On May 6, in Washington, D.C., TAG’s Mark Harrington received the 2026 HIV Vaccine Trials Network [HVTN] Wakefield Outstanding Dedication Award. “This award is named in honor of longtime HVTN External Relations Director Steve Wakefield, whose decades of exemplary service set an enduring standard for dedication and community-centered leadership. The Wakefield Award, as it is commonly known, recognizes your passion, demonstrated through years of contributions to community and stakeholder engagement, education, research awareness, and fostering inclusivity and belonging in research.” Here are his remarks.
Mark Harrington:
Good evening. Deep thanks to everyone at the HVTN for this great honor, and most of all to Wakefield for his decades of commitment to ensuring that community voices are an integral part of the research process.
I was thinking of how powerful vaccines can be. Eighty years ago, my Aunt Peggy, my Mom’s oldest sister, came down with polio. She endured an iron lung, survived into her 90s, but lived life-long with post-polio syndrome.
Less than twenty years later, my siblings and I, along with millions of others, were protected from polio with a simple sugar cube or a single shot. That’s our goal here today for HIV.
We wouldn’t be here tonight if it wasn’t for decades of activism by people affected by and living with HIV, including Wakefield and including me. I became infected with HIV in 1985. I joined ACT UP in 1988. I was lucky. My immune system was OK. ACT UP and TAG helped radically accelerate research. TAG worked and works to accelerate research to end HIV, TB, and HCV, and to make sure people everywhere benefit from it. I didn’t have to start taking HIV treatment until 1996 when suddenly, due to this work, effective combination therapy was discovered. Thanks to our work together, we helped get effective combo ART out there to over thirty million people living with HIV.
On April 21, Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth declared annual flu vaccination to be voluntary for all military and department personnel. This is the first time since George Washington mandated variolation against smallpox in 1777 that the U.S. has taken such a deliberate anti-science stand. Everything we’ve accomplished is under threat. Unbelievably, now developing an HIV vaccine is an act of resistance to those in power here in DC.
We must fight back and build on what we’ve already accomplished together, thanks to your vaccine research which led to vaccines for Ebola, SARS-CoV-2, and other diseases. Your work has already saved millions of lives. We’re here today because we haven’t finished the job.
PrEP and HIV treatment alone aren’t enough to end the epidemic. We desperately need an HIV vaccine. Please keep up working until we have that as well as new vaccines for TB and for hepatitis C
The threat from the current administration is deadly. They threaten the NIH, CDC, and PEPFAR. They threaten the future of the HVTN. They’ve destroyed USAID, causing over a million preventable deaths and countless new infections. They threaten childhood and adult immunizations. Because of vaccines, hundreds of millions of lives have been saved just as billions of lives are at stake now from their evil policies and their attempts to deny vaccination for routine infections like hepatitis B. If they succeed, polio and a host of other preventable diseases are sure to come roaring back.
We can change history again by working together as scientists and activists to do the science to develop vaccines to help end HIV, TB, and HCV. TAG won’t stop until we do. Thank you again.