![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Or as the signs brandished by protesters put it, “FDA – Fucking Disaster Area”, and “AZT is not enough – give us all the other stuff”. The brainchild of a newly formed group called Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (Act Up), the protest was an inspired act of civil disobedience, the moment when people with Aids lost their patience with federal drug regulators and stormed the citadels of American science to demand access to life-prolonging medications other than AZT, the only treatment approved at that point. ![]() It is fair to say that suburban Rockville had never seen anything like it, and neither had the bureaucrats holed up inside the FDA. Facing them were a two-deep line of police officers wearing rubber gloves and, as David France recalls, an assortment of “slack-jawed” locals appalled by the sight of groups with names such as the Delta Queens and Queer and Present Danger within spitting distance of their homes. Others brought effigies of Ronald Reagan, the then Republican president. Some were dressed as corpses and carried mock tombstones. O n 11 October 1988, a fleet of chartered buses drew up alongside the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Rockville, Maryland, and disgorged 1,200 Aids activists on to the pavement. ![]()
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