Jan 8: TAG meets with NIH Director Bernadine Healy re: the NIH Office of AIDS Research (OAR) legislation. She’s non-committal.
Jan 16: Hoffmann-La Roche community meeting disrupted by ACT UP and TAG. Shrimp cocktail goes flying. Two arrests.
Jan 20: Bill Clinton sworn in as 42nd U.S. President.
Jan 21: Senator Kennedy introduces S.1, The NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, including TAG’s OAR recommendations, onto the Senate floor. Dr. Healy temporarily reinstated as NIH Director. Panic at the NIH.
Jan 22: Emergency meetings at NIH. Directors propose a one year “study” of the proposed OAR changes.
Jan 22-24: Project “Immune Restoration Think Tank” meeting, Rutherford, CA.
Jan 26: Senate Labor & Human Resources Committee unanimously passes Kennedy’s S.1.
Jan 28: NIH/FDA ad hoc committee meets on $20 million Congressional gp160 earmark.
Feb 3: House hearing on OAR legislation. Shalala endorses S.1. The AIDS panel is split: Art Ammann, David Ho, Mathilde Krim support reform; three fossils from professional societies oppose it.
Feb 9: ACT UP and TAG members chain themselves to gates and trucks at Hoffmann-La Roche facility in Nutley, NJ.
Feb 17: Senate attaches Nickles amendment to S.1, barring immigration of HIV+ foreigners. Bill passes, 93-4.
Feb 25: A tearful Healy announces her departure from NIH.
Feb 26: Terrorist bomb set under New York’s World Trade Center; six killed, hundreds injured.
Mar 2: OAR legislation passes House committee.
Apr 2: Release of Concorde study results showing no benefit from early AZT. Havoc at Keystone HIV pathogenesis meeting.
Apr 19: TAG meets with Boehringer-Ingelheim about its experimental non-nucleoside, nevirapine.
Apr 25: National gay rights march in Washington, D.C.
May 25: House passes H.R.4 (House version of Senate bill S.1) by a vote of 290-130.
May 31: Gregg Gonsalves completes “The Basic Science of HIV Infection: A Report From the Front” for the Berlin AIDS conference.
Jun 8: In Berlin, Maxim Seligmann presents the grim results of the Concorde study.
Jun 10: At Berlin, an all-day barrage of negative results on ddI, ddC, the crash of Roche’s tat inhibitor, and others. In Washington, D.C., President Clinton signs the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993.
Jul 1: Political funeral for activist Tim Bailey, whose embalmed body is borne in a demonstration at the nation’s Capitol.
Jul 11: ACT UP/NY member David E. Kirschenbaum dies.
Jul 12: ACT UP/NY member Jon Greenberg dies.
Jul 16: Public funeral in New York’s Tompkins Square Park for Jon Greenberg.
Jul 20: ACT UP/NY veteran, founding TAG member, TAGline co-editor, and composer Chris DeBlasio dies of AIDS.
Jul 30-1: Project Inform sponsors meeting on “Future Directions in AIDS Research” in Madison, WI.
August: President Clinton nominates Nobel Prize winning virologist Harold E. Varmus as NIH Director.
Sep 20: FDA hearing on full approval for Roche’s ddC. TAG, having supported accelerated approval the previous year in spite of very limited data, now opposes full approval because ddC appears worse and more toxic than AZT.
Sep 23: Death of Project Inform’s Jesse Dobson, founder of Project Immune Restoration.
Oct 12: Activist Andy Zysman, who focused on accelerating research on AIDS-related cancers, dies of AIDS in San Francisco.
Nov 2: Rudolph Giuliani elected Mayor of New York City.
Dec 7: At 17th ACTG meeting, distribution of Mark Harrington’s The Crisis in Clinical AIDS Research, a blistering critique of the year’s sequential clinical trials fiascos (rgp160, ddC, “convergent combination chemotherapy,” inter alia).
Dec 8: At ACTG, Bill Powderly presents results of ACTG 081/981, showing that Bactrim prevents PCP and fluconazole prevents fungal infections in people with low T cells. CCG meets with Fauci. It’s a fiasco: they’re infantile; he, defensive.