Review of How to Survive a Plague (2012) by Walter M — 06 Jan 2013

How to survive a plague(in two not so easy steps):

1. Don't go quietly into that good night. Organize and protest, putting bodies on the line that are failing in acts of civil disobedience in order to put pressure on government agencies and drug companies to accelerate drug approval due to time running out while not giving into conspiracy theories. This is also before the development of the internet, making it that much harder to get information out.

2. Never, ever get into an argument with a Rhodes scholar.

First, let this serve as a qualified recommendation for "How to Survive a Plague." Activists coming of age today will get much more out of this documentary than those of use who were alive when these events were happening and have already read quite a good deal on the AIDS epidemic.(One area of knowledge I was unfamiliar with was the underground drug trade in possible AIDS drugs.) So, we don't really need to be reminded how much living nightmares Cardinal O'Connor and Jesse Helms were. But what the documentary leaves out is the fact that while ACT-UP would splinter later on, it was itself formed out of a splinter with the Gay Men's Health Crisis, as Larry Kramer and others were angry at the late reactions of segments of the gay community to the epidemic. In any case, ACT-UP, like many other radical organizations, was more democratic than other more mainstream ones, informing and listening, which ironically could also occasionally work against it.

So, in the end, protease inhibitors are developed and everybody lives happily ever after. Except according to an endnote, they don't because many people still cannot afford them.