of finding better treatments for themselves or others like them in the future. To achieve this goal they blocked traffic on Wall Street, marched on the FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, and campaigned tirelessly for faster approvals.

These changes have been steadily eroding the barrier between scholarship and activism. It used to be considered a failure of teaching or scholarship to work from a particular ideological standpoint. The teacher or scholar was expected to set aside her own biases and beliefs in order to approach her subject as objectively as possible. Academics were incentivized to do so by knowing that other scholars could—and would—point out evidence of bias or motivated reasoning and counter it with evidence and argument. Teachers could consider their attempts at objectivity successful if their students did not know what their political or ideological positions were. This is not how Social Justice scholarship works or is applied to education. Teaching is now supposed to be a political act, and only one type of politics is acceptable—identity politics, as defined by Social Justice and Theory. In subjects ranging from gender studies to English literature, it is now perfectly acceptable to state a theoretical or ideological position and then use that lens to examine the material, without making any attempt to falsify one’s interpretation by including disconfirming evidence or alternative explanations. Now, scholars can openly declare themselves to be activists and teach activism in courses that require students to accept the ideological basis of Social Justice as true and produce work that supports it.38 One particularly infamous 2016 paper in Géneros: Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies even favorably likened women’s studies to HIV and Ebola, advocating that it spread its version of feminism like an immune-suppressing virus, using students-turned-activists as carriers.39